My First (and Greatest) Job

Guillaume Piard, MBA ’15, is the founder of Nalo, a private wealth robo-advisor in France. He started the company while a student at Booth and recently sold it for $15 million. He shares how his very first job has been his greatest so far.

“At 22 years old, I started as an intern on the sales desk at Lehman Brothers in their Paris office. I was an unusual intern for them—for one, I was a bit older, and I’d just earned my master’s degree in physics, a field I decided not to pursue. At first, they had me doing basic tasks and running lunch errands, but my head was filled with algorithms and I was itching to do more complex stuff. I proved my worth by helping the department improve their client database management.

“I moved from there into the analyst program in London, starting on the credit-structuring desk—a highly quantitative role compared with sales. Over 18 months, I got them to overhaul how the structuring team operated by streamlining and automating everything. When my leads saw that success, they gave me the keys to the truck. The greatest thing I took away, and the reason this job was so instrumental in my career, was the self-confidence I developed from the deep amount of trust I earned—and was given. They took a risk on me, and I proved it was worthwhile.

“This may sound funny, considering how devastating it was for me and my colleagues when Lehman went bankrupt, but as I look back over my 25-plus-year career, that first work experience has been my career North Star. For one, it planted the seeds of entrepreneurship that came to fruition at Booth.

“If Lehman had not gone under, I bet I would still be there. I can get bored easily, but on the trading floor I learned an entirely new job every six months. It was intense. The way traders operate, the way risk is managed, the stuff that people focus on—it all changes, sometimes overnight. Technology comes along that makes you obsolete; six months later, it happens again. You have to keep adapting.”