[rutipo]

I used to work for Lehamn too, M&A. Now working on my own startup. I also found that the focus was on our incentives, and this is where the tech industry is different in that it sets the incentives aligned with the users.

Wall Street could do the same by changing its incentives, and grow massively together with their clients. Once they understand that clients all the way to the end ("crowd") investor can also be happy users.

One thing that bothered me about this article though, is that it just seemed like he had a personal reason to make his superiors look bad. After all, he built his entire career in Goldman, so why burn your bridges? Unless they are already burned and you are leaving with a blast anyway, and maybe you are trying to get back at someone.

[tomkarlo]

I think he burned his bridges because he believes that GS is on a path that will lead to its collapse if it continues unchanged. I don't think he published the letter to be vindictive. It's supposed to be a wakeup call and it's not like they were going to distribute that company-wide internally for him.

Wall Street can't really grow that much more. It's already something like 11% of US GDP and that's way too much for an industry that really doesn't produce anything much. Fin services shouldn't be more than 3-4% of an economy, barring export of services to other countries.

I'd argue this is part of why it's starting to eat its own young; it's an industry full of extremely driven, competitive people but it has started to run into the natural limits of its potential size. If the industry starts to shrink a bit, things will get even uglier. It's not like there's a natural other industry for all these people to work in that's growing and will take the oversupply - if things get worse it will look like a piranha pool in the dry seasons where a million fish have been concentrated into one puddle.