53 · Rooms I Don't Belong In

I think I'm having a massive revelation about networking and creating opportunities. Lock in a work session of a couple of hours purely dedicated to networking — cold outreach, cold emails, cold calls, warm outreach, only networking — and you can hop on Zoom calls, hear personal stories, and scale your denominator of wisdom. This is beyond books: mentors guiding you, real people sharing their stories — and it doubles as interview preparation. Getting yourself into rooms you don't deserve to be in is literally how you make quantum leaps. Imagine being in a room with Ray Dalio, Kenneth Griffin and Jim Simons. If you continue this endeavour of research, study, analysis and trading, then over the years you reach a stage where you're competent enough to hold high-level discussions with these people — and the insights from those conversations will be massive.

There is something far more transcendent about talking to someone actually in the field than reading about it. There's no flood of data — usually just a few insights and revelations — but the interaction itself connects you to a new pendulum, a new entity. Mingle with people in the fields you want to enter, find out what they're doing, 10x their input while releasing the obsession with output, then quantum leap into new playing grounds. That has always been my philosophy, and it got me here. Cold outreach at scale to the people whose position you want; hop on calls; find out what they do; 10x it; ride their golden veins, come out first, then move to the next ramp. Right now £500k as a quant dev at Citadel Securities looks massive; later you'll transcend it.

When you actually talk to people with skin in the game, you find out it doesn't take as much as you anticipated. The opposite of what I think is true is also true: yes, it takes an astronomical amount of time and effort — and it's also totally bearable. A mix of seemingly impossible, vastly stressful, and manageable.

There's one guy I hopped on a call with — Nicholas, on Industrial Placement, the gap year between second and penultimate year where you integrate work experience into the degree. He has a return offer from JP Morgan in quant research. These calls compound.

Insider information is real. You have a network of people who got into Cambridge; expand it and find the people who give real alpha on how to ace the interviews. People are far more supportive than you expect. And you get better at asking: not "how did you prepare for STEP," but "why does everybody else who prepares with past papers still fail — what do you think was your executional edge?"

There's massive opportunity in what I call mingling: going to rooms I don't deserve to be in, hopping on calls I don't deserve, putting myself in the centre. Reach out on LinkedIn to people running laps around you, intellects far more competent and knowledgeable, people who don't seem to share your lifeline. Shift into being the person who can outreach. Most billionaires are willing to pull up people who are where they once were.

If I start businesses, the way I'll hire is coffee chats. Really deep conversations for hours, then letting them choose. Would you work for this person if they were your boss? Those are the questions that matter.

Maybe I could cut hair. Free haircuts as networking — a glow-up plus good conversation. What professor, what billion-dollar hedge fund manager, would hate a free haircut with great talk and some snacks? Everybody ends up in a debt of value. Most ideas are stupid, but this one galvanises me — walk up to someone on campus: can I offer you a free haircut? How badly can a haircut go, honestly?