March 14th

March 14th was the last day of the first chapter of post grad life. Out of school I had a great opportunity to join a finance team at a great tech company in Silicon Valley. Part of what attracted me to this position was the finance rotational program. After 8-18 months you would have the opportunity to check out a whole different type of finance work. I was fresh out of school and excited to get going with life. Moved back home for a bit, got kicked out of the house, you know the drill. Still, life focused on work and professional development.

I originally started off supporting the Corporate FP&A team working closely with the VP of FP&A and his team. This first role allowed me to get exposure to external relations, the company wide p&l, overall business model and exposure to great people. My favorite part was working on the enterprise projects that allowed you to get in on forward looking information around critical company wide decisions. So corporate right? 

Then the chance to rotate to another position came up and I was stoked to go after it. I moved over to support the CFO organization. So instead of looking at the company wide metrics I was focused on just the CFO org. Looking at Opex from this point of view was great because it got me closer to the nuts and bolts. In this role I got to focus on working with business partners, tax treatments, different countries laws, headcount analysis, long range planning, annual operating plan building, and finance system testing. I mean, I even became a certified super-user for our main finance program….what the hell? Who was I? ha. Awesome manager, learned a ton.

Somewhere along my time there, my boss and I were having a candid conversation (I’ve been lucky to have real conversations with managers and not the filtered BS that I hear other people have). He said to me, “Greg you have to define success for yourself, its going to be different for everyone.” Long story short, I looked at the people who I was slated to be in this corporate environment and I decided that path wasn’t one I wanted to go down. 

After plenty of reflection/thought/advice I decided to take off from that life for a bit. I’m not worried about my attitude to get shit done, I just know the being proactive about life is key. I’ve said this before in another post, but in order to be successful in life you need to maximize your chances. What I mean by that is give life as many chances as you can to be good to you. Luck is going to factor into this forsure. But who has better chances of hitting Red 36? the guy who rolls twice or the guy who rolls 30 times? I’m just saying, give life as many chances as you can to give you what you want.

Anyway, the fun part. Plans for the next two months: live cheap, travel, network, writing, photography, exploring, side goals. I’d love to hear about other stories of people who have done this.@ gregkamradt

March 19th, 2014 3:24pm