Young Money by Kevin Roose

Author:Kevin Roose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

“A SIX-INCH TURKEY on wheat, please, and could you cut it in half?” Samson White asked the Subway sandwich artist.

Samson, who had just started his second year as a Goldman Sachs mortgage analyst, was watching his calories, and he planned to eat only three of the six inches now, and save the rest for his next meal. He’d been forced to adopt a hardcore diet by a bet he’d made with two of his Goldman colleagues back in June about who could lose the most weight before Labor Day. Samson, who had started the contest at 226 pounds, was supposed to get down to 200; if he didn’t, and the others reached their goal weights, he would have to buy each of the winners a round-trip plane ticket to any destination in the world. To avoid having to pay up, Samson had been working out like a fiend, logging five or six miles a day on the treadmills in Goldman’s gym. He’d already lost about fifteen pounds, and was on pace to reach his goal and win the bet.

It helped that Goldman, like many Wall Street firms, gets relatively sleepy in the summer, as executives escape to their homes in the Hamptons and the capital markets slow to a crawl. That summer, there was some economic activity—mainly, a brewing calamity in Europe, where the European Union was threatening to fall apart and bailout talks for struggling countries were in a perpetual state of flux. But unless you were an interest rate trader or dealt with European clients, there wasn’t a ton of work to go around.

When not doing cardio workouts, Samson spent much of his summer thinking about his next move. He was still disenchanted with Goldman, and still not sure he would stay on for a third year after his second was up. The countdown clock on his bedroom wall had dipped into the two-hundred-day range, and Samson often considered whether, when it struck zero, he might actually pull the trigger and quit, even if he didn’t have a backup plan. He hated most of his colleagues—found them dull, petty, and frustrating to be around—and he’d long ago lost the desire for becoming a Goldman lifer. But the thought of leaving the well-paying womb of “Mama Goldman,” as some employees called it, still made him queasy.

Recently, another second-year analyst named Colin had begun asking Samson if he’d ever want to launch a tech start-up together. Colin was an incurable hustler, and he often came by Samson’s desk to pitch him on his latest half-baked business idea. But Colin’s latest idea had become an obsession. It was a mobile app that would do secondary-market ticket sales for concerts, sports games, festivals, and other events. He had done some research into the ticket industry and thought that there was a lot of money to be made by undercutting giants like StubHub on fees and offering a better mobile purchasing experience.

Samson laughed at most of Colin’s business plans, but the more he thought about the ticketing app, the more he thought it sounded brilliant.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.