I spent the first three years of my career in finance — starting as an investment banking analyst at UBS, then moving into project finance at Fibabanka where I worked on deals totalling over $600M, and finally joining the M&A team at IEG Investment Banking Group in Istanbul.
Those years taught me a lot. How to structure a deal. How to read a business from the outside. How to stay sharp under pressure. But they also taught me something I didn't expect: I didn't want to advise on businesses. I wanted to build them.
What finance teaches you
Investment banking gives you an incredible lens into how companies work. You see dozens of businesses from the inside — their unit economics, their growth levers, their fragilities. At Fibabanka, I sat across the table from hotel operators, mining companies, and manufacturers. At IEG, I was executing sell-side deals and raising capital for e-commerce companies. You develop pattern recognition fast.
But you're always on the outside. You model the business; you don't feel it. You never deal with a customer complaint at midnight or a warehouse that flooded.
The moment it clicked
There wasn't a single dramatic moment. It was a slow realisation that the people I most admired in every deal weren't the bankers — they were the founders. The ones who'd built something from nothing and were now sitting across from us explaining what they'd created.
I left IEG and co-founded ErasmusInn — a student accommodation marketplace. We had no funding, no team, and no idea what we were doing. Within three years, we'd scaled to 10,000+ rooms across 12 European cities and were backed by 500 Startups. It was harder than anything I'd done in banking, and I loved every minute of it.
What I'd tell someone considering the same leap
Finance is a great training ground, but it's not the destination for everyone. If you find yourself more excited by the companies you're advising than the advice you're giving, that's a signal worth listening to. The skills transfer — financial rigour, pattern recognition, structured thinking — but the mindset has to change completely. You go from analysing risk to living it.
I haven't looked back.