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Erik Trautman

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
-- Pablo Picasso

What Comes Next

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So what comes next? I've been asked that a lot lately. Well, the reality is that I'm soon out of the job and somewhere down the road I'll need to make an income. Fortunately, part of the tradeoff for having invested 5 years in my (former) career is that I've at least given myself some runway to work with before things become tight. I intend to use that freedom to accomplish two goals: A) travel the country and, B) prepare myself for the next phase.

To address the first, I'll be taking a few months off to hop on my motorcycle and see what the US has to offer. I've seen a good bit of Europe and I'm not quite ready for Asia. What I really want to do is confirm my suspicions that this is indeed the most beautiful country on earth. If I manage to take some interesting pictures and meet interesting people along the way, I think I can live with that too. It's long been a dream of mine and I cannot give up the opportunity to live it.

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Austin Startup Weekend

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Day 1

On a sunny Friday afternoon in late March I threw my suitcase and a bicycle into my trunk and trekked the 3 hours to Austin for an event called Startup Weekend. I'd heard about it in Houston just a couple weeks too late but everyone I spoke with evangelized the experience so I vowed to catch the next one I could. I didn't really have a clue what to expect, but I came with an open mind and a lot of curiosity. The idea of a whole weekend focused intensely on startups was just what the doctor ordered after I quit my job to dive into that world.

I was one of the first to arrive at the HubAustin Coworking space a few miles south of downtown and got the chance to see all the participants as they pulled in to register. There was the bubbly businesswoman from Dallas with a big Texas smile, the two local undergrads hungry to make an impact, a former salesman from Louisiana who'd packed up his car for a one-way trip and the SW veteran who'd flown in from Oklahoma for his fourth try. They came wearing everything from the flip-flops and shorts typical of Austin to the blazers and slacks of more traditional business professionals. The only common theme was a certain nervous excitement and contagious energy.

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Today I Quit My Job

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Today I quit my job. Well, not exactly... I gave my notice and set the clock ticking on my extrication from this industry. Energy has been my home for the five years since I graduated Penn with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and an ambition to trade millions of dollars of something on the world markets.

I landed out of school in the Bank of America analyst training program in time to catch the crest of the market wave just before it broke. My analyst class was the largest in the bank's history (500+), the stock was trading around $53, and the plans were on the table for the glorious new Bank of America tower overlooking Bryant Park in New York. There were cracks already -- I remember rotating through the Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBS) desk for a week and having NOTHING to do while everyone around sort of shambled by like zombies. A year and a half later the world had changed "“ Lehman and Bear were gone and the integration with Merrill Lynch meant that our tiny commodities team in that brand-new-but-nearly-empty tower in New York was redundant.

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