I recently had a personalized information session with quantitative analysts at a "top three" investment bank. They have a group of 300-400 PhDs, all working extremely hard to produce money-making mathematical models quickly. Their compensation is unreal. Probably, better than viaweb's. (Assume a 10% success rate, and that a viaweb founder's comp of $2.5mil/year, in funny numbers, that is $250K/year.) Ok, working for a big company sucks. There are small hedge funds like Renaissance (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies</a> ).<p>The technical problems in finance are more difficult that most in the average startup and the pay better. If you are one of the few people in the world who have the technical skills that these companies look for, then why would start at a startup rather than go into finance? <p>I've been thinking about this for a few days, and the best answer I can come up with has something to do with culture. In finance, you're extremely secretive. Secrecy is downright unhackerish. Working for 10 years, amassing a fortune, and no one knows who you are or what you've done. Which is why I call finance the silent killer. You disappear into this pile of money. Anyone else want to share their feelings on this?
There's a lot of ways to get rich. Some of the Aramark vendors selling beer at Shea stadium are pulling over 100k a year working only 80 home games a season. According to John Taylor Gatto's back-of-the-envelope analysis, some of the hot dog vendors on the sidewalks are pulling over 100k a year as well.<p>Taking into account accelerating change, you're going to have more toys than you could ever possibly dream of in 20 years anyway.<p>I think, therefore, that the social status is more important than the money.<p>Plus, like Hollywood celebrities, people doing interesting stuff tend to hang out with other people doing interesting stuff. So if you want to have interesting conversations with interesting people, doing something interesting yourself goes a long way.