Where Did You Go When You Realized Banking Wasn't For You?

I definitely wouldn't have gone straight from school to solely working on the e-commerce plan, unless of course I had been working on it throughout college and had enough traction and money coming in to where it would be foolish to go work for someone else and not focus on growth. If my venture fails, I have a nice resume pillow to fall back on if I decide to re-enter the job market. It probably won't be easy but will certainly be easier than if I'd gone from senior in college to failed entrepreneur a year out and then had to look for a job. This isn't even specific to IB. I recommend spending a couple+ of years in a job where you can build and refine some marketable skillset so that you can shop a strong resume around should your entrepreneurial plans not work out (I'm assuming you're still in college, based on the nature of your question).

IB is great because, depending on what type of firm and group you go to, you'll get to see a lot of different businesses and understand how they work within their markets from a top-down view. There's a ton of potential to discover and learn about a vertical or niche that you could one day build or buy a company in yourself, which I think is a wildly underrated benefit to IB (as well as PE and consulting) for anyone that thinks they have the entrepreneurial bug. What you don't get on the job in banking is opportunities to flex skills you'll need as a founder or operator of a business, so when it comes time to develop a marketing strategy for your product or service and allocate your first bit of marketing budget, you're going to be a bit blind relative to, say, someone that has been doing digital marketing projects for a marketing firm helping companies in the middle market since they finished college. What you learn in banking (how to make things look good, how to position, how to read and interpret financial statements and models, how to present) isn't useless but it won't be what sets up your first website or guides your first marketing strategy. On that note, I do sometimes wonder how much quicker I could be moving if I had spent a year or two in one of the functions that drives business growth, primarily sales or marketing but even product development. Granted, I would not have discovered the space I'm going into, so I am thankful for my experience and wouldn't do it differently.

One thing to consider and keep in mind is that if you go to a bank or even marketing firm where you're working with large companies, you may not get to see as much as you would at firms that work with smaller clients. I worked at two boutique firms before lateraling to a large known MM bank, and I gained more entrepreneurial inspiration at those smaller firms than at the MM simply because the clients tended to be unsophisticated founders selling small businesses that I occasionally saw myself in. Not to downplay the brains and sweat needed to build and grow any company into a multi-million dollar exit but a good percentage of founders and executives I met and worked with at those boutiques never struck me as particularly talented or privileged, meaning their success could probably be replicated by most with a little bit of capital. At the MM, the sizes of businesses and caliber of executives we worked with was far more impressive but there was little I could relate to or see myself competing in after working with them. It's much easier to convince yourself you can compete with a $10M company than a $200M company, especially when you see and believe that the founder and operator of that $10M business started with less understanding of their space than you might have today based on seeing multiple companies in the industry through your IB job. They just had the balls to roll the dice and keep iterating until it stuck vs. the executives you work with at larger MM firms which are generally C-suite mercenaries that the PE owner (your actual client) brought on.

I'm drifting off-track and going beyond what you're asking but hopefully some new points to consider if your ultimate goals are entrepreneurial. IB and then the PE route after can be a trap, because there isn't much time to work on anything on the side given job demands, and the money is really good. There are people who can juggle 70+ hour weeks and building their empire on the side until it's enough cushion to leave but I struggled to do that, especially since weeks have really been ~90 hours nonstop since the initial Covid lull leading up to my last day at work. If you have an idea and you've done some groundwork on it (proven demand to yourself without deluding yourself) and you can't juggle your high-paying, high-demanding job with getting it truly off the ground, my advice is to go for it because, again, life is too damn short. While I haven't proven out that you can re-enter IB or PE after you've left for entrepreneurship, I've heard from enough people that have left for entrepreneurship that that door does not seem closed at all years out and that actually some new interesting doors have opened along the way (product management roles at good tech companies, VC roles, VC arms within large F500 companies, other operating roles).