Working at Goldman

Nicolas Sarkis is one of those people who believe that 80 percent of success is just showing up. The founding partner of AlphaOne, one of the top investment advisory firms after just five years, Sarkis got his start in the early 1990s at Goldman Sachs, where he went through 52 interviews before finally being offered a position. He tells the British wealth management publication Spear's that it was "like a psychological and intellectual boot camp for the very best young minds in the world, the most ambitious and most driven." Some snippets:

--"I knew that Goldman Sachs was out of reach for someone my age and with my qualification; this is precisely what made it so exciting. I love trying to achieve things that seem very difficult or quasi-impossible; this is what makes life fun. A lot of my friends tried to get interviews with bulge bracket firms and failed, so they immediately gave up. I sent a letter and I followed up with a call."

--"Quite frankly I learnt a lot and after each interview I tried to record as much as possible so that by the time I was on my 20th or 30th interview I actually started to know what I was talking about."

--"At GS, it is all about emulation and internal competition. They never want people to feel secure; this is why the firm as a whole is so good. How do you expect people with whom you compete internally to comment favourably about you? In general, the more successful you are, the less popular you will become."

--On the Goldman training course: "It was incredibly tough. A big part of our class actually resigned during the programme because they thought it was a madman's house," recalls Sarkis. "The first week at Goldman the head of our training program threatened to fire me twice because I was one minute late for meetings; he would chase us in the toilets and ask us where gold had closed the day before. And then they would ask some really impossible questions like 'Where is the ten-year bond trading at in Bangladesh?'"

--"The people on the Goldman program who had gone to Harvard and Yale had a huge ego and the goal of the Goldman program was to "break" these people. By breaking them, just like in the army, you can remodel them and create this esprit de corps. In the face of adversity they regrouped and did things the Goldman way. It is a shame this has been diluted a lot now, probably out of political correctness or reduced budgets."

--"The first client I ever got in wealth management at Goldman was a person I had called on his cell phone whilst he was pumping gas into his car at a station. First he said, "I will never be a client of yours. I do not want to work with American banks." I was convinced we could add value and do a better job managing his money, so I was persistent. It paid off, he became a client two years later."