Why Leave Investment Banking?

At the start of 2023, I joined Standard Metrics (Series A Startup) as an intern on the Data Solutions team. This was a notable transition for me. Just a few months beforehand, I was considering signing a full-time return offer in technology investment banking. How did this happen? It’s fair to say that it started with a little drive to clear my head.

Alright, a little drive may be a bit of an understatement, as my journey from Mountain View, CA back to Seattle, WA could surely be classified as a road trip. Despite consulting family and friends on their experience making this same road trip, mine was destined to be slightly different. First, it was a solo expedition — providing me plenty of time to think. Second, I self-imposed rules against listening to music and podcasts — providing me even more time to think. Third, I had a full-time return offer from my summer internship — the thing I needed time to think about. While I don’t claim that the “silence and drive” method is the most effective decision-making technique in existence, it surely gave me ample time to consider some pretty important questions and develop answers to them.

The three-day road trip paired with my process interviewing with Standard Metrics assisted me in building critical frameworks to assess what I want out of a career. I also have Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Designing Your Life to thank for introducing me to novel concepts regarding work and life. The road trip, the interviews, and the reading inspired me to consider the following questions, which I believe are largely responsible for my decision to jump from traditional roles like investment banking to startup land:

• What does work mean to me?

• How does my “workview” align with my “lifeview”?

• Where does the rest of my generation stand on career-building?

What does work mean to me?

Work is what one does with their time. Common estimates contend that work takes up about 90,000 hours which is roughly one third of the average person’s life. That is a lot of time, especially when considering sleep to be roughly another third.

If work is going to take up so much of life, it seems rational that it should be focused around tasks, environments, and people that are meaningful. I’d personally rather not organize a significant portion of my own work efforts around things that are of little importance to my mission.

How does my “workview” align with my “lifeview”?

In their book Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans write about the concepts of “workview” and “lifeview”. The shorthand definitions are that workview is how you spend your professional time, while lifeview is what you want out of your life. When you’re able to align these two things, you find yourself with a metaphorical compass. That compass brings together workview and lifeview, guiding an individual in the right direction on their journey of life.

When making an assessment of my own lifeview, I discovered that my previous workview did not align. My lifeview consisted of targeting large-scale positive impact as well as sharing my own optimism with the rest of the world. I believe my professional experiences, undergraduate coursework, several study abroad trips, and upbringing are all partially responsible for developing this life mission. Upon introspection, I found that my lifeview was not well-addressed by the work that I was doing in investment banking. Once I reached this conclusion, it became clear to me that I needed to make a change.

I decided to focus my efforts on joining a startup company. I believe that startups are an engine for change within a capitalist society. Great startups consist of a team of individuals who are 100% committed to improving some aspect of the world through solving a specific problem. These young companies are best led by rationally-optimistic entrepreneurs who prioritize making discoveries that can forever change society and nature.

Where does the rest of my generation stand on career building?

Generation Z consistently speaks to the importance of work-life balance, fair compensation, and impact as proxies in career selection. However, are some of these factors more heavily indexed than others? Anecdotally speaking, I believe that the majority of my senior class peers at the University of Washington prioritize balance and compensation over most other factors. I find these peers to be targeting roles in big tech, consulting, accounting, and banking. This is totally reasonable. These roles pay well and they appear to be relatively stable career paths in the eyes of unsure young professionals.

Still, I’ve observed that prioritizing job impact in roles right after undergrad is often neglected among my senior class. Will this change after big tech layoffs? Does it simply take a few years after college for people to refocus on impact? As I think about how my peers may or may not gravitate to different roles of seemingly higher impact over time — such as volunteerism, education, advocacy, research, startup roles, etc. — I wonder what steps will be critical in making sure that Generation Z gets on the right path in benefitting the rest of the world.

Standard Metrics and The Future

Joining Standard Metrics has served as an amazing opportunity for me to jump into the world of startups, a space in which I’m incredibly bullish. Standard Metrics is not only solving the problems of lackluster collaboration tools between VCs and startups, the firm is enabling founders to have more time, VCs to be better armed with metrics to assess the performance of portfolio companies, and the industry to be increasingly transparent from limited partner to employee, all by creating a lingua franca for every stakeholder in the innovation economy.

As I get closer to understanding how to best position my work to have real impact and create opportunities for others to do the same, I need to consider who will be there to do it with me. In recent months, I’ve grown increasingly observant of my peers and the similarities and differences among us. One discovery I’ve made is that we all want to have an impact in the world as we look to graduate in just a handful of months. The big question will continue to be how best to go about producing that impact. I look forward to working with those in my generation as well as all other generations to help create a better world for everyone.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear your feedback!

And thank you to those who helped me revise this piece! You are much appreciated.