I quit Goldman Sachs after only a year. Here's how I knew leaving for a tech startup was the right career move.

• Chris Hladczuk leads growth at Meow, a fintech startup, after quitting Goldman Sachs.
• He says that excellence was expected at Goldman and working there helped him develop grit and stamina.
• Hladczuk says he was wired to climb to the top, and joining a hyper-growth startup was the next step.

I picked a weird day to quit — it was my 24th birthday and I called my boss to tell her I was leaving Goldman Sachs. This was after only one year as an investment banking analyst.

It's a terribly kept secret that most people put in two years before exiting to the greener pastures of private equity, or start the climb from investment banking analyst to associate and (hopefully) to the promised land of partner.

But leaving after a year? Rare.

The power of Goldman Sachs

I love Goldman because it taught me how to win. It taught me to grind. And it taught me how to remain ridiculously calm during a crisis.

But the true power of surrounding yourself with hyper-ambitious overachievers? The expectation of excellence.

What I mean by that is at a place like Goldman, excellence isn't just a goal. It's the standard.

And when excellence is the standard, you raise your bar beyond what you ever thought was possible.

• Excellence means attention to detail — we produced 100-slide PowerPoint presentations without missing a comma
• Excellence means speed — we'd answer hundreds of investor questions in under 24 hours
• Excellence means mastery of corporate finance — we structured complex transactions to unlock value for the client

Goldman Sachs survives after 150 years because excellence is the standard.

Wired to win "The Game"

No matter what anyone says, those that climb to the pinnacle of prestige are wired the same way.

In middle school, this is A+'s on the report card. In high school, this is getting into a fancy college — Yale for me. In college, this is getting a prestigious job, like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or Google.

And I started sprinting to win the grand prize of Goldman Sachs. I made a spreadsheet of the top 20 banks, donned a suit and tie as a sophomore to attend countless networking coffee chats, downloaded and studied a 400-question study guide, and Googled the word "EBITDA" for the first time. I was wired to win.

Goldman gets over 20,000 applications every year. The real truth? Leaving an application to luck and fate was for losers, so I did everything in my power to secure the fated Goldman internship.

But between the junior year internship and graduation, during the height of Covid, I was sitting in my parent's basement when I discovered this guy named Paul Graham. He's the founder of Y Combinator, which is the mecca of startups and Silicon Valley.

At the time I knew nothing about tech, and I couldn't believe that a bunch of 20-somethings were building these businesses. I always thought you needed "pedigree" and experience first. I thought you needed to "work your way up the ladder."

I had found a new but very different prize. And it led me to a question that changed it all: How can I meet these people?

Tech Twitter x Meow

I quickly discovered all these venture capitalists and founders hang out on "Tech Twitter," a cozy corner of the internet filled with startup ideas and tech trends. It's like Linkedin for finance, but if people actually used the DM feature.

But I knew if I wanted to become a part of the tech ecosystem, I needed to win "the game" of Twitter.

A year later I had 100,000 followers. I did this by joining a club called the Yale Entrepreneurial Society and becoming the "Speakers & Podcast Lead." This was a glorified excuse to cold email and interview the best founders that came out of Yale.

It worked. That year, I interviewed Emmett Shear (CEO, Twitch) and Kevin Ryan (Founder MongoDB) and Michael Seibel (Partner, Y Combinator) and Bing Gordon (Board of Amazon for 16 years).

And when you create content about interviewing folks that have built billion dollar companies, it goes viral.

After meeting dozens of founders, I knew what I wanted to follow in their footsteps. That next step for me was to join a startup hitting hyper growth.

So as one does, I'm scrolling Twitter and stumbled across a Jeff Bezos clip about customer obsession. I clicked on the poster's profile and saw "Founder and CEO, Meow." Meow is a NYC-based fintech startup that raised $22 million from Tiger, QED, and Lux. Who was this guy?

I slid into his DMs and we got coffee the next day. For this all-consuming career search, I was like a venture capitalist, but with only one bullet in the chamber — my fate was in the hands of the ONE startup I joined next.

I was blown away by Brandon and the Meow team, mostly for the midwestern mentality they brought to startups: a no-nonsense, operate in seconds attitude and a will to win unlike any other startup I'd seen.

Before I made the decision to quit Goldman and join Meow, I asked three very important questions:

1. What's the worst case scenario?

Most startups operate with a short runway, meaning if they don't raise more cash every 12-18 months, they'll go bankrupt. Meow had over 10 years of runway.

So really my worst case scenario is getting fired because I suck. I thought, "Okay well I may as well learn quickly if I'm not cut out to be a founder."

2. When I'm 80 and look back on life, will I regret not doing this? (Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework)

Before Jeff Bezos quit his hedge fund job to start Amazon, this is what he asked himself. The concept is that every big life decision should be viewed through the lens of minimizing long-term regret.

I knew I would regret staying hooked on the comfy credentials that a place like Goldman provides.

And I'd regret even more that I deferred my career vision… for what purpose?

For Bezos, he would regret not attacking the generational opportunity that accompanied the rise of the internet. For me, I knew every second I deferred my vision was a second wasted.

3. With my future career in mind, is my pace of learning higher at Goldman in investment banking or at an early-stage startup?

This was a no-brainer. Banking is a beautiful place for those that want to pursue a career in finance.

But for founders, structuring leveraged buyouts pales in comparison to the pace of learning in startups with hiring, sales and product.

The best startup builders are customer feedback machines. This is a completely different skill set than a traditional job — your mindset shifts from how can I make my boss look better to how can I delight the customer?

While it felt like a massive step, it was an easy one in hindsight

I joined Meow as employee 10.

Recently, we crossed $1 billion in assets on the platform as a treasury tool for startups. We're the software layer on top of big banks and help startups get more yield on their cash — this includes US Treasury Bills and a Maximum Checking account.

I've easily jammed seven years of learning into seven short months leading our go-to-market team. And we're just getting started.

In hindsight, I believe investment banking is an underrated skill in startups and more generally, in tech. Most engineering types see banking as a bureaucratic waste of time compared to building products that serve customers. I see it differently. There's no better battlefield than a big bank to develop the grit, stamina and intensity associated with operational excellence.

But beware the credential treadmill. If you have startup builder ambitions, you need to get off soon or you're doomed to run in-place forever.

Chris Hladczuk currently leads growth at fintech startup Meow.