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Michael Kollar now runs his own investment fund. However, he began his career at the epicenter of global financial events. As a young Slovak, he joined a New York investment bank at a time when markets were in deep crisis and competition was brutal. In an environment where layoffs were decided daily and working hours were counted in the dozens per week, he learned that only those who are extremely focused, resilient, and willing to work harder than others will survive.

Instead of clichés about Wall Street, however, Michael speaks matter-of-factly, honestly, and with a detachment that only comes after years. He does not sell illusions or himself. He talks about the imposter syndrome, about decisions worth hundreds of millions, and about the fact that success often depends more on luck than on plans. He recalls how, during the crisis, he watched the company lay off a third of its employees, and at the same time describes moments that were nevertheless humanly powerful. In this interview, you will learn how the real world of finance works behind closed doors in skyscrapers, what a man who lived there for seventeen years took away from it, and why he ended up being the last of the 53 colleagues he once started with.

Do you remember your very first day in the office in Manhattan? What went through your mind then?

I remember it very clearly. There are only a few days like that in a person's life, and they will never fade from memory. You are sitting on the twentieth floor of a New York skyscraper with a view of Manhattan, surrounded by your peers from Harvard and Stanford, and the entire environment is pulsating with dynamics that sometimes seem aggressive. At that moment, the imposter syndrome comes into full force. You ask yourself if you are just dreaming or if you have found yourself there by mistake. You wonder if you will even be able to do it and what will be expected of you.

It didn't help that when I applied for the job, our bank's stock was trading at less than a hundred dollars. A year after I joined, it was around fifteen dollars. We wouldn't be surprised if the bank declared bankruptcy. I started in 2008, during the deepest financial crisis, and it wasn't easy mentally. During my first year, the company laid off more than thirty percent of its employees. Every day I wondered how many days I had left.
Still, I'm grateful for this experience. It taught me to focus only on what I can actually control. There's no point in stressing about whether a bank will fail like Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns. I can't control that. All you can do is put your head down, roll up your sleeves, and work. That's the only thing in your hands that can protect you from being caught in the next wave of layoffs. It's cruel, but it's reality.

Do you remember the moment when you first felt that work could break you?

I never saw it that way. There were too many factors that could have ended my career through no fault of my own. A financial crisis, intense competition from colleagues, a bank failure, a health problem that would have prevented me from working ninety to a hundred hours a week. I told myself that this experience could end at any time without my doing anything, so I wouldn't leave voluntarily. I would stick around as long as I could.

Since childhood, I have been stubborn and went after my own things. When you fight for something for years, there is no reason to give up. Neither the fast pace of work, nor a demanding boss, nor fatigue discouraged me. In my last year of university, I went through a hundred interviews and only one company made me an offer. In times of crisis, such an opportunity is not to be missed.

Have you also experienced situations that were humanly powerful or moving?

Investment banking is a world of money, buying and selling companies, closing deals. It would be naive to pretend that anyone does it for noble reasons. People there want to work with motivated and intelligent colleagues, learn quickly, grow, and make good money in the long run.

But at the same time, you spend a huge amount of time in a small team. Strong bonds are inevitably formed. I still keep in touch with colleagues I worked with seventeen years ago. In large transactions that last two or three years, closing a deal can be a really emotional moment. It's a feeling of victory and satisfaction. I wouldn't compare it to an athlete on the podium, that would be disparaging, but the long journey and the enormous effort are similar in nature.

If you had to compare life on Wall Street to a movie or metaphor, what would it be?

Most people expect me to mention movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or The Big Short. I compare it more to the slow TV genre that Norwegian television made famous. For example, a seven-hour train ride from Bergen to Oslo. Not because the work is boring. More because it's a marathon.

Day after day, hour after hour, you analyze financial statements, create models, and monitor the markets. Nothing dramatic happens on the outside. Only after a year of work does the moment come when the transaction is closed and the train reaches its destination. When you realize that you still have many hours ahead of you, you think about where you made a mistake and what you could have done differently.

Was the Friday night work restriction a genuine effort to change company culture?

I think it was a sincere effort to change something. The system was unsustainable. There were several cases where analysts died after several days without sleep. That was the moment when it became clear that action had to be taken. Motivation and high commitment are one thing. But when it threatens health or life, the line has been crossed.

It wasn't written in our rules, but we very rarely worked after 6pm on Fridays. Everyone wanted to catch their breath for at least a few hours, go for a workout, or meet up with friends before returning to the office on Saturday morning.

Today, I don't have that pace anymore. I'm building my own investment fund, which requires intense attention, but every decision carries more weight. A better balance between work and rest allows me to perform at my best.

What was the biggest myth you thought about Wall Street before joining, and how quickly was it dispelled?

From movies and the media, I had the idea that every second person there was high on cocaine and various other narcotics or stimulants. However, the opposite was true. Most people, at least in my environment, tried to really take care of their health - precisely to cope with the enormous workload. When it was even slightly possible, they followed a sleep schedule, exercised a lot and tried to eat healthily. It was a little worse with alcohol, but I don't think that was specific to Wall Street. Most of us were between twenty and thirty years old and, unfortunately, such a lifestyle simply belongs to that age. The topic of longevity and sustainable living was not discussed as intensively back then as it is today .

At what point did you say to yourself: "This is no longer sustainable, I have to change something"?

This moment never happened to me. As you move up the corporate ladder, become more senior and have your own team, the working hours gradually decrease. But at the same time, you get more and more responsibility, so while you spend less time physically in the office, the intensity and stress increase.

I didn’t leave New York because I thought I had had enough. Quite the opposite – after five years I had planned to stay for another two or three years. But an opportunity arose to move from investment banking to asset management and mutual fund management in London. I decided to take it and moved to London, where I continued with the same firm for another seven years.

But my story is more the exception than the rule. In 2008, we started out as 53 analysts in New York. When I left for London five years later, there were only six of us left. And when I finally left the firm after 17 years, I was the very last of the original 53 graduates.

What work habits from Wall Street do you still keep today – and conversely, what did you have to consciously unlearn?

Definitely work ethic. I have no problem working all day from morning to night, eating lunch at the computer and – apart from short hygiene breaks – not being disturbed by anything or anyone for even ten minutes. The term procrastination doesn't mean much to me and I honestly don't understand how anyone can fight it.

I also learned to focus only on the things I can control. I don't spend time thinking about factors I can't influence. I can detach myself from the idea that everything has to depend only on me. For example, when I applied to universities in the US, I didn't set a specific school as my goal. I told myself that I would devote four hours of intensive work a day to it and accept the result as it comes. Thanks to this, I didn't have to deal with whether it turned out better or worse than I expected. I put my best into it - and I didn't deal with the rest.

For many years, I have had bad habits that have kept me constantly optimizing and streamlining everything around me. I recently turned forty, and I'm only now learning to enjoy the time that isn't used 100 percent. It's not that I'm a workaholic who dedicates my life to work alone - I've traveled a lot, visited over 70 countries, pursued hobbies, and I think I've spent more time with friends and family than most people. But everything had to be efficient. I'm traveling? I want to see as much as possible. I'm with friends? I have to take away as many experiences as possible.

Today I can enjoy moments "just like that". Being with family, friends or by myself without pressure and without a goal. Because that's important too - especially if you want to live a balanced life.

You were already in negotiations with company directors before your 25th birthday. How does your view of authority change when you are suddenly the one making the decisions?

In situations like these, you realize that we are all just people made of flesh and blood. Even though we try to do our jobs the best we can, we make mistakes – and sometimes we fail completely. I have come to understand that the greatest authority should not be the one with the most experience, let alone the oldest. Age is just a number. The authority should be the person who knows how to ask the right questions, analyze the situation quickly and accurately, uses common sense, logic and simply – knows how to think.

Today, we have 99% of the world's information available in our pocket. The key is knowing where to look, how to think about it, and how to connect the dots. When I face a new challenge today that I don't know, I know that I will never be an expert on a given topic. But I also know that I can quickly learn the key 20% of knowledge that will allow me to understand 80% of the issue. I respect authority, but not as uncritically as I did at the beginning of my career. What is more important is the ability to understand and connect facts to a broader context.

Many people think Wall Street is all about Excel spreadsheets and stressful conference calls. What was your typical day like when you were “at full speed”?

You are not far from the truth. The working day really consisted of Excel and conference calls – easily 70 to 80%. To this we must add PowerPoint and creating presentations – either for clients, where we summarized our analyses, or for internal purposes, mainly for bank management decision-making. Also included were meetings with clients, researching companies and industries, monitoring events on financial markets and, of course, a lot of email communication.

We spent about 80% of our time at the computer, the rest was meetings and in-person or video meetings. We almost always ate lunch at the computer. In five years in New York, I never saw colleagues sit down for an hour at a restaurant – maybe on special occasions, like a big birthday. If the day was slower, someone would go for a 30-minute run in Central Park and pick up lunch on the way back, which they ate at the computer again.

At nine or ten o'clock in the evening, we sometimes found fifteen minutes to play table tennis, when there was already too much to do. That is, until the company hired a vice chairman from the bankrupt Lehman Brothers. As a traditional banker, he considered the ping-pong table inappropriate and had it removed. At that point, all we really had left was Excel...

Looking back, does this experience seem like something that took away a part of your youth, or do you consider it the most valuable school of life?

Definitely the latter. Those who didn’t know exactly what I did and what the job required often asked me: “Is it really worth it?” My answer was always: “100%.” I never felt like my job robbed me of my youth or turned me into a lifeless workaholic. The environment was full of inspiring, intelligent, hard-working people who were going after their own things. It was precisely because the job demanded so much from us that we learned how to get something out of life. The motto “work hard, play hard” may sound like a cliché, but we lived it literally.

It was no problem for us to board a plane to the Caribbean on Friday night at 9:00 after work, lie on the beach during the weekend, and solve urgent tasks for 3-4 hours a day, go to local bars on Sunday night, go straight to the airport from there and land back at JFK at 6:00 in the morning. At 8:30 we were back in the office in our ties. Or leave work "early", let's say at 10:00 in the evening, and go for a drink with friends. I lived a three-minute walk from work near Central Park, so I set my alarm for eight in the morning and was up by eight-thirty.

Yes, it was physically and mentally demanding. But would it rob me of my youth? Quite the opposite. I had extremely eventful years and when I left for London at the age of 27, I felt that I had experiences behind me – both work and life – that had taken me much further than if I had had a “normal” five-year life in the 9:00-17:00 regime.

If you were to advise a 22-year-old Slovak today who got an offer at an investment bank in New York - what would be the one piece of advice you would give him?

When people ask me for advice – career or life – they usually expect a miraculous recipe for success. But there is no such thing. Each of us already knows the recipe. They don't have to hear it from me or anyone else. I'll sum it up in three letters – BTS. Not after the Korean boy band, but after the code of our airport in Bratislava: Blood, Tears, Sweat. Blood, tears and sweat. That's the whole secret. You just have to work at it – and success will come by itself in time. The king of world football, Lionel Messi, put it best: "It took me seventeen years to become an overnight success."

But you'll also need a huge dose of luck in addition to hard work. I personally attribute where I am today to luck much more than hard work, talent, or intelligence. In 2008, during the worst financial crisis, I went on over a hundred job interviews. The result? One single offer. And the fact that I got it was a lucky coincidence. Everyone will work hard in this environment – and even the most talented of them will only succeed if they have the right cards.

The average person thinks that working on Wall Street will secure you for life. Is that true?

It depends on what you mean by “secure.” If you mean a house, a car lease, and three meals a day, then yes—four or five years on Wall Street can really allow you to live off interest. It won’t be a secret to you—ChatGPT will tell you—that 22-year-old Wall Street analysts today can earn well over $200,000 a year, including bonuses. Of course, it was less in my day—inflation has taken its toll since then.

But honestly: I haven't met anyone who went into investment banking just for the salary in the first few years. Yes, earning such amounts at a young age is not bad, but it's not about the money. It's about the opportunities that open up to you after a few years in this industry. They have a much higher value - both financial and non-financial. If you get to Wall Street at 22, you definitely don't have the mentality of someone who puts their feet up on the table after four years and lives off the interest. Such a person wants to grow, build, learn. After all, even billionaires - who have assets on a completely different level than investment bankers - often work even harder. Not because they have to. But because they want to.