By: Dean Shiff ’26
There is a moment, usually sometime in high school, when your perspective on learning shifts. Before that moment, much of your learning feels rooted in questions and answers. You study, you prepare and you respond to those questions with your answers. Over time, however, you realize that the questions themselves begin to matter more than the answers.
For Andre Radensky ’17, that shift began in an economics classroom. “I liked taking economics with Mr. Kashdan a lot,” he said. “It was a different way of looking at things, blending math with analyzing world events and behavior at the same time.” What he discovered was not simply a subject, but a framework, one that would stay with him long after he left Pine Crest, and one that helped shape how he approached decisions in college, in his career and in the industries he would eventually enter.
At Princeton, Andre studied economics, though not without some uncertainty along the way. He had always been interested in both history and math, but economics offered a way to connect the two and understand how large systems actually function. “When you learn about the Roman Empire or the Great Depression, so much of it is described through an economic lens,” he said. “It makes you ask why economics underpins so much of how the world works.”
After graduation, Andre moved to New York City where he accepted a finance position at a global firm, following a path familiar to many economics majors. Working in the media and telecom group, he analyzed companies and learned how businesses operate at scale. Soon, the experience clarified something important. “I realized I didn’t want to be a professional investor,” he said. The realization was gradual, shaped by long hours and a high-pressure environment where precision mattered, but perspective often felt constrained.
What stayed with him, however, was the vantage point. In his role, he had a front-row seat to a major shift in media. Traditional television was declining while streaming was rising, and companies were trying to manage both at once. “These businesses were trying to balance an old medium that was still making money with a new platform that wasn’t yet profitable,” he said. “It was fascinating to watch.” That tension, between what exists and what is emerging, became the inflection point in his career.
Andre left investment banking and moved into the industry itself, first at NBCUniversal and later at Netflix. “The scale is immediate at Netflix,” said Andre. “You’re in meetings with people in London, Tokyo and Korea. You really get the sense that you’re making content for the entire world.” Yet what defines the work is the level of ambiguity.
Streaming, as a business, resists simple explanations. Millions of people pay a monthly subscription, but the reasons they stay are not always clear. “If someone pays for Netflix each month, why do they stay?” Andre said. “Is it one show? The whole library? Even if they don’t watch anything?” Questions like these cannot be answered with a single metric. They require interpretation of behavior, patterns and meaning. “In media and entertainment, storytelling and perception can be just as important as the data,” he said. In that sense, the work sits at the intersection of analysis and narrative, where numbers explain part of the story, but not all of it.
That duality, logic and storytelling continue to motivate him. “I’ve always loved video,” Andre explained, recalling early YouTube videos that took an entire car ride to load. Today, that early fascination has scaled into something global. The platforms are larger, the stakes are higher, but the core idea remains the same. People are drawn to stories. Even in a non-creative role, Andre sees himself as part of that process. “What I do helps support the people who are actually making these stories,” he said.
Looking back, he connects that mindset directly to Pine Crest. Not to a single moment, but to a shift in how he learned to think. “At some point, you have to start asking the questions yourself,” he said. “In the real world, things aren’t clear-cut. You have to define what success even means.”
From economics to finance to global media, Andre’s path has not been linear. It has been shaped by a way of thinking; one that values curiosity, embraces uncertainty and recognizes that the most important questions are often the ones without the most obvious answers.