I quit investment banking and now run a startup. I work just as much, but the hours feel totally different.

• Andrew Meng, 29, left a career in investment banking to be a founder.
• He owns his time and schedule now, but there are tradeoffs to the flexibility.
• Meng said that he has very different types of Saturday morning anxiety as a banker and a founder.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Andrew Meng, 29, who worked in investment banking at Wells Fargo until January 2021 and now runs a startup, Yorby AI. Business Insider has confirmed his previous employment at Wells Fargo. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

My dad is a professor of engineering, my mom is a developer, and both of my older siblings have engineering degrees — so I was surprised when the engineering internships I had in college felt boring.

I decided to look at other fields the summer after my junior year, and eventually settled on investment banking, a mysterious black box at the time.

I was late to recruiting and didn't study finance, but I landed an internship. After graduating in 2019, I got a job at Wells Fargo as an investment banker for their technology, media, and telecommunications group in San Francisco.

I knew exactly how much I was working

Something felt off during my very first week at Wells Fargo. I couldn't pinpoint what it was, but I just wasn't excited about the job. It wasn't specific to the firm. It was about banking itself.

My hours were pretty typical during those first few months, landing between 60 and 100 per week. In my experience, the hours came in peaks and troughs, only getting super bad when I was working on a live deal, meaning an active transaction like an IPO or merger. I'd spend a lot of time waiting for comments from my managers, which could come late at night.

There were definitely times when I had to cancel plans at the last minute because of work. I often didn't know what my weekend would look like until Friday night — and even then, I couldn't always predict, because I could get an unexpected email on Saturday or Sunday. I'd constantly be checking my corporate phone.

I had legitimate PTO

That being said, I had legitimate PTO when I worked in investment banking, especially if I wasn't working on a live deal. If I took time off during active transactions, I'd have to hop online for the occasional client request, or I would log on by choice since I didn't want to let my team down.

The firm generally respected time off, but I felt the internal pressure not to fall behind.

I lost any separation between work and life during the pandemic, which took a huge mental toll. I woke up, worked, and went to sleep, all in the same room. I closed my first big IPO in the summer of 2020, and remembered thinking that I should be proud. But I felt nothing, even though I'd worked on the transaction for months.

That was a turning point in my banking career — the whole idea was that the bad days were bad and the good days were great, but my good days weren't even great.

It took me six months to quit

I mulled quitting for about six months, since the thought of leaving was terrifying. I considered going to the buy-side, or working at a hedge fund or VC firm, but eventually accepted that I just don't care about finance.

I finally left in January of 2021 to try to make it as a content creator. I was already living at home with my parents because of COVID, and I stayed there for three years to save money. My expenses were low, and the money I made from banking carried me through to the end of 2022 — when I realized I had only $2,000 in my bank account. That's when I took a job at my friend's AI startup for a few months, before launching an agency for social media marketing.

I never have a day off now, but don't count my hours

In August of last year, I shut down the agency to cofound Yorby AI, an AI content strategist that aims to automate social media marketing. So far, we've raised $125,000 from angel investor Jason Calacanis and joined his startup accelerator. We've got around 35,000 users.

Now, as a founder, I set my own hours. Nobody owns my time, but every hour could be a working hour. Right now, I usually work from 9 am to 8 or 11 pm on weekdays, and around 8 hours total on the weekends. The hours are pretty similar to banking, actually — I'd estimate it's around 70 a week, though my wife would probably say it's closer to 80.

In banking, I always knew exactly how many hours I worked, and the fact that I'm not too sure of my hours now indicates how different my job feels. I'm working for myself and actually building something I want to do, so the hours don't feel that bad.

Still, there are tradeoffs: PTO doesn't exist as a founder. On my honeymoon in Switzerland and Greece, for example, I checked my phone and email every day, since I had to meet client needs and not working would have stressed me out.

I held onto one relic of banking culture: protected Saturdays, which some firms have. I force myself to take Saturdays off, since I'd burn out if I worked seven days a week. I still wake up with anxiety on Saturday morning, just like I did when I worked in banking, but the nature of that anxiety is totally different. As a banker, I worried that someone would email me with work to do. Now, as a founder, I worry about how I'll grow the company and pay my rent.

There's no clear, single answer on whether the banker or founder schedule is better. They're both high-pressure, high-burnout career paths, with minimal work-life balance. It's just about figuring out what works for you in a certain moment and running with it for as long as you can.