In this episode of Careers in Finance on FinPod, we welcome Kristen Kelly and Jennifer Saarbach, founders of The Wall Street Skinny. Through their podcast, social media platforms, and other channels, they’ve built a highly regarded brand dedicated to demystifying the complex world of finance and helping others break into the industry.

Kristen and Jennifer share their journeys of transitioning into high finance, offering real-world advice for those considering similar career moves. From navigating the challenges of non-finance degrees to leveraging mentorships and the power of perseverance, their stories are full of practical tips for listeners looking to unlock opportunities in finance.

Tune in to hear how they started, the myths of working on Wall Street, and their thoughts on why keeping career options open is key to long-term success!

Transcript

Anna Talerico (00:01)
Welcome back to a new episode of Careers in Finance. I am so excited. This is a very, very special episode because I am thrilled to welcome Kristen Kelly and Jen Saarbach as our guests today. Welcome, Jen and Kristen.

Kristen Kelly (00:17)
Thank you.

Jennifer Saarbach (00:18)
Thank you so much for having us on. We’re really excited to be here. We love what you’re doing.

Kristen Kelly (00:22)
Mmm.

Anna Talerico (00:22)
and I love what you’re doing. The audience might already feel like they know you because Kristen and Jen are the founders of The Wall Street Skinny, a very popular podcast, Instagram account. I think I stumbled on you. Maybe I was follower number one, I hope, way back when, but such a fan of the content that you’re putting out. And so I’m just so excited to have you here.

Kristen Kelly (00:47)
Thank you. We’re super excited.

Jennifer Saarbach (00:48)
Thank you so much. It’s really an honor to be here.

Anna Talerico (00:50)
All right, so we got a very special episode. We’re going to talk about all the things that I love about this podcast, which is, you guys have didn’t come from finance background in terms of your educational degrees. We’re going to hit that 25 combined years of working on Wall Street, culminating into this total career plot twist, and this very, very popular brand, which is on a mission to do something that is very near and dear to our hearts at CFI, demystifying the world of finance.

High finance, think I’ve heard you call it, which is always a funny one, right? And putting out so much educational content to help people break into the industry. And just again, I think there could be nothing more noble than helping people on their career journeys, especially something that can feel so unattainable for people when they look at finance, right? So we’re gonna get into all of it. And we’re gonna start with my, how we always start this podcast, which is.

Kristen Kelly (01:21)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Anna Talerico (01:47)
your finance origin story. Did you always see yourself going into a career in finance? What did you study? Jen, I’ll start with you.

Jennifer Saarbach (01:54)
Yeah, well, thank you again so much for having us on. love hearing how closely our missions are aligned. So as anyone who listens to our podcast or has checked us out on social media may know,

had no idea that I ever wanted to pursue a career in finance because I majored in my native language of English. I was at Princeton University and I remember my sophomore year, all of my friends saying they were getting ready for their iBanking interviews. I thought iBanking stood for internet banking and I thought that physical bank branches were in fact still going to be the staple going forward. thought internet banking was a blip on the radar. So why did this matter?

Anna Talerico (02:36)
You

Jennifer Saarbach (02:37)
Fortunate enough to have a mentor in the form of one of my big sisters in my sorority who said, hey, listen, you need to stop partying. You’re not going to have a career floating on a raft in the middle of the Mediterranean writing the great American collection of essays. Okay. You need to come up with something that you’re going to do. Why not explore the world of finance? I have a fly in this room, by the way. So a fly just landed on my forehead. Welcome to the South in the summer. But so

Anna Talerico (03:00)
I’m dead.

Jennifer Saarbach (03:06)
my junior year, I stumbled upon…

what was at the time the hot thing, which was fixed income sales and trading. I interviewed for and landed a summer internship at Morgan Stanley and then converted that into a full-time role at Lehman Brothers, which then sadly rest in peace, which then became Barclays Capital and I eventually went back to Morgan Stanley and that was kind of the arc of my career. But finance was something I totally stumbled upon accidentally and it was really thanks towards

Kristen Kelly (03:25)
Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (03:39)
Thanks to the mentorship and guidance of a friend who said, hey, listen, you got to have a plan about how you’re going to be financially independent out of college. That was the entire genesis of the thing.

Anna Talerico (03:50)
That is such a good friend, I will tell you. My daughter is studying playwriting and she’s fully prepared to make no money for her entire life. She needs one of those friends too to say, hey, wait. Love it. Well, what about you, Kristen? What was your path in?

Kristen Kelly (04:06)
So I also obviously had no idea that finance even existed.

I went to Brown, where I studied biomedical and mechanical engineering. And it was literally just because when I was applying to schools, I was like, well, I’m good at math and science. And my dad was an engineer. My mom was a school teacher. And so I had no idea what anything was. I didn’t even really know what engineering was. But I was like, OK, I’m good at the math and science stuff. I’ll go study engineering. And I did a number of internships where I was working at an orthopedic research lab and was terrified by the dead bodies. Because it was next to a cadaver lab. And I was like, what is this?

That’s why I switched to mechanical engineering, but I did an internship at like a biotech firm. The TLDR is like, I was like, this also, it’s not like mathy enough. And then I went and I visited Jen her summer when she did the Morgan Stanley internship. And I was like, this seems really fun and cool. Like, how do I do that? You’re getting paid to learn. You’re living in New York City. You have like this whole new group of friends in the form of your analyst class. I was like, I want to do that. And.

It actually was really hard for me to break in because I didn’t have an internship. I basically had everything on my resume was like engineering, engineering, bio stuff. And then I started to apply for the job offers. And I would make it to super days, basically most of the firms that I interviewed for. And then they basically like dinged me after the end of it. They were like, we don’t believe you want to do this. So I was like, nope, I’m going to prove them wrong. I basically stayed an extra year, took whatever, like three econ classes, and then did a master’s so that could get in the recruiting

cycle and then did land a job in actually at Morgan Stanley. But again, back to like getting a job offer and not knowing what the heck I was doing, I was put into the CDO group, which was in 2007. So I will spare you the rest of that story because I you wanted to talk a little bit about just like what we did, but it did not end well. But I did actually land the job in finance. just, was, yeah, it was an interesting and tumultuous path to there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anna Talerico (05:58)
See you.

And then trainer, right? We got to talk about training too, because it’s near and dear to our hearts for sure. So what I love about that is that just like dispels myth number one. Many people think you have to have, know, econ, finance, something. And so I love it when people, you know, break in and don’t have that background, just because I think that a lot of people think you have to have it all figured out, even to say like, I didn’t know what I banking was. I hear that all the time on this podcast, people saying, I was interfering for this job, and I had no idea what it even meant.

Kristen Kelly (06:06)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Anna Talerico (06:31)
People need to know then hear that because that they know so that they don’t have their own block of thinking well don’t know that I can’t pursue it and so I love both of those stories are such a great way and You mentioned that you went to go visit Jen so we got to come back to that because clearly you guys go way back but I want to talk about a couple of those roles because you threw around a lot of terms people don’t you know don’t even know Like how to get in let alone. What are some of those things? I just want to talk about

Kristen Kelly (06:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Yep.

Anna Talerico (06:59)
the role, the day in the life was like. I also think, before I forget, need to say, Kristen, you’re talking about you didn’t have an internship, how hard it was to get in. This is what your podcast, and really your Instagram account too, but the podcasts are so good at talking through this. How do you position yourself? How do you position yourself when you don’t check every box? So anybody that’s listening that feels like that’s them, like

This is the podcast. The Wall Street Skinny has all the info you need to position yourself as best as you can, for sure. So let’s talk about a couple of those things that you said. I think, who said fixed income sales and trading division? Jen. Okay. So what the hell is that? Excuse my language. What is that? And what was the day in the life? Yeah.

Kristen Kelly (07:24)
You.

Jennifer Saarbach (07:38)
Me.

The world may never know. No, so when I was applying to give you guys a sense, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth in the early aughts, the sexy thing at the time was the markets -based side of investment banks. And so when we think about investment banks, there’s really three key divisions of an investment bank. You’ve got the corporate advisory division.

The corporate advisory division, IBD, that’s helping companies think through strategic events like buying other companies, selling themselves to another company, spinning part of themselves off. All of these things require money. So then you have the capital markets division of the bank, which helps banks raise that money, either through the debt markets or the equity markets

Once those bonds that are evidence of the loans that fund those transactions go out into the secondary market, they trade in what’s called the fixed income markets. So it’s called fixed income because most bonds tend to have a fixed coupon. It is a predetermined interest rate that that company or government or entity is borrowing money at.

And so the fixed income sales and trading side of an investment bank is the area that provides access to those capital markets for institutional investors like hedge funds, insurance companies, pension funds.

bank portfolios, and by the way, companies who may need to access those markets for hedging purposes. So that’s really what the fixed income sales and trading division of the bank does. The traders are responsible for making markets, meaning providing a buyer for every seller of those securities and providing a seller for every buyer. And the salespeople are responsible for managing the relationships that brings that risk into the bank. The bank only makes money when someone needs to do a trade. And by the way, that’s a chance to make money. It’s not a guarantee

Kristen Kelly (09:11)
Mm-hmm

Hehehehehe

Jennifer Saarbach (09:38)
that you’re going to make money. It’s not a fee-based business the same way that corporate advisory is, where you charge your same pound of flesh for every transaction regardless of the relative riskiness, right? So that is the division of the bank that I entered into.

And I did my summer internship in fixed income sales and trading. And I did not know one word of what I just told you. I could not have explained it to the most sophisticated individual, let alone my eight-year-old son, right? I really didn’t understand what I was doing there, what the difference between a salesperson and a trader was, what the role was, how the bank made money, who the clients were, what their risks were, any of

Kristen Kelly (10:12)
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Saarbach (10:18)
So my summer internship was really a process through very, very painful trial and error of trying to understand that. And what I discerned at the end of that 10-week program, by the way, I didn’t get the return offer at the end of those 10 weeks, as you can imagine, given my total lack of understanding of what the big picture was. They were like, hey, we have a spot for you and like a remote office. It was basically the equivalent of doing equities in Dallas, if anyone here has ever read.

Anna Talerico (10:31)
Ha-ha.

Kristen Kelly (10:46)
Liar’s Poker.

Jennifer Saarbach (10:47)
Liar’s Poker, exactly. So so I then took the knowledge that I had gleaned from that experience of what I didn’t like about various things and said well, Okay, the interest rate sales desk. That was the best part

of my internship. I understood the most what was happening there. And what the Interstrate Sales Desk did is they provided access, again, for institutional investors to specifically things like U.S. Treasuries, which is debt issued by the U.S. government

and their derivatives, right? So things like interest rate swaps, interest rate options. You also had agency debt, a little bit of mortgage debt. Agency debt is debt issued by the GSEs, the government sponsors entities like Fannie and Freddie, the people who guarantee all those big pools of mortgages so that you and me, homeowners like us, can go out and get a mortgage and have it actually subsidized in part by the government effectively to get those things off of bank balance sheets. So interest rate sales is really where I made my career after that. I leveraged that experience knowing this is what interests me.

I went across the street to Lehman Brothers, got a full -time offer there, and I started my career in a joint venture between investment banking and sales and trading, covering corporations.

Kristen Kelly (11:52)
Mmm.

Jennifer Saarbach (12:02)
for their need to hedge their interest rate risk. So if a corporation is going to borrow money, let’s say six months from now, they’re gonna buy another company and they’re gonna fund that acquisition with debt. They have risk to interest rates rising between now and then. They can use the interest rate markets to hedge that risk. So that’s what I did. I kind of straddled the line between the private side, the corporate advisory side, and the public side with the public markets.

It was the worst of both worlds because I was working banking hours. I had to be there until midnight until the MD could get off his butt and give us comments on some PowerPoint slide where he wanted, you know, the Y axis is extended by a hundred basis points. Thanks. This meeting could have been an email. Okay. And the market side where I had to get in at six 30 in the morning and watch what was happening so I could sound smart in front of my clients and be intelligent about moves in the market. Right.

After a year of that, I moved entirely to the public market side, covering institutional investors. So again, hedge funds, mortgage servicers, bank portfolios, pension funds, et cetera, et cetera.

Anna Talerico (13:00)
Yeah, well done, by the way. This is why you guys are so popular because you explain it and break it down so well. So, okay, thank you for all that. I wanna just call out one thing which is that you didn’t get the return offer. I have to call it out because I read it, right? Every day somebody’s like, I didn’t get the return offer and they’re melting down and thinking it’s the end of their lives. And I just like, you don’t always get the return offer and it’s okay. Your path forward is…

Jennifer Saarbach (13:07)
Thank you.

Nope.

Anna Talerico (13:29)
going to be just fine, you know? It’s like, so I love that you share that part of it too.

Kristen Kelly (13:33)
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Saarbach (13:34)
By the way,

it was much less common not to get the return offer back then. It used to be the message at the beginning of the summer was this is your offer to lose. So it was like I had a tattoo on my forehead that said I suck, okay? Now many investment banks and other institutions that do summer internship programs, they notoriously over hire and over fire. So they may be only offering full -time jobs to something like 60 % of the interns over the summer.

Anna Talerico (13:38)
No.

Jennifer Saarbach (14:05)
You’re in good company. Okay, like this isn’t a reflection on you and if it is Learn from that right for me. The reason I didn’t get a return offer was I think There were probably a lot of reasons why I didn’t get that return offer I could spend all day talking about that, but I took

Kristen Kelly (14:07)
Yeah.

Anna Talerico (14:07)
Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (14:25)
the entire summer to figure out what I actually wanted to do. So many of my analyst classmates came in understanding the big picture, knowing what all this was. They had someone guiding them. They were an Econ major, whatever it was. They understood the landscape better and they were able to be surgical about, wanna be on this desk. I know I wanna do this and really fight to find mentors and advocates and figure out, okay, is this desk a good fit? And if it’s not, they could pivot very early. I was just like, la-di-da!

someone’s clearly going to give me an assignment and tell me what to do so I can get an A plus, which is what I’m used to doing in my academic career. Instead, it was build your own internship, figure it out, come up with a project. And I didn’t know how to succeed in that kind of environment. And I think that that’s something that a lot of people struggle with is the lack of formal structure within a lot of these internships where you have to make the agenda. You have to ask the questions.

Anna Talerico (15:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Kristen Kelly (15:19)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Anna Talerico (15:20)
and probably they don’t realize that they need to do that. Yeah. So you’re in this internship, Christine, you come to visit Jen and you say, this looks great. want to, yeah. So you got a little inspired. So tell us a little bit so that you didn’t have the internship. So you did go try to find some roles, weren’t finding success, decided to go get your master’s. So tell us about what was your, what did you get your,

Jennifer Saarbach (15:23)
You don’t know what you don’t know.

Kristen Kelly (15:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yup.

Anna Talerico (15:48)
Masters in it and what did you go do right after that? What was your first role?

Kristen Kelly (15:52)
Yeah, well, so basically, mean, coming back from, like, visiting her, I was like, all right, I’m going to get serious. I want to do banking or I want to do finance. I didn’t know what anything was. It was the same thing. And so I ended up applying. I was like applying for consulting. I was applying for sales and trading. I was applying for investment banking. In my head, I had read Like Monkey Business, and I had read Liar’s Poker. And then Jen was over there being like, investment banking is not cool. So was like, all right, I want to do sales and trading. And I did all the interviews and everything. But like I said, I mean, not having that internship

was actually like, it was a pretty big deal. And so I kind of found a little bit of a loophole. I was at Brown, like I said, and so was in Providence. And there was this local Morgan Stanley in Providence. It’s now Smith Barney. It was like a private wealth management branch. like I said, I ended up graduating. And I was like, you know what? I’m going to

sign up to do this master’s degree thing because, Browde, you could like literally sign your name on a piece of paper and like now you’re enrolled. So it’s called the Prime program, which was the closest thing that Brown had to like a business program. It was innovation management and entrepreneurship. And I got, like I said, this internship,

internship at this local Morgan Stanley in Providence and it was, it was I mean like I was like addressing envelopes it was like the silliest like non anything but it got me my line item and it was part of my story and so then when I started applying my fifth year like my master’s year it was a much easier sell it’s like hey I decided I wanted to do this I struck out last year I took five classes my second semester senior year so I could do three Econ classes got this internship and I went back again and they were like okay we believe you you seem

Anna Talerico (16:59)
Yeah.

Kristen Kelly (17:28)
like you’re, you know, want to do this. And so the funny thing is I actually also was hired into the fixed income division at Morgan Stanley. Now, when you’re hired, you don’t necessarily know where you’re going to go. And I, again, as an engineering major, was like interviewing with all these different groups when they were trying to place me.

And they were like, the CDO group seems good because you’re an engineering person. And like I said, worst place to start for a lot of reasons. Again, I didn’t know anything. All I really think I understood was like investment banking seemed long hours like, you know, you were doing it like, again, the book is called Monkey Business. And so but I ended up basically doing that with much less interesting things, at least from my perspective, because you’re like packaging bonds together. And it’s basically an investment banking role on the trading floor. And then obviously with the whole collapse of the

economy in 2008, which was basically started by that product called CDOs. My group went from like, gosh, there was probably 40 when I got hired down to three. And I was very lucky. I was able to interview. It’s like they didn’t want to hire, you know, they didn’t want to fire analysts. So I ended up interviewing and I, knows this story. I can try to truncate it because there was a lot of hiring freezes going on at the time as well. But I ultimately moved into the convertible desk within capital markets and then

project finance and then ultimately into financial sponsors and banking because I did, even though I thought like, it’s just thinking it’s not cool. Ultimately it was like, that seems like a much better fit because my roommate at the time had gone through banking training and I remember being so jealous. I was like, I wanna do that training. I wanna learn this stuff. This seems really cool. So I ultimately did get my way into banking. But anyway, so that’s a whole, like I said, it’s like my path through the…

divisions at Morgan Stanley, was funny. was like sales and trading, fixed income, capital markets, fixed income and equity capital markets, and then ultimately into investment banking. All in three years, by the way. So yeah, it was a…

Anna Talerico (19:20)
Wow. When did you transition to training? So what, yeah, I’ve got to hear more about that.

Kristen Kelly (19:27)
Yeah, well again, I think the thing about me, I love understanding how things work and I’ve always just loved teaching. My mom was a teacher and the thing that I always used to do when I was in engineering, it’s like, never really, I don’t think I was necessarily that smart, but I knew how to look at something and break it down in a very simple way that I would almost have to learn it myself, teach it to myself. And I felt, like I said, just, when I went through,

the whole program when I got hired, the training was my favorite part. And so I remember thinking like, this seems like the coolest job in the world. Like, I want to do that. And so I ended up, mean, my third year, like I said, I had gone all over the place. And unfortunately, the downside is that you don’t really make, you don’t develop really strong relationships with anyone. So I didn’t really have that person who was like, I didn’t build up any political capital. And so I did start to interview, I was interviewing for private equity roles and hedge fund roles. And I did have actually a couple

of offers, but I kind of just was like, I want to do something that makes me happy. I love teaching. So I ended up going and joining the firm that ran the training program when I was at Morgan Stanley. And I ultimately did that for 13 years. And it was, like I said, it was a blast. Like I said, I love teaching. the new kids who are getting hired and coming in, they’re so excited and eager to learn. It’s like…

It was just, it’s so much fun. And again, we see this all the time now when we’re on social media and people message us and it’s like people are just so positive and excited and eager to learn and there is nothing better than teaching people that want to learn stuff. It’s just, it’s a lot of fun.

Anna Talerico (20:59)
And yeah, people are so hungry for the information and you all deliver it in such an engaging way. And more than that, I just think the way you explain things, it’s certainly entertaining, but you’re really good at explaining things and breaking it down for the lay person because I think there’s so much knowledge that does feel kind of out of reach. So I want to get into, you know, certainly how you guys met and the career twist here, but I know that you do this all day long on the podcast and everything, but tell us, what do you think

Kristen Kelly (21:09)
Thank you.

Anna Talerico (21:29)
are the biggest myths, you know, having kind of come in, worked in Wall Street, on Wall Street? What do you think now on the other side of it are the biggest myths that people have about it?

Kristen Kelly (21:43)
Jen, do you want to start?

Anna Talerico (21:43)
Let me start, I’ll start with Jen. I’ll start with Jen.

Jennifer Saarbach (21:45)
First yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, you’re fine. It’s funny. I was like, we’re just gonna talk over each other But I’ve gotten so used to the luxury now of you calling on us, No, you’re fine, It’s so funny. I think that there are a number of different ways that people on Wall Street are either glorified vilified or satirized in kind of pop culture that are all based on these

Anna Talerico (21:50)
I got it, yes.

Kristen Kelly (21:52)
I also just talked for a long time, so I was like, shut up for a minute.

Anna Talerico (21:55)
Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (22:13)
wild, outdated notions that are popularized in a couple of movies and a couple of books that are so different from reality. First of all, the notion that people are just in it for the money. All right, when you move to New York City right out of college, if you don’t have a job in investment banking,

Don’t understand how you can afford your rent. It is an exorbitantly expensive city. It is impossible to make your way and you know, it’s not like the okay like Frank Sinatra You know if I can make it no, all right. It is a brutal place so You know the take-home pay of first-year analysts on Wall Street is not some it may seem like a ton of money on the headline number But when you’re just starting out in finance, you’re not killing it

Kristen Kelly (22:52)
Ha-ha-ha.

Anna Talerico (22:54)
Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (23:07)
Okay, so if you’re just starting out, I think the reality is, that many people, not all, but many people aren’t doing it for the paycheck today. They are doing it to open as many doors as possible for them. And that’s why I did it. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I wanted to, and I still don’t by the way, like I’m going to be 40 this year. Maybe I’ll figure it out. But for me,

Kristen Kelly (23:08)
Mmm.

Anna Talerico (23:08)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (23:36)
Watching my peers and my mentors go through this process before me in college and then seeing what panned out in the scope of their careers, to me this represented something with minimal barriers to entry as far as the formal educational requirements necessary. Again, English major, hadn’t taken a math class in four years, didn’t matter. And maximum…

ability to keep as many doors open and maximize my optionality for things to do down the line.

Kristen Kelly (24:07)
Mm.

Jennifer Saarbach (24:10)
Find it hard and I think you’d be hard pressed to make an argument that starting your career in finance closes doors to you. The only door it might close to you is tech because tech is the only other industry that is so youth obsessed when it comes to the talent wars that like if you didn’t choose it at 19, you’re a day old bread, okay? But.

Kristen Kelly (24:22)
Yeah.

Anna Talerico (24:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (24:33)
Even that, I do think there is so much fluidity between tech and finance that even that door is not closed to you. Or again, like maybe an Olympic athlete or professional athlete, okay? But like those generally are the reasons that I think so many people get into finance. And that’s why we are so passionate about keeping those doors open for people. Because again, I don’t care if you want to be an investment banker, right? A lot of people…

Kristen Kelly (24:41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm.

Jennifer Saarbach (24:58)
listen to us or follow us or whatever. They think it’s like, you must be an investment banker to find joy in life. Fuck no, okay? Like, pardon my French. But that’s not what we’re trying to say at all. If this is something you’re interested in exploring, the door will be closed to you if you don’t pursue it early. It will be so much harder to break in.

Kristen Kelly (25:05)
Mmm-hmm. Hmm-hmm.

Anna Talerico (25:05)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (25:17)
So if you want to keep as many doors open to you as possible, add this to the list of things you’re learning about. And that’s simply it. So I think it’s that myth of immediate financial reward versus maximum long-term optionality. And I think that’s the key driver for so many people approaching the industry. Not all, not all, but many.

Kristen Kelly (25:31)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Anna Talerico (25:37)
I love that actually. I think it’s something a lot of people don’t realize as they’re starting out or making choices in their life of just trying to keep optionality available to them and not closing doors. It’s so true. By the way, you can be an investment banker and an Olympic athlete. There was somebody this summer who won a gold medal, I think, right? Yeah. So yeah, you can do it. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it.

Kristen Kelly (25:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yep.

Will say my brother, he went and swam in the Olympic trials when he was first-year analyst on the, well, he wasn’t on the floor, he was on the capital markets floor, but kind of trading floor at Morgan Stanley. He did not make it, but he did get to swim in it. That was the same debate.

Anna Talerico (26:11)
Incredible, I don’t know, that is like Herculean. So what do you think, Kristen, of some of the biggest myths that people have about working in finance in Wall Street?

Kristen Kelly (26:17)
Mm-hmm

I mean…

think, of all, you know, there is obviously, as Jen put it, this caricature of the finance bro and like the types of people that you’re going to meet. And I mean, I feel like some of my best friends who I’m still very close with, I met through my analyst program. mean, like, it’s really, there is just such a group of really great people. I mean, I’m trying to think. I don’t even know if I even knew any like finance bros. Like, I feel like, as Jen puts it sometimes, like what you see on social media is not the actual

like depiction of people in real life. So I think that’s the first thing. And then I think the second is that, especially in the population that we tend to interact with, and I think part of it, it’s the optionality piece, but because private equity starts to like recruit so early, I think people, and for whatever reason, tend to think that like private equity is the big sexy thing.

And there’s so many other options out there, by the way. Like, private equity is great for the people that it’s great for. And there’s definitely going be people that this is definitely the thing that they should pursue. But there’s so many other opportunities out there. And the other thing is there’s, again, this perception that you’re always going to be making more on the buy side than on the sell side, which is also not necessarily the case either. So I don’t know. I’d say those are like the big three things that are not really true.

Anna Talerico (27:43)
Love it, love it. So, gonna switch gears a little. Tell me how you met, which is clearly going back a while now. We gotta hear about that and then I wanna just talk about how in the heck you guys decided to start the Wall Street Guinea. But first, how did you meet? Because you guys go way, way, way back.

Kristen Kelly (27:53)
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Saarbach (28:03)
We do. So we actually met in the second grade. We happened to be in the same second grade classroom and there is no more to it than a kind of happy accident of birth or situation as you will say. But one of the things that’s so cool.

Kristen Kelly (28:03)
Mm-hmm.

Anna Talerico (28:07)
Love it.

Jennifer Saarbach (28:18)
You’ve I’ve known Kristen now for going on 33 years and you think at that point you stop learning new things about someone right But what’s been so amazing about our friendship and about this opportunity to go into business together is again I’ve talked to Kristen about pretty much everything we could conceivably talk about okay, whether it’s becoming a mother whether it’s going through the challenges of navigating our careers whether it’s college high school the drama in middle school and we weren’t cool and nobody let us sit at their lunch table and we had to eat lunch

alone in the stairwells, but I’ll save that for another time. But one of the things that I discovered so late in our friendship that I’m so grateful to now be a part of, you think you know someone, right? You hear them when you’re out at drinks or dinner or hanging out on the phone. I’ve gotten to see Kristen, the teacher Kristen, and it is the coolest thing in the world. Because I thought I knew everything about my friend.

And then when we started this business together, she was like, I’m just an explain, you know, how an LBO works and kind of layman’s terms and whatever. I’m like, okay, good luck. Like, and she just transforms into this like goddess that descends from the sky and drops knowledge on you in the best way and explains things that I had again, casually overheard for decades and never really understood and never gave a shit about whatever. And I’m like, my God, you are so talented.

Anna Talerico (29:45)
Okay.

Jennifer Saarbach (29:45)
coolest thing. So to be able to discover that about your lifelong best friend is just such a gift and has been miraculous as we’ve gone through this process of building this business.

Anna Talerico (29:52)
Love it. See a whole other side of her. So Kristen, how did it, tell me about the origin story of the Wall Street skinny. Like how did you guys decide to do it? I mean, obviously coming out of your training experience, I’m sure it’s closely tied, but yeah, tell us how did this all start?

Kristen Kelly (29:55)
Yeah, no, this is… Yeah.

Yeah? Mm-hmm.

So I mean, Jen had been coming to me for years being like, we should start this business. I feel like at one point, not this particular one, but like, I think she’s always been an entrepreneur. Again, she’s very good at building businesses. She’s done a few in the past. And again, I’ve always obviously loved teaching. And when I was getting ready to leave New York City, again, I love training, but the…

the flights, like I didn’t want to be traveling away from my kids. Cause again, when you do the training, you’re all over the world. Like you’re going to Hong Kong, you’re going to California, you’re going to Texas, you’re all over the place cause you need to be on site. And I was like, that’s not going to work. And again, coming out of COVID, at least when I was in New York city, the clients were nearby, but then it was like,

OK, so I’m going to move to Boston. And so Jen and I started talking. And this was right around the time when SVB went under. And I remember saying to her, was like, because I was teaching a class at Blackstone, actually. And all of my students were so paranoid. They were like, this is the great financial crisis 2 .0. And so we were talking. I was like, Jen, because again, actually she had come to me and been like, we should do podcast about something. And I was like, Jen, it would be really fun if

we got on the podcast and you told the Lehman story about what it was like being on the trading floor at Lehman when Lehman went under. And she was like, yeah, she’s like, OK, but if we do that, maybe we should start a little bit earlier and start with, well, what is an investment bank? Because if I talk about whatever, it going under, we need that context.

At the same time as well, like I said, I mean, I was leaving New York City and it felt like, okay, if we do this podcast, like maybe there should be an associated channel that’s like devoted to explaining things because it’s one thing to talk through things when you’re on a podcast, but it’s a whole nother thing to actually be able to see how things work.

Anna Talerico (31:56)
Yeah.

Kristen Kelly (31:56)
And so we were like, you know what, maybe we should also have a social media presence while we do that as well. You know, there’s all these also like just these FingMeme accounts and stuff. Everything is so masculine. We were like, you know what, it would be really cool if we start some kind of account

Anna Talerico (32:06)
Mmm.

Kristen Kelly (32:11)
and try to bring a more feminine energy. Not that it’s only for women, but just, you know, all the other accounts are very masculine energy. Let’s bring feminine energy. And so that was kind of how it started was, again, I was like leaving New York, leaving my job. Jen and I had always talked about doing a podcast and it was like the stars aligned. And as we literally said when we did this the first like few months, we’re like, if this goes nowhere, it doesn’t matter because we were having like the most fun of our entire life. Like this could be just, you know, it’s a dream we wake up from and that’s fine. It goes nowhere. But like,

Jennifer Saarbach (32:15)
Not at all.

Anna Talerico (32:16)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kristen Kelly (32:40)
We’re having so much fun. This has been such a gift. And so the fact that it’s actually catching on has been so much. It’s just been so amazing because it’s so much fun. And again, it’s the best thing in the world. I get to basically be on the call on a phone or on whatever. It’s actually the portal. It’s a meta portal. But basically talking to my best friend 24 -7, and I get to call at work. It’s the best thing ever.

Anna Talerico (33:00)
Yeah, I love it.

Jennifer Saarbach (33:02)
Also say this, Anna, Kristen is extremely modest. Had to. She was like, Listen, I listened to this podcast with Mark Cuban, and he said that his son is using TikTok instead of Google. And I was like, over my dead body, am I going to be dancing on the internet? I don’t use social media. I think it is terrible for people’s brains. And Kristen was always the one who really believed that listen, you can be right, or you can be effective, right? You can say, Hey, listen, this is something that I’m

Kristen Kelly (33:12)
This is true.

Yes.

Jennifer Saarbach (33:32)
personally passionate about in my own life or not, right? But if you can’t meet people where they are, it doesn’t matter if you’re saying the most brilliant thing, closed up in my closet here in my office, no one’s ever gonna know. And so it’s funny because Kristen was always a natural. Again, she had been in that teaching role and in that mindset for so long. She had to teach me how to get comfortable being on camera, not being anonymous. I never wanted my name on anything, you know, and it’s been, it’s been, you were talking, you said you listened to someone else.

Kristen Kelly (33:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (34:02)
Call it getting over cringe mountain and on the other side is freedom.

Anna Talerico (34:05)
Yeah.

Kristen Kelly (34:05)
Yeah, no, the road to success is on the other side of Cringe Mountain. Like, you gotta…

Jennifer Saarbach (34:10)
Yeah, we are Cringe Mountain, okay? Like, if you look up Cringe Mountain, you’ll see a picture of my face, but the total ego death that has been building this business has actually been very freeing and…

Anna Talerico (34:10)
It’s now.

Kristen Kelly (34:22)
I need to pop in for a second because actually this is so true. It’s hilarious going back to last year, whatever, like April or whatever. Jen wanted to hire paid actors. She did not, again, she didn’t want her name out there. She didn’t want any information about herself. And again, actually it’s so funny because for me, what’s been really cool is seeing Jen who started off and I think she was a little bit almost like camera shy and to then basically like, it’s like the mask, she’s, she’s.

Jennifer Saarbach (34:29)
This time? Yeah.

Anna Talerico (34:34)
Ha!

So, yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (34:47)
Disaster.

Kristen Kelly (34:50)
I mean, especially when she does like funny skits, I’m like, my God, like this is amazing. And so it’s just been really cool to kind of see that as well. So again, this whole thing has just been like so much fun. Yep.

Anna Talerico (34:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, you unleash the beast again, right? But I think it probably comes from connecting with the audience. You see that the audience, it’s resonating with the audience and that kind of helps you get over the discomfort of needing to do it. Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (35:16)
There’s that, but there’s also the fact that, again, mentors and teachers are so important in our lives. Having someone who’s your best friend be able to deliver criticism and also help you get over your fears is invaluable. Sorry, you were about to say something. I interrupted you. I’m so sorry.

Anna Talerico (35:21)
Yeah.

Yeah. No, no, I can’t even remember what it was. No worries. I love that, by the way, just acknowledging that bringing the different energy, you know, there is nothing wrong with finance, bro. By the way, right now it is finance for a summer and I’m loving it. It’s so fun. It really is. But nothing about I find nothing about the podcast or the Instagram. I’m not on TikTok, I because I’m too addicted. So don’t let myself I don’t let myself do it because I can can, you know, death scroll.

Jennifer Saarbach (35:56)
Okay, it’s all the same shit.

Kristen Kelly (35:58)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anna Talerico (36:00)
Doom scrolled, but just there’s nothing inherently feminine about it. Meaning it’s content for everybody, but it is a different energy, right? And I think that that is obviously filling a big void as well, for sure. So I know you do this all day long, but I have to ask as we kind of start to wind out, like wind down, what are your big pieces of advice that you give to people that are thinking about, know, trying to break into

Jennifer Saarbach (36:07)
Yep.

Kristen Kelly (36:09)
Mm-hmm.

Anna Talerico (36:29)
role in Wall Street and feeling like they’re at a disadvantage and they don’t check every perfect box. again, there’s so many podcasts you’ve done about this and so many good Instagram reels, but I’m just curious, how would you kind of summarize some of the advice you give? Kristen, I’ll start with you.

Kristen Kelly (36:47)
I mean, this is going to sound like I apologize if this is not the best thing to hear. I’d say the younger you start, the better in the sense that if you’re able to get some kind of internship as a freshman or sophomore, it’s going to open so many more doors to you, even if you don’t think that you meet the criteria for a lot of other things. It’s the way that.

Jen, heard her explain this once, and I think it’s a really good explanation. It’s like private schools, right? If you apply for a private school, like in kindergarten, the whole class is open. So you’re one of like 20, 100. As you get further along, the spots narrow. And so the first thing is just getting your foot in the door as early as possible is going to keep as much optionality open for you. Beyond that, I think that, you know,

If you find yourself in a position like kind of how the position I was in, which is I really wanted to do it, I struck out and I was like, OK, how can I make myself an attractive candidate? There are ways to do that. I mean, obviously getting into the recruiting cycle. I mean, that was, like I said, why I stood it and I stayed for an extra year. The master is the most important part of it was, like I said, getting back in the recruiting cycle, you know, identifying if you didn’t get the offer, you know, again, you didn’t get the return offer. What was it that was the problem? Again, for me, like

I was able to learn from how I needed to change my story and how I needed to get the line items on my resume and then convert that into actually getting the job. So again, step one is like start early. Step two is if you want to do it, try to figure out the right path. And step three, or I should say, I guess my third just piece of advice is it does get a lot harder as you get older with that said. And this is by the way, kind of like, know, diamond in the rough, like this is not the norm, but I did have a friend.

Anna Talerico (38:24)
Yeah.

Kristen Kelly (38:40)
who was 40 years old with five kids who did actually get a job. Now he went in as an associate, as a 40 year old associate. But if you really want something and you try and you are persistent, luck does favor the well -prepared. But it does get harder as you get older.

Anna Talerico (39:00)
And what I love about saying to people start early and even if you don’t think you’re going to want to go into finance, it’s not going to close the door, but at least you’ve gotten it in. So you have, again, going back to Jen, you’ve got the optionality, at least if you do it. So Jen, what about you? What is your advice to people?

Jennifer Saarbach (39:10)
Yes

and Kristen just gave such great advice and to piggyback on something you just touched on you said you know again if you want to be on that private equity track right you basically need to know coming out of middle school that this is what you want to do. So many people are chasing whatever seems like the sexy thing right now. Having gone through the global financial crisis having seen the industry shift under my feet so many times while I was working in it and even after I walked away from it it is constantly shifting it’s a function of the markets it’s a function of things that are well-being

Kristen Kelly (39:27)
You.

Jennifer Saarbach (39:49)
beyond your control and your ability to predict. So keeping an open mind to the fact that there may be, I mean, again, if you’re 18, chances are you may think you know what private equity is.

Anna Talerico (40:01)
Amen.

Jennifer Saarbach (40:01)
Chances are that you know that this is actually the thing you want to do relative to everything else. Maybe your true dream is to be a mortgage servicer. You have no clue because you don’t know what these things are because no one’s telling you what they are. There is no textbook on this. This isn’t going to be covered in your econ class or your finance class. No one’s actually going to explain to you what the overall landscape is and what the field of opportunity is. So be open to opportunities. Don’t think that you have to be chasing the same thing

Anna Talerico (40:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer Saarbach (40:31)
that everyone else is chasing. And in that process of being open to more things and being genuinely intellectually curious, more opportunities, I think, will magically present themselves to you if you aren’t just chasing this very narrow thing of, God, if I didn’t get a job at KKR, my life is over, right? This fly, okay, is really forcing me to.

Anna Talerico (40:52)
Hopefully, we can edit that out in the post. Probably not.

Jennifer Saarbach (40:59)
my new best friend. But yeah, so just to continually be chasing things just for prestige and just because everyone tells you it’s what you should want, right? That’s not going to necessarily end up with the best outcome for you. Like I said, 40 years old, still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. So the idea that you at 18, thinking about your first internship application, know exactly what you want to do and where you want to be.

I think maybe apply some humility and some reflection to that process and you will end up a lot happier in the process rather than being so disappointed if things don’t work out perfectly like you planned.

Anna Talerico (41:36)
Yeah, stay open to the possibilities too. I love that. What a perfect place to end today. I could do this all day with you because I really want to go back and talk about all those roles. And so we might have to pick it up again, but thank you so much for sharing all the great content that you do. All of the, you know, just it is like democratizing access to information that people wouldn’t otherwise have access to. And thanks for being on to tell your story today. I really appreciate it.

Kristen Kelly (42:05)
Thank you so much. This was so much fun.

Jennifer Saarbach (42:06)
Thanks, Anna. We’re so amazed by what you’re doing and so grateful for the opportunity to be on.

Anna Talerico (42:11)
Yay. All right. Till next time.

Kristen Kelly (42:12)
Bye!