I used to be a banker
Eight years covering banks, insurers, central banks, and sovereign wealth funds taught me how institutions actually run. A lot of it was people doing what software should.
I started at twenty. A temp on a desk in New York, middle office for fixed income, currency, and commodities. Goldman Sachs, 85 Broad Street, the heart of downtown, and me barely old enough to be in the building.
Money moved fast there.
I remember standing in the men’s room, hearing sales traders talk about deals they’d just closed and the numbers they’d locked for their bonuses. Holy shit, I thought. This is real. I’d studied economics in London imagining exactly this, and now here it was in the flesh, young guys in suits making a fortune. It was nuts.
Then back across the pond for a master’s. Near the end of it I met an alumnus from my school, Olivier, at a coffee shop outside his office. I’d worn shorts and a t-shirt because I figured it was nothing. He walked me upstairs to meet his desk in debt capital markets. That’s how I got my first real job.
The first years are brutal.
Eighteen-hour days. Six, seven days a week. Always on. You’re a spreadsheet jockey and a pitch-deck jockey, and your job, honestly, is to be wrong on the way to right, the labor layer the senior people stand on.
Then I rose. Sales and trading, covering official institutions, central banks and sovereign wealth funds. A run of events put me on some of the largest in the world. A couple in the Middle East, others across Europe, the central banks of China and Russia.
I learned a stupid amount.
Mostly that markets are self-policing systems. High velocity, repeated every single day, built to punish bad behavior. Screw someone and they pull your line, so most of the worst never happens. And when you trade with the same people daily, real money on the table, you pick up human psychology on a compressed cycle you can’t get any other way.
Here’s the part I clocked but didn’t really appreciate until much later. The infrastructure behind me. Middle office, back office, the layers holding up every single trade. It was impressive. It worked. And it was far more manual than it needed to be. Through the lens of what software does now, a lot of it was people doing a system’s job.
That’s the part I kept. Eight years learning how institutions actually run at scale, the human layers, the process, the tech, regulation and risk and legal and ops all moving at once.
Now I build the systems that do that work without the armies.
I just didn’t know it yet.