Young Bankers Fed Up With 90-Hour Weeks Move to Startups

It was a Friday in the fall of 2004 and Umber Ahmad had been invited to read a poem at the wedding of one of her closest friends. She was planning to catch a 7 p.m. flight from New York to Toronto when a vice president at Morgan Stanley called her in. The client in a big merger deal needed work done over the weekend. A mergers and acquisitions specialist, Ahmad had no choice. She canceled the flight and started revising her analysis of the deal, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its June issue.

The missed wedding was just one of dozens of dinners, family get-togethers and other events that Ahmad did not attend as she worked 70- and 80-hour weeks as a young associate at Morgan Stanley and later as a vice president at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Ahmad, the Michigan-born daughter of a Pakistani doctor who taught at Harvard Medical School, likens the long hours and all-nighters to serving in the army.