This is your life in traditional finance.
100+ hour weeks, learning skills AI is already replacing.
Inside a firm
2/3Replaced by AI
$250KThe MBA
TrappedUnvested pay
Age 42The top
Inside a firm
Years 1-3
2/3
Banks are cutting junior analyst classes by as much as two-thirds as AI takes over the work.
Source: Bloomberg, 2026.
Years 4-5
$250K
all-in cost of the top-10 MBA your promotion requires.
Source: Poets&Quants, 2025.
Year 8
Hundreds of thousands
Golden handcuffs: banks defer a share of every bonus for years, and leaving forfeits the unvested balance.
Vested
Forfeited if you leave
Source: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.
Year 12
Age 42
the average age of a new Goldman Sachs partner, a rank fewer than 1% of the firm's employees hold.
Source: Business Insider, 2024.
The bill
Replaced by AI 2/3
The MBA $250K
Unvested pay Trapped
The top Age 42
All this for a shot at a job that keeps 90% of what you earn.
Or launch your strategy today.
The incubator is simulated. The head start is real.
Mark Clarkson
Economics sophomore, launched his first strategy from his dorm.
Clarkson Software Leaders
Moderate Technology Growth
Priya Shah
First-year investment banking analyst, running her own strategy on the side.
Shah Global Industrials
Conservative Industrials Value
Kenji Nakamura
Second-year equity research associate, invests where he already does the work.
Nakamura Clean Energy
Aggressive Energy Growth
Illustrative
Build under a pseudonym.
Already in the industry? Keep your day job out of it. Run your strategy under a pseudonym, and when you're ready, put your real name on everything you've built.
CR
Crescent Ridge Capital
Pseudonym DP
Daniel Park
Real name, same record The chart never changes. Only the name does.
You keep the majority. Always.
Remember the firm's 90% cut? Here's ours.
Your first $1M under management You keep 100%
Beyond $1M You keep 70%
As your assets grow Rising to 80%