BankersBall chats with Amit Chatwani of Leveraged Sellout on banking and his new book, Damn, It Feels Good To Be a Banker.

Q: So I think by now your readers know you that your blog, LeveragedSellout, is satire. But just for clarification — have you ever worked at a bank?
A: No. I have, however, been aggressively pursuing several HCM ladies at Goldman and have been blasting my resume to their TMT group daily. I’ve got a lot of people going to bat for me there, and I think this book can only help my chances.

Q: What percentage of people would you say take your blog seriously — you know, think it’s “for real”?
A: Leveraged Sell-Out is as real as it gets.

Q: I’m sure some people are going to be confused and try to send love/hate mail to Logan, the protagonist of Damn, It Feels Good. How far have you gone in creating this persona? Is there a Logan profile page on Facebook or what?
A: Logan is more of a myth, a concept that people might know is far-fetched but really want to believe exists. Like a hot banker chick, for example.

Q: And who’s the guy on the cover?
A: That’s Ryan Gosling. I wanted to capture that The Notebook aspect of finance.

Q: So what do you do for a living?
A: I’ll tell you what I tell girls out at bars: “I’m independently wealthy.”

Q: Your bio on Damn, If Feels Good says that you lived with nine investment bankers. Was that all at one time? And what would motivate someone to do that?
A: 4 were in my man-pad and 5 more were upstairs. I think we got like 8 Bergdorf Catalogs, and we held modeling competitions on our 60″. It was glorious. If you go to a top-tier school and move to New York with people from college, I’d say it’s nearly impossible not to live with all bankers.

Q: I guess that means you’re friends with investment bankers.
A: Most of my friends are on the buy side now, but yes, I only surround myself with prestigious people.

Q: Were they the primary source material for your blog? How did you get into writing about i-bankers? Was there a particular night, say when you were going “models n bottles” with your nine banker pals, where you just had it?
A: There is a joke cover letter to Lehman Brothers on Leveraged Sell-Out, which I actually sent to them during school; it got forwarded around. I didn’t think about writing anything in the space again until one night, three of us managed to spend over $1k at The Patriot, an insanely cheap dive bar in fake-TriBeCa. I woke up on the floor with a Wall Street Journal plastered to my face and saw my roommate, who had drank even more than I had, in full business professional attire, eating grapes and screaming at some corporate lawyer on the phone. At that moment, I thought: “there’s something here.”

I wrote the article Bonus Season, it got some traction, and so I continued.

Q: We enjoyed the drawings in the book. Especially the Investment Banking Hierarchy (p 21) and the Deal Trophy (p 87). Who was behind that?
A: The artist is a New Yorker cartoonist, but she prefers not to have her name associated with the book. I guess New Yorker readers must find finance offensive.

Q: Will we ever know what you really think about investment bankers?
A: …

Q: The blog and book are by LSO. There’s a credit to Amit Chatwani, the “Indian drone” but your name is definitely not splashed over the book. Is there a reason behind the anonymity?
A: Still hoping to land that Associate position at TPG one day, you know?

Q: What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve heard an investment banker say or do in real-life?
A: It was 2am on a Tuesday, I believe, and I called up one of my friends at work. All I heard was the rapid sound of keyboard clicking and his VP screaming at him. “What are you doing?” I asked. He was panting, but his hushed response summed up Banking for me. He said: “Just saving lives, bro. Saving lives.”

Q: Will you be continuing to write about the finance community?
A: I don’t write about the finance community, I write about life. But yes, I will be still writing Leveraged Sell-Out and am currently refining some loglines for films/TV shows set in the backdrop of Banking. I’m thinking something like: “Blow 2: Investment Banker loses his job during the credit crunch and turns to dealing cocaine” or “The (Murray) Hills: Three finance chicks become interns at People’s Revolution.” I see a lot of potential here.

Q: Thanks for the interview. Any thoughts to your fan boys & girls?
A: I’d like to thank them, not for reading my book or website, but for making the world a better place to live.