Well its finally time to make the announcement: Today is my last day at Benzinga. While many of you already knew this, Ive sort of kept it quiet as I wanted to make sure my work was wrapped up here first. My next move is to take on a role with Venture for America, one that gives me the flexibility to pursue my own venture on the side. Ill remain in the Detroit area, but I will be traveling quite a bit. More on that in a later book-sized post. That said, Id like to focus on the whirlwind that was my last two years with the Zingers. When I joined the team Raz joked that I didnt know what a dividend was. In reality I didnt know what an option was, and I sure as hell didnt know what margin buying or selling was, what futures were, or had even heard the term HFT. Hell I didnt even understand what a hedge fund was until the month before joining Benzinga. While working on the desk I got thrown into the capital markets, and got a chance to look at what they truly are, and let me tell you, staring into that abyss was both wildly interesting and terrifying at the same time. What I learned while doing so though was that even at these mega trade desks, there are people behind every trade, every order, every move. This lead me to my first startling revelation about the capital markets: Wall Street is the only place where something that is blatantly untrue can become fact if enough people believe it (and decide to bet on it). Its an incredible phenomenon when a stock plummets on fantastic earnings, or when a commodity rallies on a piece of news that should truly be bearish for it. While the market corrects eventually, it still gets it wrong for a time, and this is where trading serves its purpose. Aside from the markets themselves, the incredible people Ive met; traders, money managers, entrepreneurs, TV personalities, radio personalities, and executives etc have given me an entirely different outlook on the world. Business is 100% about relationships. Forget what you know, it still is who you know, and who wants to work with you, and most importantly, who you can get to know. Its that simple. In the mornings I had the opportunity to go on Chicago radio once a week to talk markets with some of the best minds out there, while occasionally I had the opportunity to go on TV and be an expert about an emerging event. Im still shocked they let me do all of that- the rush of having 3 hours to learn an entirely new topic for a TV segment is unreal. I also got exposed to the recruiting game. It first started with interns where I had the privilege of building our internship program, speaking at Universities, and bringing on more than 50 interns over the course of 2 years. An absolute blast. I also had the opportunity to learn about how to truly build a team as we continued to expand our newsdesk, which was had a magnitude of difficulty that I could never have experienced. If you cant tell by now, my experience has been incredible. My horizons have been broadened more than I could have ever expected while I have learned of an entire aspect of the world that I knew essentially nothing about 2 years ago. So cheers to the Benzinga team for having me. Its been a wild ride, and more than a pleasure to work with you all. I cannot wait to see this company blow our competitors out of the water and become Detroits first media empire!
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 16:30:10 +0000