Career path: Achieving your goal by 30

Clare Flynn is President of Beauchamp Financial Technology, a provider of portfolio management and trading software. An American, she worked as an intern on Wall Street at 18, became a fund manager in the City of London at 21, ran her own hedge fund at 27 and retired from managing money at 30. She says she always wanted to be able to tell an interesting life story.

My interest in the financial markets goes back a long way. When I was a kid, my father used to joke I wouldn't get my school tuition fees paid unless his investments performed well. That gave me a great incentive to look at the financial pages: I didn't want to be pulled out mid-term.

It was at boarding school in New Hampshire, at Phillips Exeter Academy, that I took my first economics course and learned the concept of 'buy low, sell high.' It was at that point that I decided that I wanted to work on Wall Street.

New York's Columbia University is only a subway ride away from Wall Street, so applying there seemed a good bet. I figured I could get some work experience in investment banks while I was completing my course.

During the summer vacations I worked in asset management, investment banking and equity research. It was the early 1990s and internships in investment banks were less established than now, so it was largely a question of knocking on doors and asking my dad's friends if they would hire me.

The work was not exactly high-level. I literally started in the mailroom, stuffing unit trust prospectuses in envelopes. I was over the moon when I got promoted to answering the investor enquiries line. But I was of the first generation of students to grow up with their own personal computers, and in era when analysts could barely use Excel properly, that made me increasingly valuable.

I spent the third year of my degree course at the London School of Economics. When I graduated a year later, I already knew I wanted to be a fund manager. I also knew that the route into fund management was long.

It typically involved joining a slave labour programme as a corporate finance trainee at an investment bank, leaving to study an MBA, coming back to work as a buyside analyst at somewhere like Fidelity, and becoming a fund manager a decade later. I didn't want to do that. I wasn't keen on hanging out for years trying to get where I wanted to go.

I did a few interviews with Wall Street banks, but also tried an alternative route. I asked my school in New Hampshire for a list of all their alumni in London. I wrote to all the bankers, asking to meet with them when I was next in town.

A few people wrote back saying they had forwarded my CV to the personnel department. Then I got a letter from a woman saying who said she'd be happy to see me. She was Nicola Horlick, the top City fund manager, who was then managing director of Morgan Grenfell Asset Management.

I came back to London and she and her colleagues in effect interviewed me for a position as a trainee fund manager. Then I went back to the US and waited nervously for job offers to arrive. I started getting offers from Wall Street, but after a month I'd heard nothing from Nicola. I called her, she said to come on over, and the next thing I knew, I was back in the UK proudly touting my first business card.

I got in there early: I was managing money by the time I was 21. I became one of only two women among 35 managers on Morgan Grenfell's UK pension fund team.

It was an eventful time. The company was hit by the Peter Young rogue trading scandal, then Nicola Horlick left. Our name changed to Deutsche Asset Management. The turbulence was probably good for my career. Jobs shifted, opportunities opened up that would not otherwise have existed, and I progressed as a fund manager.

It was at this stage that technology stocks started to really interest me. I had always been quite techie and used to make annoying presentations about how the internet would benefit us all. People started to listen when they noticed we were making money out of it. We got in early on a couple of really high performing stocks and it was very exciting.

At the height of the technology boom I was 27 and I was starting to get itchy feet. I became friendly with Dr. Mike Lynch , CEO of Autonomy Plc, the listed software company. When I said I wanted to mange money on my own, he said he would help me. We went into business as Avocet Capital Management, a technology-focused hedge fund.

At 27, that life occasionally felt a bit surreal. I was much younger than everyone else and there were times when I wondered why people were willing to invest so much confidence in me. But the fact that a few people I really respected in turn believed in me gave me vital confidence.

Unfortunately, confidence did not bring success. Our timing wasn't great. We opened the technology fund with myself, two analysts, a trader and a COO in March 2001, not far off what turned out to be the top of the market. For the next two years it was very difficult to make money, even as a hedge fund. Those were precisely the two years when investors were looking at us to see how well we would do.

People who are starting hedge funds cannot possibly overestimate the amount of work involved. I went in with the intention of working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was prepared to work until I dropped, and I did.

The tough environment meant I couldn't grow the business and I couldn't delegate. I had less and less time to focus on stock picking and I was increasingly dissatisfied, both professionally and philosophically. I was 30; I took a step back and looked at my life. I didn't like what I saw.

I realized that I had already achieved my professional goals - there wasn't much else to go for apart from money. Money is great, but I definitely needed something else to get me out of bed in the mornings.

Around this time, I got a job offer from Beauchamp Financial Technology, a fund management software company. I had spent a lot of my time at Avocet trying to adapt software so that I could analyse my portfolio the way I wanted to. Beauchamp had an excellent product that did just that. I recognized an opportunity and decided to go with it. I closed the technology fund and joined as head of their international business.

I moved from picking tech stocks to picking trends in fund managers' use of technology. At Beauchamp, I keep my ear to the ground and talk to my fund manager friends about what they need. I still enjoy stock picking do it on a personal basis.

But my days are no longer consumed by a market, which rather depressingly, one cannot control, no matter how much effort one puts in.