Hedge fund founder: Goldman Sachs & fatherhood were my two craziest periods

Getting into Goldman Sachs isn't easy, and working there can be quite the challenge, too. In a recent podcast, Cliff Asness, founder of AQR Capital Management and a former MD at Goldman, said the period he joined was one of the most intense of his life.

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Asness described his first year at Goldman Sachs in 1992 as "the busiest I've ever been." He was "supposed to do analytics," but due to the rapidly expanding nature of the business at the time, found himself "on the phones trading... that was a different experience than I was expecting." The quant group that Asness first joined initially had "very little mandate" and he says they initially acted as "door-to-door quants."

What made the period particularly difficult, however, was that he was "writing [his] dissertation at night." He said, "thank god I was in my 20s, I could not do that today."

The other most intense period of Asness' life was when he became a father of four in the space of two years. While in his role at AQR, he and his wife had "two sets of twins, born a year and a half apart." He says both were "crazy periods" with a lot of late nights, but they were very different still; "feeding children is not quite the same as banging out a dissertation."

A decidedly less intense period of Asness' life was high-school. He says he was an underachiever who would repeatedly say "when it really counts, I'll turn it up." Teachers would say "he has so much potential, but he's just not living up to it," and his father called him "aimless." Going to university resulted in a "three months transition to extremely type A."

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