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While attending UC Berkeley’s business school, Shelley Jiang told Business Insider that she felt she had three career paths to choose from: accounting, banking, and consulting — or “ABC.”
She developed an interest in banking and landed a summer job at Goldman Sachs after her junior year of college, emerging from the internship with two big payoffs.
“First, I really hated investment banking,” says Jiang, who graduated from college in 2014. “Second, I realized what an incredible opportunity it would be to work in technology. While working on these deals, I saw first-hand how the price-to-earnings multiples of tech companies were going through the roof.”
That marked her first career change, leading to her taking a job at Amazon in 2014.
In 2015, she moved to Google and ended up working with a team in Singapore called Next Billion Users, essentially building products for them. “The next billion users coming from markets like Indonesia, India, Brazil, etc. — as opposed to the idea of ​​the first billion users targeting the US and European markets,” she explained.
The opportunity allowed Jiang to experience what it’s like to build something from the ground up.
At a tech giant like Google, “most people inherit a product that already has a billion users and they’re trying to maintain that, but in this case, you’re basically working on a startup within Google,” she said.
A few years later, the product she was working on “was no longer in that really exciting, fragmented, fast-growing zero-to-one phase,” she said. “I wanted to do something different and take a risk.”
In 2021, Jiang left his job to launch his own startup. Instead of starting a company as a side hustle, he wanted to take it full-time.
“I went all in,” says Jean, who was 29 at the time and quit before her business idea was even fully formed, adding that she doesn’t necessarily recommend the same strategy. “It’s really a personal style. What I did is not a reflection of what you should do. It depends on the situation. For me, it’s all or nothing. You have to put your heart into it and be totally committed.”
Still, she took some steps to prepare herself financially for leaving the corporate world: She applied to and was accepted into an accelerator program. Entrepreneurs Firstpaid stipends, connected her with other startup founders, and provided mentorship and structure. She eventually built a personal finance platform. peak.
The timing couldn’t have been better, she adds: “I had savings to support myself and I didn’t have any dependents or kids,” and it was early in the pandemic, with strict stay-at-home orders in place, “so it was the perfect time to focus, hit the ground running, and get started on my entrepreneurial journey.”
Aim for financial independence through investment
Jiang could afford the decision thanks to smart investments he made in his 20s, including Tesla, and he also received RSUs as part of his compensation package at Google.
She noted that luck certainly played a role in the portfolio’s growth.
To get asymmetric returns, she said, you need to “get into a growing space early,” which was technology in the 2010s. “I feel like it was just like, ‘right time, right place.’ I happened to go to school in the Bay Area, I worked in the Bay Area, and tech was part of my psyche at a time when tech was super strong.”
But she also prioritized landing a high-paying job and consistently saved and invested a portion of her tech-related income.
“You want to work somewhere where you’re not only making a ton of cash, but you also have RSUs and stock options,” she says. “That’s where most of my net worth growth has come from. Probably 50% of it is from RSUs because Google’s stock price has done so well.”
Her advice to young investors is to “go somewhere where you have a chance to actually make a lot of money early on and not spend it all. Don’t get carried away with the lifestyle and don’t spend all your money, but invest that money and be very disciplined about it.”
Adapting to life as an entrepreneur: Downsizing your lifestyle and tracking your spending
When Jan was thinking about retirement, she looked at the approximate ratio of her net worth to her investment income. “I could basically get by on a much more frugal lifestyle,” she realized. “If I downsized completely, I’d have essentially unlimited funds.”
She made some lifestyle changes, including living with two roommates, to lower her living expenses.
“I never thought I’d do it again, but then I decided to live with a roommate in my 30s,” said Zhang, whose roommate is also a startup founder. “I was paying about 50% more in rent, so it’s a big difference.”
She’s also traveling less and becoming more generally conscious of where her money is going.
At Google, she had “cash flow without worrying about the outcome” and was more free to spend money. “I’m now much more conscious of what I really value.”
When tracking her finances, she focuses on two main numbers: her savings rate, which she makes sure is at least 30%, and her net worth.
She uses a personal finance platform she built herself to stay organized, and points out that many great startup ideas start with a problem they’re trying to solve in their own life.
“My personal financial life is quite complicated. I have a lot of accounts in the US, assets in Singapore and I also invest a lot in cryptocurrencies so I have several wallets and holdings,” she said.
As it turns out, she’s not the only one struggling with personal finances in Singapore. While integrated asset aggregation is nothing new in the U.S., it is new in Southeast Asia. After talking to colleagues and people in her network, she found that “there are virtually no solutions in Singapore other than Excel.”
Peake addressed that issue, and thanks to financial preparation, he did so in a relatively low-pressure environment.
Eventually, she calculated her finances and realized she had enough savings and investment accounts to survive without a steady paycheck, giving her time to “explore and see if entrepreneurship was really for me and if my idea really had potential.”