Book Review: Straight to Hell

Oliver Thylmann
Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts
2 min readAug 30, 2019

It was that time of year again, holidays, beach, sun, and I chose to finish some books. One of them was Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals, a book on the tales of big banking and I do love these kinds of books. Admittedly, it is a bit like reading tabloid news in this case, but it was still fun.

It’s written by John LeFevre who has started it all with registering a Twitter account called GSElevator, an account built by telling the tales out of the Goldman Sachs Elevator.

Everyone else doesn’t get it: the lifestyle, the long hours and canceled plans, the binge drinking, and the nihilistic sense of humor. I don’t think any of them have ever woken up from a blackout on a subway car and gone direct to office still wearing last night’s tuxedo, only to be showered with praise. How could they understand? And they certainly don’t have the disposable income — although it doesn’t always feel limitless at the rate I spend it.

Even if the stories are only 50% true, they are so over the top, it is mind boggling.

Banking has given me a very distorted view of money, priorities, and what I deserve or feel that I am entitled to. Despite my paycheck, I feel poor. This detached sense of reality, combined with my increasingly selective social circles and a blindingly aspirational culture, has created a lifestyle as precarious as any middle-class one. The numbers are just bigger.

The money that is flowing there is ludicrous and the way they are just pushing deals down the pipe because they need to be winning against the other bank, tells you that this entire market is somehow wrong. At the same time, their services are needed.

And John is doing a good job in walking that tight rope between entertaining over the top stories …

I realized a very important thing that had eluded me during my exploratory trip a few months prior: that Lipton was leaving Hong Kong, not because of the opportunity in New York, but because he had a coke problem and his wife was threatening to divorce him. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t moving here with a wife or a coke problem. [ … ] Here I am, locked in a stranger’s bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, sweat pouring down my face, white powder all over my nose, and my limp cock in my hand. I’ve been in Asia for all of eight weeks.

… and showing what it is like to work in international banking, and how the processes work, banks interact, clients demand, real people work on hundreds of millions of dollar deals.

Entertaining book.

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Oliver Thylmann
Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Father, Serial Entrepreneur, Developer Whisperer and currently Co-Founder @giantswarm and Co-Host of the Crypto Nerd Show Podcast