bobtheflob
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You should be a little more subtle than this guy:
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/the-resume-mocked-round-the-world-vayner-speaks/
With his name and image appearing on the “Today” show, in The New York Post and all over the Web site Gawker, Aleksey Vayner may be the most famous investment-banking job applicant in recent memory.
But he says his new celebrity is less blessing than curse.
“This has been an extremely stressful time,” Mr. Vayner, a senior at Yale University, told DealBook over steak in a northern New Jersey restaurant Thursday.
It was his first face-to-face meeting with a reporter since an 11-page application and elaborate video clip that he submitted to securities firm UBS showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread to every corner of the Internet. The clip, staged to look like a job interview spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner’s athletic prowess, flooded e-mail inboxes across Wall Street and eventually appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube. And the overwhelming reaction was mocking laughter.
Mr. Vayner is not amused. Instead, he said he feels like a victim. The job materials that were leaked and posted for public view included detailed information about him that allowed strangers to scrutinize and harass him, he said. His e-mail inbox quickly filled up, with most of the messages deriding him and, in certain cases, threatening him. Since the video surfaced on the Internet, Mr. Vayner said he has deleted at least 2,000 pieces of e-mail.
It was Mr. Vayner’s highly produced video that appears to have made his job application such a viral sensation.
A Zen-like koan — “Impossible is nothing” — introduces the seven-minute clip, which shows Mr. Vayner performing various feats of physical strength and skill, interspersed with inspirational maxims. Viewers are presented with images of Mr. Vayner bench-pressing weights (a caption suggests it is 495 pounds), playing tennis (firing off what is said to be a 140 mile-per-hour serve) and performing martial arts (he breaks seven bricks with his palm).
The tone of the video seems too serious to be parody, yet too over-the-top to be credible. After sharing the clip, fellow students at Yale began to share their favorite Aleksey-style tall tales, notably involving reminiscences of bare-handed killings and nuclear waste.
And then there were Mr. Vayner’s claims about running a charity, the legitimacy of which is now in question.
In person, Mr. Vayner is much as he appears in the video. Tall, with gelled-back hair and a navy pinstriped suit, Mr. Vayner — along with his sister, Tamara, and his lawyer, Christian P. Stueben — met with DealBook on Thursday afternoon. Throughout the interview, Mr. Vayner was reserved, speaking deliberately, sometimes peering at what appeared to be notes in his Yale University portfolio.
Mr. Vayner, 23, said he has been interested in finance since he was 12 years old, when he was creating financial data models. So Mr. Vayner, who is registered in Yale’s class of 2008, decided a few weeks ago to look for a job at a Wall Street firm. He thought that making a video would help him stand out in the often cutthroat competition for investment-banking positions. By emphasizing his various athletic pursuits, which he listed as including body sculpting, weightlifting and Tai Chi, as well as brief stints on Yale’s polo and varsity tennis teams, Mr. Vayner said he could show that he had achieved success in physical endeavors — success that could carry over to the financial world.
“I felt demonstrating competency in athletics is a good way to stand out, because the same characteristics are the same in business,” said Mr. Vayner, who legally changed his name from Aleksey Garber when he was 18. “The need to set and achieve goals, to have the dedication and competitive drive that’s required in business success.”
Despite all the mockery that the video has inspired, he still speaks proudly of his athleticism. Nearly all the feats in the video are his, he said, and they are real. (The only doubt in his mind lies in the skiing segment, which he says is probably him.) When asked about a posting Mr. Vayner had placed on the classifieds site Craigslist soliciting skiing videos — a posting that was reproduced on a blog that questioned whether the skier was him — Mr. Vayner said he was simply looking for the cameramen who shot his ski-jump efforts.
Much of the other Internet chatter about him, mentioning studies in Tibet under the Dalai Lama and a “Blood Sport”-type tournament in Thailand, is false, he said. Such claims stem from what he described as a satirical article in Yale’s tabloid, the Rumpus, detailing outsized claims from him when he was still a pre-freshman. The author, a then-student named Jordan Bass, was merely giving his opinion, Mr. Vayner said, and did not directly interview him for the article. In a piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine, though, Mr. Bass said that he was merely reiterating what Mr. Vayner had told him.
In the end, though Mr. Vayner said he is less concerned about the mockery — “One mark of success is the ability to handle mass amounts of criticism,” he said — than about what appears to have been a leak of his application materials from UBS. Mr. Vayner and his lawyer, Mr. Stueben, confirmed that they are exploring legal options against the investment banks to which he sent the application.
A UBS spokesman said in a statement: “As a firm, UBS obviously respects the privacy of applicants’ correspondences and does not circulate job applications and resumes to the public. To the extent that any policy was breached, it will be dealt with appropriately.”
However the job materials landed on the Internet, the scrutiny has raised several questions about Mr. Vayner’s claims.
On Wednesday, the blog IvyGate posted excerpts from Mr. Vayner’s self-published book, “Women’s Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust,” which until recently was available on the Web site of Lulu Press. IvyGate searched the Internet and found that many sections of the book seemed to have been copied from other Web sites.
Asked about the similarities, Mr. Vayner said Thursday that the text on Lulu’s Web site was a “pre-publication copy” based on an earlier draft. The final version was worded more carefully, he said.
On his resume, Mr. Vayner cites his experience as an investment adviser at a firm called Vayner Capital Management and his charity work at an organization called Youth Empowerment Strategies, of which he was the founder and chief executive. Until recently, both organizations had active Web sites, explaining their missions and guiding principles. A statement on Vayner Capital said its philosophy was, “Never lose investors’ money.” Youth Empowerment Strategies featured a four-star banner said to be from Charity Navigator, an evaluator of nonprofit charitable groups.
Asked about Youth Empowerment Strategies, however, a representative of Charity Navigator said it had not the group a coveted four-star rating. Instead, it had referred Mr. Vayner’s organization to the New York attorney general’s office, saying it should be investigated for potentially posing as a fraudulent charity.
Mr. Vayner said Thursday that he had filed the necessary paperwork for the charity in August. Furthermore, he said that he had outsourced the design of his charity’s Web site to companies in India and Pakistan and had no role in placing the Charity Navigator banner on it. Mr. Vayner told a reporter that he had the banner taken down immediately when he learned that the group had disclaimed the banner, some time around Sept. 15. When a reporter then told Mr. Vayner that the banner was still on the site as of last week, Mr. Vayner clarified that he had sent notification to take down the banner.
Mr. Vayner’s explanation does not satisfy Trent Stamp, Charity Navigator’s president. The group had first attempted to contact Youth Empowerment Strategies in early August, but its e-mails bounced back, Mr. Stamp told DealBook. After learning Mr. Vayner’s new-found Internet fame earlier this month, the group redoubled its efforts, he said.
“I’m not on the governing board of Yale, but it seems to me that someone who committed massive charity fraud with intent to deceive people shouldn’t be able to receive an Ivy League degree,” Mr. Stamp told DealBook.
A Yale spokeswoman declined to comment.
Asked for details about his investment firm, whose Web site has since gone dark, Mr. Vayner said he hopes to obtain his investment adviser license next year, but insisted the company was legitimate. He also stood by Vayner Capital’s stated mission of never losing money. It was not a promise, he said, but merely a philosophical polestar.
“I have two rules,” he said. “One, I will never lose your money. And two, when in doubt, refer to rule No. 1.”
For now, Mr. Vayner said he is camping out at his mother’s residence in Manhattan, having taken a short leave of absence from Yale when his video hit the Internet. He said he may have lost his chance to work on Wall Street, and added that he may not succeed in securing a financial job at all.
Real estate development is an option, he said, but for now his future is unclear.
In the meantime, he plans on taking his midterm examinations next week.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/the-resume-mocked-round-the-world-vayner-speaks/
With his name and image appearing on the “Today” show, in The New York Post and all over the Web site Gawker, Aleksey Vayner may be the most famous investment-banking job applicant in recent memory.
But he says his new celebrity is less blessing than curse.
“This has been an extremely stressful time,” Mr. Vayner, a senior at Yale University, told DealBook over steak in a northern New Jersey restaurant Thursday.
It was his first face-to-face meeting with a reporter since an 11-page application and elaborate video clip that he submitted to securities firm UBS showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread to every corner of the Internet. The clip, staged to look like a job interview spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner’s athletic prowess, flooded e-mail inboxes across Wall Street and eventually appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube. And the overwhelming reaction was mocking laughter.
Mr. Vayner is not amused. Instead, he said he feels like a victim. The job materials that were leaked and posted for public view included detailed information about him that allowed strangers to scrutinize and harass him, he said. His e-mail inbox quickly filled up, with most of the messages deriding him and, in certain cases, threatening him. Since the video surfaced on the Internet, Mr. Vayner said he has deleted at least 2,000 pieces of e-mail.
It was Mr. Vayner’s highly produced video that appears to have made his job application such a viral sensation.
A Zen-like koan — “Impossible is nothing” — introduces the seven-minute clip, which shows Mr. Vayner performing various feats of physical strength and skill, interspersed with inspirational maxims. Viewers are presented with images of Mr. Vayner bench-pressing weights (a caption suggests it is 495 pounds), playing tennis (firing off what is said to be a 140 mile-per-hour serve) and performing martial arts (he breaks seven bricks with his palm).
The tone of the video seems too serious to be parody, yet too over-the-top to be credible. After sharing the clip, fellow students at Yale began to share their favorite Aleksey-style tall tales, notably involving reminiscences of bare-handed killings and nuclear waste.
And then there were Mr. Vayner’s claims about running a charity, the legitimacy of which is now in question.
In person, Mr. Vayner is much as he appears in the video. Tall, with gelled-back hair and a navy pinstriped suit, Mr. Vayner — along with his sister, Tamara, and his lawyer, Christian P. Stueben — met with DealBook on Thursday afternoon. Throughout the interview, Mr. Vayner was reserved, speaking deliberately, sometimes peering at what appeared to be notes in his Yale University portfolio.
Mr. Vayner, 23, said he has been interested in finance since he was 12 years old, when he was creating financial data models. So Mr. Vayner, who is registered in Yale’s class of 2008, decided a few weeks ago to look for a job at a Wall Street firm. He thought that making a video would help him stand out in the often cutthroat competition for investment-banking positions. By emphasizing his various athletic pursuits, which he listed as including body sculpting, weightlifting and Tai Chi, as well as brief stints on Yale’s polo and varsity tennis teams, Mr. Vayner said he could show that he had achieved success in physical endeavors — success that could carry over to the financial world.
“I felt demonstrating competency in athletics is a good way to stand out, because the same characteristics are the same in business,” said Mr. Vayner, who legally changed his name from Aleksey Garber when he was 18. “The need to set and achieve goals, to have the dedication and competitive drive that’s required in business success.”
Despite all the mockery that the video has inspired, he still speaks proudly of his athleticism. Nearly all the feats in the video are his, he said, and they are real. (The only doubt in his mind lies in the skiing segment, which he says is probably him.) When asked about a posting Mr. Vayner had placed on the classifieds site Craigslist soliciting skiing videos — a posting that was reproduced on a blog that questioned whether the skier was him — Mr. Vayner said he was simply looking for the cameramen who shot his ski-jump efforts.
Much of the other Internet chatter about him, mentioning studies in Tibet under the Dalai Lama and a “Blood Sport”-type tournament in Thailand, is false, he said. Such claims stem from what he described as a satirical article in Yale’s tabloid, the Rumpus, detailing outsized claims from him when he was still a pre-freshman. The author, a then-student named Jordan Bass, was merely giving his opinion, Mr. Vayner said, and did not directly interview him for the article. In a piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine, though, Mr. Bass said that he was merely reiterating what Mr. Vayner had told him.
In the end, though Mr. Vayner said he is less concerned about the mockery — “One mark of success is the ability to handle mass amounts of criticism,” he said — than about what appears to have been a leak of his application materials from UBS. Mr. Vayner and his lawyer, Mr. Stueben, confirmed that they are exploring legal options against the investment banks to which he sent the application.
A UBS spokesman said in a statement: “As a firm, UBS obviously respects the privacy of applicants’ correspondences and does not circulate job applications and resumes to the public. To the extent that any policy was breached, it will be dealt with appropriately.”
However the job materials landed on the Internet, the scrutiny has raised several questions about Mr. Vayner’s claims.
On Wednesday, the blog IvyGate posted excerpts from Mr. Vayner’s self-published book, “Women’s Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust,” which until recently was available on the Web site of Lulu Press. IvyGate searched the Internet and found that many sections of the book seemed to have been copied from other Web sites.
Asked about the similarities, Mr. Vayner said Thursday that the text on Lulu’s Web site was a “pre-publication copy” based on an earlier draft. The final version was worded more carefully, he said.
On his resume, Mr. Vayner cites his experience as an investment adviser at a firm called Vayner Capital Management and his charity work at an organization called Youth Empowerment Strategies, of which he was the founder and chief executive. Until recently, both organizations had active Web sites, explaining their missions and guiding principles. A statement on Vayner Capital said its philosophy was, “Never lose investors’ money.” Youth Empowerment Strategies featured a four-star banner said to be from Charity Navigator, an evaluator of nonprofit charitable groups.
Asked about Youth Empowerment Strategies, however, a representative of Charity Navigator said it had not the group a coveted four-star rating. Instead, it had referred Mr. Vayner’s organization to the New York attorney general’s office, saying it should be investigated for potentially posing as a fraudulent charity.
Mr. Vayner said Thursday that he had filed the necessary paperwork for the charity in August. Furthermore, he said that he had outsourced the design of his charity’s Web site to companies in India and Pakistan and had no role in placing the Charity Navigator banner on it. Mr. Vayner told a reporter that he had the banner taken down immediately when he learned that the group had disclaimed the banner, some time around Sept. 15. When a reporter then told Mr. Vayner that the banner was still on the site as of last week, Mr. Vayner clarified that he had sent notification to take down the banner.
Mr. Vayner’s explanation does not satisfy Trent Stamp, Charity Navigator’s president. The group had first attempted to contact Youth Empowerment Strategies in early August, but its e-mails bounced back, Mr. Stamp told DealBook. After learning Mr. Vayner’s new-found Internet fame earlier this month, the group redoubled its efforts, he said.
“I’m not on the governing board of Yale, but it seems to me that someone who committed massive charity fraud with intent to deceive people shouldn’t be able to receive an Ivy League degree,” Mr. Stamp told DealBook.
A Yale spokeswoman declined to comment.
Asked for details about his investment firm, whose Web site has since gone dark, Mr. Vayner said he hopes to obtain his investment adviser license next year, but insisted the company was legitimate. He also stood by Vayner Capital’s stated mission of never losing money. It was not a promise, he said, but merely a philosophical polestar.
“I have two rules,” he said. “One, I will never lose your money. And two, when in doubt, refer to rule No. 1.”
For now, Mr. Vayner said he is camping out at his mother’s residence in Manhattan, having taken a short leave of absence from Yale when his video hit the Internet. He said he may have lost his chance to work on Wall Street, and added that he may not succeed in securing a financial job at all.
Real estate development is an option, he said, but for now his future is unclear.
In the meantime, he plans on taking his midterm examinations next week.
