Why I Quit my Investment Banking Job

February 2024

Last week I resigned from my job in investment banking after working there a year and a half. A lot of people thought I was mad for quitting. By all accounts I was well on my way to climbing the corporate ladder; I had scored very well on internal reviews and colleagues thought highly of me. Further to their bemusement, I quit with no job lined up. I took with me my recent annual bonus to keep me afloat for a few months while I focussed on a variety of projects and doing more work with the military. 

My reasoning was simple: I needed to take more risks. It shocked me how risk-averse investment banks are. Films about Wall Street conjure up the image of bankers wildly swinging between excruciating stress and unrestrained hedonism. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this industry you were to turn up and do your job as outlined; nothing more, nothing less. Obtaining approval for personal investments was a Byzantine process that shackled your focus to the trading floor and away from ambitions outside of the office. Socially there were bonus points if you lived in the right postcode and skied at the right resort each winter half-term. Conformity ruled.  

I cannot blame this whole modus operandi. A bank would not function well if its well-paid employees were distracted by outside prospects. Any institution employing tens of thousands of people needs to instil a sense of obedience to keep the cogs turning and the machine well-oiled. Nor can I blame those who spend their careers in such an environment, for probability makes it clear they are far more rational than any aspiring entrepreneur. 

As jobs go for intelligent, generalist undergraduates, there are few better industries to enter out of university. You have the chance to learn plenty and acquaint yourself with some highly competent and ambitious people. But an employee who remains there must accept that their life prospects are narrow. The spectrum of potential outcomes facing them is a distribution ranging from Vice President to Partner. To those in the corporate rat race, this may seem chasmic. But compared to the vast scale of human fortune stretching from abject failure to world-changing success, the two positions are indistinguishable. That realisation did not sit easy with me. There are, of course, far more abject failures than world-changing successes out there. So when you step outside the corporate world and start rolling the dice, that means being comfortable with the prospect of finding oneself closer to the former and not the latter. For me, that is a fair price to pay to have a shot at making a five-sigma impact on the world.