Dear person still waiting for the strategy to get signed off,
The thing about big institutions is that the prestige is doing a specific job: it's making the staying feel like ambition.
I came into finance thinking MD was the destination. This was during the internship years, when the whole system is designed to make you feel like you've arrived at something — the name on the building, the client list, the culture of we don't just hire anyone. By the time I was a few years in, sitting in rooms presenting the same version of the same strategy deck to the same senior people who didn't have the authority to act on it, I had started to understand what was actually happening.
The work wasn't going anywhere. Not because the people were bad — they weren't. My manager was excellent. The team was sharp. The analysis was sound. But at a certain scale, the institution itself becomes the obstacle. A decision that needs to move up the chain reaches a point where someone in the chain has changed, and it starts again. The strategy that needed sign-off six months ago still needs sign-off. You present, you refine, you wait, someone exits or gets promoted, and you present again. What looks like progress is a loop.
The other thing nobody tells you is that your entire experience is a function of your manager and your team — which sounds manageable until you realize that in a politically complex environment, those variables can disappear overnight without your input. An extraordinary day-to-day can become unrecognizable in one reorganization. You have no leverage over any of it. The thing you think you're protecting — the stability, the path, the prestige — is less secure than it looks, just disguised well enough that most people don't notice until after the reorg.
I was bored. I want to say that plainly, because it gets dressed up into something more strategic in the way people tell these stories. I wasn't misaligned with my values or searching for deeper meaning. I was bored. The work wasn't difficult enough to be interesting and not impactful enough to feel real, and I had been trying to make it both for long enough to know the constraint wasn't me — it was the structure.
Moving into crypto felt like the answer to a question I hadn't fully formed yet. Not a leap: a move toward something I could see clearly. Things moved at a different pace. Decisions got made. You could draw a direct line between what you did on Tuesday and what was different by Friday. I went from presenting to people who couldn't act to working on teams where acting was the whole point. I also doubled my salary by making the move. Then doubled it again.
What I understand now, watching people who stayed — some of them brilliant, all of them capable — is that the MD track is the system's prize for playing by the system's rules. It's not nothing. It's genuinely prestigious and genuinely hard-earned. But it is not the most ambitious outcome available to someone who could do it. It is the safest outcome with the best branding. If you came up through an analyst program and you stay in the system, you will rise through it and get there. The system is designed to reward exactly that. The question is whether you want what the system gives you — or something the system can't.
Ego will keep you in rooms long after they've stopped serving you.
The version on Substack goes into the numbers — what the salary jumps actually looked like, and what it cost to stay as long as I did.