Gaurav Kapadia: commitment

Transcript context

…That was frustrating? There’s an important reason I was in Boston Consulting Group, which probably a lot of people don’t know. I studied finance at Wharton because I knew I wanted to be an investor when I was 15. Then I said, “Well, what’s the best place to go? The best place to go was Wharton. I applied early, went there, and actually had a wide variety of experiences through my college career. I worked at the State Department on economic sanctions policy, of all things. Still have my security clearance. I worked at an investment bank. At the end of that period, I interviewed at a bunch of places. I was lucky enough to get offers from Goldman, Blackstone, and BCG. After thinking about it for a long time, I made a decision that basically no Wharton student would have made at that time — to go work at BCG. They paid one-third the amount of money, but there’re a couple of reasons why. One, I had a lot of finance experience through my college career and through my internships. I realized that I didn’t really know how the world worked or how businesses work in any reality. So, I took it as a detour on purpose to learn more about how corporate environments work, how leadership functions, because I thought it would make me a better investor. Now, the funny thing is that I remember this almost like it was yesterday. The Goldman person — I called and said, “Hey, by the way, I’m going to go work at Boston Consulting Group.” He told me at that time, “You are making the worst mistake of your career. I hope you remember this phone call,” which, of course, has been ironic. Then the BCG experience worked out incredibly well to some extent. So, you learned how things work.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.