Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart, ambitious people choosing the nonlinear route.

Subscribe now

Alex McCann has never had a corporate job. He studied music. He ran a boutique marketing agency that didn’t work out. He digital nomaded across Latin America with friends who quit their jobs to come with him. And then he wrote a Substack post called “The Death of the Corporate Job” that got 17,000 likes, got picked up by The Times, and somehow led him to a call with the CEO of Bayer. Then he build an AI career platform.

None of that was his plan. His plan (if you can call it that) was to document what he was learning in real time and see what happened. After his Substackpost blew up, he did something I think is underrated (and exactly what I did before I first started creating content): he opened his calendar to strangers, took hundreds of calls over two months, and used every conversation to understand exactly what people were stuck on. That research became Rumbo, an AI career tool built around the idea that most people aren’t asking the wrong question, but answering it in the wrong vocabulary.

Alex and I connected through our career-related content, and I’ve been wanting to have this conversation for a while. So many of you are in corporate jobs that feel like they’re running out of road, and so many of you want to build something but have no idea where to start. Alex has thought about both of these things more carefully than most people I’ve spoken to.

Whether you’re thinking about your next career move, figuring out your next creative direction, or building your own product, I think you’ll get a lot from our conversation.

From engineering to music to founder: the long way around

Hannah: You’ve made so many pivots: engineering to music to creative director to now founder and content creator. A lot of my audience has been in the same job for years while you’ve done all of that. How did you get clarity on what the next step was every time? And how did you get the confidence to actually go do it?

Alex: It was a combination of things. I really believe in this idea from the book Tiny Experiments, just trying things out. That was something I didn’t realize was a skill, but I had always just been somebody who would give stuff a go. And that coupled with a really intense curiosity, just asking a lot of questions of myself and other people. I think that was what allowed me to pivot quickly.

I also have to acknowledge that I was young and didn’t have any responsibility, so I could take on a lot of risk. But the culmination of voracious curiosity, willingness to try things, a kind of attitude of I’m just going to try stuff and then see what happens, and circumstances that allowed that to happen. It was a combination of luck and people around me encouraging that curiosity.

Hannah: Did you ever fear that by switching from engineering to music, or music to creative, you were throwing away all the work you’d done previously?

Alex: Yes, a little. I never got so into it that there were too many sunk costs. The biggest shift was definitely the move from engineering to music, because up until that point my whole life I had really identified as an academic person who loves this type of thing. I had crafted my identity around what I thought I was going to be. And then when it all came crashing down, there was a real identity shift. That was hard.

I was pretty early on clued into the idea that qualifications were less valuable than they used to be, and the corporate ladder wasn’t what it used to be. So the sunk cost piece was less of it. But I definitely felt the weight of the identity changes that came with the pivots.

Building the content muscle before anything went viral

Hannah: You said several times that you were really lucky. And I’m sure you feel that way, and you’re a humble person. But luck only shows up when you’ve done the work to maximize your surface area of luck. Every piece of content you post is a lottery ticket. How did you first start creating content? What was your initial goal with it?

Alex: I want to give myself credit for two things. One is the beginner’s mindset. When I started my first business, I went to a lot of networking events and I was often the youngest person in the room by a lot. The mistake a lot of young people make is going into those rooms trying to show what they know. I didn’t have that. I went in with an attitude of: you’re the expert, I’m the beginner, can I just ask you questions? That gave me access to people who ended up being mentors because they were interested in helping someone who was genuinely curious rather than performing confidence.

And the second thing: opportunity is a function of density. When you’re young, one of the best things you can do is just put yourself out there in whatever form that is. Networking events, content, reaching out to hundreds of people every week.

How I got into content: that graduate job I mentioned introduced me to personal branding because I was doing some LinkedIn posts for the founder. An early mentor said to me, you’re in a really steep learning curve right now, why don’t you just share what you’re learning and see what happens? So that’s what I did. And I started to get some traction. Nothing like now, but it helped me build the muscle.

Then I stopped for a while while I was traveling and working a previous role. And when I started this new venture, it felt like second nature. I thought, okay, there are interesting things I’m learning, interesting things I’m seeing, let me just put it out there. My coach was also on Substack and said it’s a good place for a slightly different style than LinkedIn. So I did. And yeah, rest is history.

Hannah: I love that you were documenting your learnings in real time. That’s the thing people don’t say out loud: most people who build a personal brand, it’s not their full-time job. The best approach is to document what you’re already doing, so it doesn’t feel like every post is a fresh thing you have to invent from scratch.

Alex: It’s like what they say about musicians. In the early stages, their work is the best because their proximity to real life makes it relatable. And then as they get successful, that proximity disappears and people stop connecting with it as much. When people are really in the thick of something, building a product, learning from a day job, it’s stuff people can relate to. It feels more authentic. And I can imagine that when your whole job becomes content creation, it gets harder to maintain that.

The viral Substack post and the CEO of Bayer in his DMs

Hannah: Your Substack post “The Death of the Corporate Job” had 17,000 likes. I usually get 50 likes on my posts. What was the core idea, and why do you think it resonated the way it did?

Alex: It came from reading Moral Ambition, which I highly recommend. The author talks about this idea that so many highly ambitious, highly intelligent people end up in what he calls bullshit jobs, this Bermuda Triangle of meaninglessness: corporate finance, banking, corporate law. And I remember reading that and seeing the people around me in my life who were so intelligent, so ambitious, great university degrees, genuinely kind and generous people, and yet the system had incentivized this particular kind of work, and the corporate ladder was still being sold as this glamorous journey.

I just thought there was something so different between the narrative around corporate work in media, from our parents’ generation, and the people actually living it. I wanted to uncover that and be honest about it. Why is the system set up to reward something that is so clearly not what it’s perceived to be? And what does the future look like? Because part of what I was writing about is that this understanding of the corporate ladder is changing anyway. It may not even be on offer to people who are interested in that path.

Hannah: And you’ve never had a corporate job. How do you think about those two things being true at the same time?

Alex: Totally get it from the people who’ve criticized me for that. Two things are worth saying. First, I was hearing this from so many people, so many conversations all coming to the same conclusion. I was prepared to be wrong. But the response felt like proof of concept, because so many people put their hands up and said yes, this is true to my experience.

The second thing is the fish in water observation. People who are inside the corporate machine get so heads-down, engrossed in the culture and the language, there’s this whole corporate vernacular, that sometimes it takes someone from outside to point out something that’s actually pretty obvious to the people in it. I was hearing a lot of the same thing from a lot of different people, and I thought: let me just put my observations out and see what they think.

Hannah: What was the craziest thing that happened as a result?

Alex: The press coverage was wild. The Times did a roundup of articles to read in 2025 and it was one of the top ones. The Free Press feature the same weekend they were acquired blew up too. But the craziest one was the CEO of Bayer reaching out.

This person messaged me on Substack with no profile picture, no context, said their CEO wanted to chat if I was interested in interviewing him. I was pretty doe-eyed about the whole thing at that point, said sure, put it in the calendar a few weeks ahead, and forgot about it. Then the weekend before, I’m looking at my calendar and I see this interview pop up. I looked it up. Bill Anderson. CEO of a company with nearly 100,000 employees, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. And I had just casually booked it like it was nothing.

But honestly? The craziest thing is being at events now and having people I’ve never met turn to me and say, oh yeah, I’ve read your article. That still blows my mind.

How he turned 17,000 likes into hundreds of 1:1 calls and (eventually) a product

Hannah: You didn’t just double down on Substack after the post blew up. You had a really intentional approach to figuring out what to actually do next. Walk me through that.

Alex: When the article went viral, I knew we were going to build the platform, but it was really early stages. I didn’t know exactly who it was for or what it might look like. I asked myself: since I’m not the one building it, what’s the most impactful thing I can do? And I thought: understand the problem from every possible angle.

So I put out a link to my calendar and said, if anyone wants to chat, just book some time. I’m not a career coach, I’m happy to just be a sounding board. And it went crazy. Hundreds and hundreds of people booked calls over the next couple of months.

One of the things that kept coming up was that people had started using ChatGPT to help them think through their careers, but they were still lost. ChatGPT as a conversational partner can only respond to the quality of input you give it. And if you don’t have a clear understanding of what is likely to bring you career fulfillment and meaning, the results you get back are going to be pretty limited. So that was really interesting to me: people are open to exploring this with AI, but it’s not quite there, it’s missing something. And that’s where we landed on the idea for Rumbo.

Alex’s advice: Stop seeing your career as your CV

Hannah: Last question. For someone in a corporate job who feels like it’s slowly dying, but the paycheck is real and they feel stuck, what’s your number one piece of advice?

Alex: The number one problem I see is that people think about themselves through the lens of their CV. When I ask people who come to me in that situation what they’re good at, they answer in CV language. I’m really good with Excel. I can present PowerPoints in a meeting. And my advice is to try and get yourself out of that way of thinking and look below the surface.

What is the skill behind your ability to use Excel? Maybe it’s analytical skills or being a really organized person.

What is the skill behind being good at presentations? That’s communication, making sense of complex ideas, storytelling.

When you start thinking about the foundational skill beneath the things you’re doing day to day, it allows you to think much more broadly about where you could apply those things. Things end up being a lot more transferable than you might expect.

Subscribe to Alex’s Substack and follow his journey building Rumbo!

• Chief of Staff – Live Near Friends (PropTech, Early Stage)

• General Manager, Ghana – Capi Money (FinTech, Early Stage, Ghana)

• PE & VC Partner Manager – Google (Tech, Public, SF/NYC)

• Head of Finance – LangChain (AI, Growth Stage)

• GTM Associate / Analyst – Basis (AI/Accounting, Growth Stage, NYC)

• Product Strategy and Operations Lead – Google (Tech, Public)

• Sr Operations Manager, US&C Merchant Ops – Uber (Tech, Public, Chicago)

• GTM Engineer – Vanta (Security & Compliance, Growth Stage, Remote)

• Strategic Partnerships Lead – Factory (AI, Early Stage)

• Chief of Staff / Head of Business Development – Fortuna Health (HealthTech, Early Stage, NYC)

• Chief of Staff – Lovable (AI, Growth Stage, Stockholm)

• Sales Representative – Brex (FinTech, Growth Stage, NYC)

• my resources

• Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart, ambitious people choosing the nonlinear path.

Subscribe now

TLDR: Having too many ideas is a filter problem, not a focus problem. By the end of this, you'll have a 4-step process for clearing the list and a Claude prompt you can use every time you hit this wall again .

At the start of this year, I dedicated my Q1 to a specific direction for my creator business. I spent months on it, hired externally, lost time and money, and eventually made the call to walk away. The moment I made the decision, I knew it was the right one.

And then I had the problem I seem to have every few years on a large scale, and every few months on a smaller scale:

…What now?

I had a running list of things I wanted to build: A course repackage. YouTube. Workshops. A community. A storytelling side practice. In-person events. Brand consulting. Eight directions after culling down the list… all of them real, all of them with a case for doing them. The possibilities felt endless, which was energizing and paralyzing in equal measure.

I was briefly frustrated, but I wasn’t panicking. I’d been here before when the stakes felt much higher. The blank slate feeling after leaving a job you’d worked toward for years. Knowing you want a new direction but having no idea what.

I’ve cycled through that more times than I can count from a career perspective. This was the same thing playing out on a smaller scale, inside my business.

So instead of just sitting with the spiral, I decided to systematize how I approach it.

If you’re building something outside your 9-5, or thinking about it, you probably know this feeling. You have more ideas than you know what to do with, and thinking about all of them at once makes it impossible to start any of them.

This framework is built specifically for figuring out what to build outside your job, but it adapts pretty easily to career pivots, life decisions, whatever version of “too many directions” you’re currently in.

1. Too many ideas is a good problem to have

If you feel like you have too many ideas, directions or pathways and can’t choose, that’s a good thing.

I mean that, not just in a “silver lining” way.

The alternative is much worse: brain fog, stagnation, malaise, zero pull in any direction. When the ideas keep coming, it means you’re genuinely multi-passionate and excited about each thing. That’s worth realizing before you try to solve it.

Some of the hardest conversations I have are with people who have the opposite problem — no list, no pull, nothing that feels like theirs. Just “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”.

So a full list of things you want to do or build is a gift, even when it feels like a curse.

If you don’t have ideas you’re excited about, Step 1 and 2 of this process might help you too.

2. Being multi-passionate and being a maximizer aren’t the same thing

I wrote a piece earlier this year about the cost of keeping your options open — the maximizer tendency, common among people who came up in banking, consulting, and tech, to collect optionality instead of committing. That’s a real problem, and a very different one from having too many genuine interests.

A maximizer avoids committing because they’re afraid of choosing wrong. A multi-passionate person has multiple things that genuinely feel authentic and wants to build all of them. Committing harder and getting clarity on what you want solves the first. What solves the second is finding the thread that connects what you already have…and a way to sequence it.

3. Your ideas are related

In the moment, all your ideas feel distinct. But zoom out and the things you want to build are usually more related than they appear — they come from you, and you want them for a reason.

The thread is almost always there. It’s just hard to see from the inside.

When I left investment banking to work at a food delivery startup in Mexico City, those looked completely unrelated. The common thread was wanting to tackle something new and challenging where I’d actually feel the impact.

When I moved from a 1,000-person remote tech job to a 50-person startup last year, same thing — both let me work on go-to-market and learn what marketing looks like at different scales.

Even now, my day job (product marketing for a technical fintech startup) and building content for high-achieving people navigating nonlinear careers feel like completely different things on paper. But both come down to telling the story of a brand. One is a company’s. One is a person’s.

When I applied the same lens to my eight business directions, they stopped feeling like competing options. Several were just different expressions of the same thing, at different scales, or for slightly different audiences. The question quickly shifted from “which one?” to “which version” — and then “which one first?”

But in order to see how your ideas connect, you need a manifesto. Here’s my process for writing one and assessing your ideas against it.

The Process

You have to do Step 1 yourself. I wrote a Claude prompt to help you with 2-4!

Step 1: Get out of your head first.

When I feel stuck, my instinct is to keep pushing — keep analyzing, start something, anything. Wrong move (almost) every time.

What I’m actually looking for usually only surfacing when I step away: on a walk, in a sauna, at a random movie, at a dinner where work doesn’t come up. What I keep thinking about without trying or thinking about it from a new perspective. That tends to be more reliable signal than what I think I should be working on.

The more analog and orthogonal to your normal day, the better. A walk in an unexpected neighborhood. A bike ride. Time away from your phone. The goal is to let the right things rise without forcing them.

This is the hardest step because it looks like doing nothing. And it can be the hardest thing to do when you’re hell bent on “solving the problem” and this feels like…not doing that.

Step 2: Write your manifesto.

Once your head is clearer, write an anchoring statement for the next year or even just the next few months. This answers questions like: Who do you want to be? What do you want to learn and grow in? What kind of people do you want to build for? What kind of problems do you want to solve (and don’t want to solve)?

A page or a paragraph. The point is to have something to run your ideas against, so you’re not evaluating the list in a vacuum.

Step 3: Brain dump everything that’s on your brain.

Every direction, every half-formed idea, everything you’ve been talking yourself into or out of. Write them down, say them out loud, tell Claude. Don’t filter yet. Get everything on the table first.

Step 4: Assess and sequence.

Run each idea against your manifesto and your real constraints: time, energy, income needs, what you can actually test in the next 30 to 60 days. Surface the “shoulds” — the ideas that feel like you’re supposed to want them rather than ones you actually do — and cut them. What’s left gets prioritized into a goals document you can start acting on.

The Claude exercise

This past weekend, I ran through this four-phase process to assess my list of eight business directions and turned it into a Claude prompt that you can run for yourself.

HOW TO USE THIS: Copy everything below the line and paste it into a new Claude conversation. Claude will interview you through 5 phases and produce a Manifesto and a Goals Doc. Set aside 20–30 minutes. Answer honestly, not aspirationally. Ideally after you’ve done Step 1 (which Claude can’t do for you!)

Read more

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart, ambitious people choosing the nonlinear path.

Subscribe now

230 of you signed up for the vibe coding event I co-hosted with my friend Yuqi from GMI Cloud at the Beacons office in NYC on Thursday!! (stay tuned for future events I’ll share here if you missed this one)

Now…sharing Sophia’s story with you!

Sophia Mullins spent nearly a decade in banking, PE, hedge funds, and VC. In the middle of it, she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis at 25 after two years of specialists couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She overhauled her lifestyle, sent it into remission, and kept working in finance while building her wellness brand. She didn’t leave until she was ready to leave.

Sophia now runs Wall Street Wellness, a wellness consultancy that provides workshops, coaching, and advisory for companies and individuals in high-performance industries. She's building what she wished existed when she was the person on a lean PE team trying to figure out how to eat well, manage stress, and not burn out while working around the clock. She’s the person you call when you’ve tried the supplements, optimized your sleep score, and still running on fumes.

Sophia and I met through Instagram as fellow finance dropouts. So many of you have asked me how to take care of yourself when your job is high-pressure and nonstop, and honestly, I’ve been terrible at answering that question because I’m bad at it myself. Sophia has much better answers!

Whether you’re in a high-pressure job trying to figure out how to actually take care of yourself, or you’re thinking about building something on the side and wondering when the right time is to go all in, I think you’ll get a lot from this one.

Reverse engineering Wall Street from rural Ohio

Hannah: You grew up in rural Ohio, valedictorian, first-gen college student. When did Wall Street even become a concept for you?

Sophia: I honestly think I kind of reverse engineered it because it was not a concept in rural Ohio. If I told most of my older family members that I worked in banking, they would think I was putting the little plastic thing in the tube and sending it into a drive-through as a bank teller. It just was not an industry that really existed to them.

When I got to Ohio State, I connected with some upperclassmen who were heavily involved in investment banking and sales and trading. They came back from their internships super excited. And I had always known, I think from eight years old, I had a poster of New York City in my childhood bedroom. Rural was not really my vibe.

When I met those upperclassmen and saw how intellectually stimulated they were, the rigor and grit and obviously the prestige that came with Wall street, that was attractive to me. But also with my background, being a first-gen college student, not really having that safety net of going to a big city that’s obviously quite expensive, Wall Street was also a pretty surefire way to pay the bills and support myself as someone going there solo. I got really lucky connecting with the right people when I got to Ohio State to spark that initial interest.

How she built a wellness brand inside finance (without it becoming her whole identity)

Hannah: You started Wall Street Wellness as an Instagram page while you were transitioning from banking to PE. Were you already feeling the tension between work and health at that point?

Sophia: Pre-COVID, it was a little less common to talk about your well-being as a means to peak performance. I wasn’t really getting that side of myself expressed in my day-to-day working environment, so I took to the internet to connect with people. I knew other people had to also feel this way. I wanted to find that community, share what it was like to meal prep and go to Equinox while balancing 80-plus hour work weeks.

Hannah: Was wellness something your team knew about you? How did people respond?

Sophia: Earlier in my career, it was definitely not something I was front-footed about. If you got to spend time with me and we were talking about our personal lives, you’d pick up that I was doing a lot of wellness-based things with my limited free time. But as I got more senior, at my first PE firm and then hedge funds and VC, it became a bigger part of my personal brand. People started noticing behaviors. After you’re somewhere for six months or a year and someone sees you meal prepping or bringing your food in glass Tupperware, maybe they want to emulate those behaviors too.

A big thing I emphasize with my community is that you have to earn your chips first. You can’t show up to your first day of investment banking and say, hey, I’m the wellness person. But when you really show up, meet your responsibilities, exceed what’s expected of you, then you can be that positive example of: I’m here, I’m crushing it, I’m a top performer, and I’m taking care of myself. By the time I was VP and beyond, people would jokingly call me the Chief Wellness Officer. It was always perceived as a positive because they knew I was leading with my work ethic first.

The health crisis that changed how she thought about performance

Hannah: Tell me about the health symptoms. When did you first notice something was off?

Sophia: I started feeling off about a year into my banking experience. All of the lymph nodes in my neck were swollen to the size of marbles all the time. Really inconsistent energy levels, weight fluctuations, some weeks my skin would be super dry and then completely fine. Weird patterns across a lot of different ways you can monitor your health.

What’s so interesting about autoimmune conditions, especially how they manifest in women, is it’s really easy to point to them as just the symptoms of working in a high-stress environment. I was able to kind of shirk that off for a while. But then my lymph nodes had been swollen for six months at a time. At 24 to 25, this probably isn’t normal.

I started working with traditional medical practitioners at one of the highly rated medical systems in New York City. I had a lymphoma scare, where I had full body PET scan, all the tests, all the panels. About two years in, two doctors came into my examination room and said: “You’re just a medical mystery”. That was so unsettling.

Hannah: How did you manage those appointments while working full time?

Sophia: It was not easy. I was very open with my team. When you tell someone you need to go get a full body PET scan with radioactive sugar to rule out lymphoma, no one is going to stop you.

I was close with my VP at the time and pretty open with her because she’d had similar health struggles. She was like, do what you need to do. And going back to earning your chips, if I needed to be gone for two hours, I was really committed to: if I need to make a sacrifice for personal, it’s never going to affect what my team can expect from me.

The waitlists were also so long that it could take three months to get into the next specialist. It wasn’t like I was off the desk five times a month. It was more like once every three months, going on this trail of breadcrumbs to figure out what was wrong.

Hannah: What finally gave you answers?

Sophia: I was connected with a functional practitioner who looks at the body systemically, how all of our organ systems and functional systems are interconnected, because so much of the decisions we make in our lifestyle don’t just affect one part of us. All of our organs are connected in a symphony rather than being individual systems separate from one another, which is kind of how Western medicine looks at things.

Within one intake, a really extensive blood panel, and about three weeks total, she said: you very clearly have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Because you’re 25 and this hasn’t been manifesting for long, it would be very hard to catch by traditional measures. But because we look at tighter biomarker ranges, we can detect it earlier.

We did an extensive lifestyle overhaul. An intense cleanse and gut healing protocol, eating an anti-inflammatory diet and also got serious about stress management. Then a few months later, we retook all of my biomarkers that pointed to autoimmunity and my Hashimotos’ had gone into remission.

Why she stayed in finance after the diagnosis (and doesn’t regret a single year)

Hannah: After the diagnosis and the lifestyle shift, you didn’t leave finance. You went deeper with PE, hedge funds, VC. Why stay?

Sophia: These careers can be super fulfilling and intellectually stimulating if you actually feel well enough to enjoy the fruits of your labor. I knew I could stay in finance and probably retire at 50 with a very healthy bank account but always have that proverbial angel and devil on my shoulder asking, did you take that bet on yourself? Or I could leave, walk away from a lot of stability, and never have to question the what if. As I sat with that, the what if just got heavier and heavier.

Hannah: You’ve said you’re pro-corporate, which is kind of unusual coming from someone who eventually left. What do you mean by that?

Sophia: Respectfully, I don’t think the world needs another generalized millennial health coach. I think we need health professionals with unique backgrounds who can deeply relate to the people they’re serving. I get asked a lot: do you regret your time in finance? Absolutely not. It’s what enabled me to serve this group of people (high-achievers) so deeply, to be so niche that it actually moves the needle for them.

The difference between “green juice wellness” and actually feeling good

Hannah: There’s a version of wellness that high achievers get caught up in, the green juice, the red light mask, the powders. You push back on that pretty directly.

Sophia: I am guilty of this, so I can say it. A lot of high achievers, top performers, type A recovering perfectionists, can get caught up in performative wellness. Those things are all well and good, but if your fundamentals, like your movement, your nutrition, your mental health, your baseline resiliency and mental safety are out of whack, then you’re just putting band-aids on a much larger problem. It can feel like you’re checking your wellness box. But it’s a much deeper conversation than what supplements you can add or what new workout class to try.

I always tell people: it doesn’t matter if you’re drinking a green juice or eating a slice of pizza. If you’re in chronic fight or flight, neither is going to help. You really have to get to the root of mental safety and feeling good in your internal and external environments.

Hannah: So what do you tell someone who’s in a high-pressure environment with limited time and wants to do more than just the green juice?

Sophia: Find your one to three practices that are actually exciting to you for your mental and emotional health, and figure out the easiest next right decision you can make to open up that practice. It probably doesn’t look like doing breath work for an hour every day. Maybe it looks like blocking five minutes between Zooms to open an app and do it.

Small, consistent changes will actually move the needle versus going in super hot and setting up something unsustainable. The same goes for running, if you’re telling yourself you’re going to run a marathon and you start shooting for long runs on a Monday afternoon, you’re setting yourself up for failure. There’s a level of practicality and realism that actually sets people up for success.

Why she waited until she could build from abundance

Hannah: You left your PE role in July 2024 to do Wall Street Wellness full-time. What finally tipped it?

Sophia: This would not have worked if I’d left when I was 25. First and foremost, I wouldn’t have had the professional credibility that I carry with my corporate and individual clients. But also from a practical financial angle, I worked on Wall Street, had really stable, high-paying jobs, and lived below my means. I was kind of buying my flexibility. I call it building from a place of abundance. If I needed to replace my salary day one of Wall Street Wellness, I don’t think it would be as intentional or as thoughtful as it is now, because good things take time. I bought myself the flexibility to build this in the best way I could.

Hannah: You’ve described having a calling as a blessing and a curse. What do you mean?

Sophia: I was never the person who wanted to be an entrepreneur or start their own company. If anything, I was like, “Well, this doesn’t exist, so I guess I need to create it.” I want to bring this into the world, so I guess I’ll have to start a business. A lot of people want to start a business and then back into what that business will be. I was very much vice versa.

It has led to a lot of incredible opportunities because it’s just really obvious to who we interact with that this is so service-based and driven from a place of care and excitement. That’s not something you see very often. It’s become almost like a superpower for us.

Hannah: What’s been harder than you expected about going from VP in private equity to running your own thing?

Sophia: I came from finance thinking, oh, I’m so dynamic, I know what it’s like to wear 10 different hats per day. I didn’t know shit. It is so dynamic. Maybe you’re doing different types of tasks in a narrow corporate role, but here it’s like: I’m the CTO for an hour, then I need to go be the CAO, then the COO, then the CEO, then the chief salesperson.

I honestly just call entrepreneurship personal development boot camp. It requires you to not just figure out what you’re good at, which is sometimes easier, but get really honest about where your weak spots are. And either get better at those things, or outsource them, or hire someone with skill sets complementary to your own. If I hired another Sophia, we’d be duplicative. It’s been incredibly stimulating. I’ve grown professionally, obviously, but personally, it’s unmatched. I’ve really uncovered who I am.

Sophia’s 3 non-negotiables for daily wellness

Hannah: You now have the strictest boss you’ve ever had, yourself. What are your actual non-negotiables for your own wellness?

Sophia: I try to make it practical and realistic. If I came out of the gate every day with a 20-step morning routine, I would fail by 7:30am. So I narrow it down to what actually makes a difference for me.

Number one is eating an anti-inflammatory diet. Really mindful around gluten and dairy, trying to get 30 to 40 different plants on my plate every week, eating organic, high quality plant and animal proteins. I can notice a 30% difference in how I show up mentally and physically on a day after I’ve eaten really clean versus a day where I was more laissez-faire. That’s non-negotiable number one.

Number two is I walk outside every day. Rain, sleet, snow, shine, and I was in New York City for a long time before Miami. It is truly the biggest anchor for my mental health. Getting outside, getting fresh air, resetting my perspective that the world is so much bigger than my nuclear experience.

And number three is meditation. I personally am very easy to get wired and wound up, shoulders up to here, jaw cramping with tension. I am primed for that state. A lot of this work I’ve had to learn so deeply myself because that high-cortisol, high-tension state is like my nervous system’s comfort zone. But it’s not the comfort zone for any of my other bodily systems, so we had to figure that out.

Connect with Sophia on Instagram, Substack, and LinkedIn!

• Incubator Lead – New Gravity (Philanthropy, Startup, NYC)

• Venture & Growth Associate – Galvanize Climate Solutions (Climate/VC, Early Stage, NY/SF)

• Ghostbuster – Deel (HR Tech, Late Stage, Remote)

• Chief of Staff – TEN (Think Tanks, Early Stage, Denver)

• Strategic Alliances Lead – Tabs (FinTech, Growth Stage)

• PE Partnerships Manager – Tabs (FinTech, Growth Stage)

• Strategy Associate – Global Payments (FinTech, Public)

• Senior Manager, Global Youth Digital Safety & Wellbeing – Google.org (Philanthropy, Public)

• Chief of Staff – Profound (AI, Growth Stage, NYC)

• Programs and Business Operations Lead – Airbnb (Travel/Tech, Public)

• Forward Deployed AI Accelerator, Marketing – Stripe (FinTech, Late Stage, NY)

• Growth Manager, Organic – Leland (EdTech, Growth Stage, Lehi UT)

• The LinkedIn Opportunity Most People Still Don’t See

• Smaller is Better - Two person teams

• From Hierarchy to Intelligence

  

• my resources

• Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people forging nonlinear paths.

Subscribe now

I was at a wedding this weekend where several friends and acquaintances told me they had watched my recent Instagram videos about being “low status, high income.”

One even said it was giving her a lot to think about as she considered her next job.

This was a Wharton wedding. MBAs, consultants, bankers, people in tech - all high achieving, all who have spent their careers optimizing for prestige and equating status with wealth. When you’re that credentialed, status is hard to renounce. It’s your currency to be seen as peers with your social set, and until now it’s been your precursor to wealth.

So when even this crowd starts listening, I know the status game isn’t working.

The status-income matrix

The status-income matrix is a cross-section of how much society respects you versus how much you earn.

The x-axis is income, the y-axis is status. Two of the quadrants make sense. The other two don’t.

The two that make sense, because most of us have been trained to equate status with income:

• Low status, low income (fast food workers, cashiers, a lot of blue collar jobs)

• High status, high income (doctors, lawyers, bankers, engineers)

The two that don’t:

• High status, low income: nonprofit work, artists, journalists, teachers

• Low status, high income: solopreneurs, small business acquirers, people in crypto, content creators

These counterintuitive quadrants didn’t appear by accident. To understand how they got created and why the gap between status and income is growing, we have to first start with why we equate the two at all.

Seeking status as a proxy for wealth is human instinct

Naval Ravikant’s tweet storm “How to Get Rich” explains the historical reason humans value status:

“On an evolutionary basis, if you go back thousands of years, status is a much better predictor of survival than wealth is. You couldn’t have wealth before the farming age because you couldn’t store things. Hunter-gatherers carried everything on their backs. So, hunter-gatherers lived in entirely status based societies. Farmers started going to wealth-based societies. And the modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth-based societies.”

So we’re wired for status first, wealth second. Once wealth started to matter, status became the signal we used to predict it. The Ivy degree, the brand-name employer, the right LinkedIn title. If you have those things, the assumption is the money follows. Sometimes it does, but sometimes you’re a journalist lunching on expense accounts with celebrities and wondering if you can make rent.

Institutions created high status, low income work

David Brooks published a piece in 1996 called The Tragedy of SID, or “status-income disequilibrium” - about what happens when the status signal and the wealth reality come apart. It’s the best explanation I’ve read for what created this quadrant.

His “sufferers” of SID include journalists, editors, news producers, and museum curators who are like “aristocrats” at work, lunching on expense accounts with the famous, but “like peasants” at home wondering if they can afford the bills. An army general might command 100,000 men but drive a Honda Accord.

Brooks traces this to “the proximity to wealth combined with the inability to match it,” but some of these fields also disequilibrate status and income by design. Teachers and nurses pay a “passion tax”. The tradition of starving artists receiving patronage from the wealthy stretches back centuries. UN internships are highly coveted but unpaid, available mainly to people who can already afford to be there.

The high status, low income job is a product of institutions that gave people status but kept the wealth for themselves.

Then the internet flipped that dynamic.

The rise of low status, high income work

A NY Mag piece that went around last month was a great example. They published the salaries of 60 New Yorkers, and some of the highest earners were jobs that barely existed, or weren’t that well paid, before the internet: ghostwriters, Substack writers, content creators. Ghostwriters and substackers out-earned bestselling authors. Exterminators out-earned nonprofit directors.

The internet has been the biggest innovation since Brooks wrote his article thirty years ago. Through the internet, more people no longer need institutions to vouch for their credibility or pay for traditional distribution of their work. Status becomes less necessary for building wealth.

And the people stuck in high status, low income jobs have a new out: the attention economy. Political aides can write tell-all memoirs. Laid-off journalists can launch Substacks. Often for much higher incomes than their prior high status institutions paid them.

The endpoint of this shift is when the originally low status jobs start getting perceived as high status.

That’s already happening. 68% of Gen Alpha want to be content creators. I had dozens of angry commenters on my videos saying I was ridiculous for calling content creation “low status”.

AI is accelerating all of this further, and we’re in the first innings.

You used to have to be a FAANG engineer to be a high status, high income software builder, but that’s breaking down with vibe coding. Physical jobs like plumbing and electrical work are starting to feel scarce in a way they haven’t in decades.

Status is, at its core, a proxy for scarcity, and the internet and AI are reshuffling what’s scarce.

The predicament of high status, high income

A lot of high achievers spent their careers in the top two quadrants. We’re conditioned to value the the degree, the fancy title, the feeling of importance. The unspoken assumption is that status and wealth are two sides of the same coin. By pursuing status, we in turn get wealth.

So the highest achieving people pursue the high status quadrants, which means more competition, more burnout, and a lot of people who stay stuck not because they’re happy or well compensated, but because the pull of status keeps them there.

As elite, large companies from Morgan Stanley to BCG to KPMG keep downsizing, this dynamic only intensifies as the same number of people compete for fewer and fewer jobs.

Why low status, high income jobs are the hidden opportunity

For the formerly high status, accepting low status is the underrated path to high income. A few reasons why:

First, less competition. A lot of low status roles have fewer qualified people going after them, which means more room to grow and less of a ceiling on what you can earn.

Second, your background commands a premium because it’s rare in that world. For example, an HVAC small business looking for someone to run finance and operations isn’t usually getting credentialed former bankers applying. When you do show up, you get paid for that scarcity. Your rigor, your pace, your analytical instincts add more value to industries where the bar is lower than what you’re used to.

Third, the income upside is often nonlinear in a way high status jobs aren’t. You might take a pay cut and a status cut at first. But you end up in industries with more room to grow than you’d have fighting for your share of a shrinking pool at the top because the opportunity is early and feels “beneath” the high status.

How to play the wealth game (not the status game)

If you’re ready to move to the low status, high income quadrant of work, wrote a post last year on 11 career paths where high achievers have an unfair advantage, many of which I now realize map to this quadrant. Not all of them are traditional “jobs” - much of the low status, high income world requires some degree of entrepreneurship.

A few principles for succeeding here:

1. Build and monetize a specific skill. This path is less about the title and more about what you’re uniquely good at. Naval writes about this a lot. The goal is a skill so specific that no one can really compete with you on it.

2. Create multiple income streams. High status job seekers tend to optimize for a prestigious base salary. But the average millionaire has multiple income streams. By diversifying how you earn, you stop tying your financial ceiling to a single job title.

3. Invest for the long run. Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money makes the case that some of the wealthiest people are not flashy spenders or high-status signallers. They make disciplined, boring investments that compound. The status game encourages spending. The wealth game rewards patience.

4. Look beyond the base salary. A lot of high-status job seekers only evaluate base pay. Commissions, bonuses, and opportunities to monetize your own expertise often don’t exist in elite jobs that require your full loyalty. Low status, high income paths tend to have more of these.

5. Use status as a tool, not a destination. It’s easier than ever to build a personal brand and manufacture credibility. That can give you proximity to opportunity and eventually to wealth, as long as you don’t confuse the signal for the goal.

As Naval Ravikant put it: “play the wealth game, not the status game”.

Status and wealth aren’t equal. This is just the beginning of the disequilibrium.

• Chief of Staff to the COO – Coinbase (Fintech, Public)

• Builder – Replit (AI, Growth Stage, SF)

• Strategic Consultant – Applied Intuition (AI, Late Stage, SF)

• Chief of Staff to CEO – Alma (LegalTech, Startup, SF)

• GTM & Deployment Lead – Felicity (SaaS, Startup, NY)

• Chief of Staff – Atlas (HealthTech, Startup, SF)

• Strategic Product Operations – Stealth (SaaS, Early Stage, Remote)

• Solutions Lead – AI for Good – The Conduit (AI, Fellowship, Hybrid - London/NY)

• GTM Associate / Analyst – Basis (AI, Late Stage, NY)

• Sales Strategy and Operations Manager – Kong (Sales, Growth Stage, Remote)

• Venture Relations Associate - AngelList (Fintech, Public, Hybrid - NY)

• tarot card inspired career card game

• my resources

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people forging nonlinear paths.

Short note this week! I want to share something I’ve been working on for you and why I built it.

Every week, someone in banking, consulting, or some other high-paying, prestigious-on-paper job asks me a version of the same question: “How do you actually leave?”

And I always want to say: you just quit. That’s how.

But I remember being so deep in it in banking that I couldn't picture what that would even look like. The “how” is much more complicated than it sounds.

I would make up my mind to leave after working 20 hours straight.

Then I would see my paycheck come in. A week would pass.

I would decide to quit after being berated for a missing footnote at 10pm. Then I would hesitate again because I couldn’t imagine making less money.

I would wait until the next paycheck and tell myself it would get easier. Or that I could just apply for an MBA and leave then. So on and so forth.

The whole time, I was trying to consume my way into clarity.

I thought that if I just found the right framework or heard the right story, I’d finally know what to do and have the courage to do it. That the money wouldn’t matter if I just had enough “clarity”.

I would feel briefly motivated after consuming the content, then go right back to work. Until the next month, the next bonus, the next performance review.

The thing I wish someone had told me then:

I was never going to get to solving the clarity problem until I proved to myself that leaving made financial sense.

I had a math problem to solve to first.

If you’re looking to leave a prestigious-on-paper, high-paying job that makes you feel like you have the proverbial golden handcuffs on, you have the same math problem to solve.

There are 3 numbers most people in your position never calculate:

Your true hourly rate. Not what’s on your offer letter — what you actually earn per hour. Real comp divided by real hours, with nights and weekends. Time you spend worrying and panicking about work. Mine in banking ended up being only $50 an hour.

Your replacement number. The income you’d actually need to maintain your life if you left. Not your salary — your real expenses once you strip out everything you spend because of the job. The apartment near the office, the dinners, the wardrobe. Most people find that it’s 40-60% of what they’re making now because so much of the status tax disappears with the job.

Your stagnation cost. What staying is already costing you — in skills you’re not building, positioning that gets harder to explain every year, experience in the thing you keep saying you’ll start when the timing is better. If you’ve already made up your mind to leave, every month you stay is a month you’re not compounding in the right direction.

None of these numbers are on your paycheck or offer letter. No one builds a spreadsheet for them.

But my “high-paying job” was costing me $120K a year.

My true hourly rate in banking was a fraction of what I made in my next job. After quitting, I saved and invested much more even though I made less. I started learning and growing in a field, where 5 years later, my unique skillset allowed me to build a secure 9-5 and 5-9.

Your numbers might be higher or lower than mine.

Come do the math with 800+ people next week.

I’m hosting a free live training on Tuesday, March 24 @ 7pm EST.

The Real Math Behind Your Golden Handcuffs (And What to Do About It)

Let’s see what numbers look like for you.

»» Sign up ««

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people forging nonlinear paths.

Subscribe now

This week’s newsletter is a guest post from my friends Alex and Gerta, co-founders of YourNegotiations.com.

A year ago, Alex and I met after he commented on my Instagram post that went viral about learning the concept of BATNA in my Wharton negotiations class. Turns out, he also went to Wharton a few years before me, also worked as a product marketer in tech, and now runs YourNegotiations.com with Gerta, helping high-earning people in tech and startups (as well as founders) negotiate salaries and deals.

Alex and Gerta are both nonlinear career people. Alex was in the military before Wharton, and DJs on the side (he’s opened for the Chainsmokers!). Gerta has worked across startups and founded her own companies. And they run the whole thing together as a husband-wife team, which honestly feels closer to how work was done for most of human history, before the corporate era split everything into "work life" and "home life."

I learn a lot every week from their negotiations newsletter, so I asked them to write something specifically for you. A lot of you assume that changing careers means taking a pay cut or losing leverage. It doesn’t. Their advice breaks down how to think about negotiation when you’re in transition, and how not to sell yourself short.

Why career changers undervalue themselves

We’re in a peculiar job market. Yes it’s competitive, but it can be surprisingly unpredictable. For instance, several of our clients have received initial job offers at a lower title or level than at their last job, at comparable companies, but we’ve been able to help them negotiate compensation packages that are even higher than what they were making before. Old assumptions like “changing careers automatically means taking a step back financially” are no longer true.

We see these assumptions often held especially by people moving from finance, consulting, or big tech into new fields they’re genuinely excited about. But because they don’t check every box in the job description, they start the process already feeling like they should be flexible, grateful, or cautious about pushing too hard when negotiating their offers.

This mindset tends to show up early in the job search, sometimes without them even realizing it. And once they start interviewing, it impacts how negotiations unfold later.

The good news is that a career pivot doesn’t erase your leverage. But you do need to be thoughtful about how you carry yourself through the process.

Lay the groundwork early

A common misconception is that you start negotiating when the company extends an offer. However, you start shaping your future compensation far before that, sometimes as early as the online application itself when you’re asked for your preferred compensation (we wrote in this past newsletter about how to answer the salary question on the job application).

Here are a few things we strongly recommend that career changers keep in mind throughout the job search.

Be careful with early compensation questions

Sharing your preferred salary number will never help you, except in very rare edge cases.

Imagine that negotiations are like a game of cards, and the cards in your hand are your leverage. Your preferred salary number is a powerful card, and it’s hard to win the game by revealing it. The company has their own cards too, such as the “true max budget for this role” card, and they will never proactively reveal their cards either.

Note that in many US states, companies are mandated by law to share their salary range on job postings. These salary ranges are not truthful, as most companies follow the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.

So if you share your number first, it will either:

• fall below the top of their budget. And they may agree to it, but you’ve now left money on the table, because the company knows that you’d be open to accepting less than what they’ve budgeted for.

• fall above the top of their budget. This introduces risk that they think you’re entitled, can’t afford you, or feel that you’re too far apart that you won’t be happy in the role even if you did accept. You’re a higher flight risk if you’re unhappy in the role, and companies want to hire people who will be there for the long term.

Some more reasons why sharing a number first is risky:

• Limits your bargaining power: If you share your number upfront, you may be limiting your bargaining power later in the negotiation process. Once you’ve disclosed your desired salary, the company may be less willing to negotiate higher than that figure.

• Lack of information: You may not have all the information you need to make an informed decision about your desired compensation until later in the interview process. By sharing a number upfront, you risk locking yourself into an end result based on incomplete information.

• Perception of being inflexible: If you share a number upfront, especially if it ends up being far above their budget, you may be perceived as inflexible or difficult to work with. This might not be the case, but perception can be just as important as reality in the hiring and negotiation process.

• Different compensation structures: Different companies may have different compensation structures, including stock options versus shares, vesting periods and cliffs, stock buyback windows, various bonus types, commission-based pay, and more. Sharing a number doesn’t necessarily capture these complexities, so you may be missing opportunities later to arrive at creative solutions that will make the offer worth accepting.

On that note, sharing a range is very similar to sharing a number, because when you share a range, you’re implying the bottom of your range is an acceptable amount to you. So we recommend not sharing a range either.

If you’re asked for a number or range early on, tactfully deflect sharing it and instead say something like: “Thank you for asking! I’m currently focused on exploring that this is a mutually good fit. I’m confident we can align on compensation.”

There are many ways you can phrase deflections, and much of it depends on your unique circumstances, whether you’re in between jobs or currently working, the company culture, the demeanor of the recruiter, if you were referred, whether you have an existing relationship with the hiring manager or someone from the team, and more. You can book a free call with us to get specific tips for your situation.

Avoid oversharing in general

What makes someone a great employee in most jobs nowadays but also makes them bad at negotiations? Oversharing.

It’s virtually guaranteed that you’ll get pushback from the company whenever you refrain from sharing something.

That includes your current or past compensation, the details of other offers you’ve received, or other opportunities you’re considering. Note: it’s illegal in many US states for employers to ask for your salary history.

Being transparent can feel collaborative, but it often gives away information that’s hard to take back. We’ve written before here about how overcommunication is a common trait shared by high performers but bad negotiators, and what to do instead.

Negotiating well signals that you’d make a strong hire

Being overly transparent comes at another cost. You may think you’re being trusting and collaborative, but it can also signal that you cave under pressure, you may be too people pleasing, you may not know how and when to be strategic, and you may not have the skills needed to handle challenging conversations, all of which are important traits companies look for when hiring.

Imagine that you accepted the first offer a company made you without negotiating. It could get the hiring manager thinking, “This candidate just said yes to the first offer. Is this how they’re going to handle their work with cross-functional teams across the company, business partners, external vendors, investors?”

Many years ago, Gerta negotiated her job offer against a tough and driven hiring manager. Once Gerta started the job, that manager put her in charge of the team’s most important and highest-priority projects, telling Gerta, “I remember how you negotiated your offer, so I trust you to lead this work.”

Negotiating your offer well doesn’t happen in a vacuum during the job search. It also reflects how your manager and team will perceive you in the job, as someone with competence and strong business acumen.

Always show excitement for the role

You can never show too much enthusiasm. We’ve sometimes been asked, “If I show too much enthusiasm, doesn’t that make me seem desperate for the job and thus lose leverage?” or “I have multiple offers, isn’t it better to play hard to get and pit the companies against each other when negotiating?”

No. Companies want to hire people who will be excited to work there. That means you’ll be motivated in the job, onramp quickly, and be a pleasant co-worker to work alongside. If you’re playing it cool, a company may interpret that as you not being fully committed, that you’re using them as leverage for another opportunity that excites you more, or that you won’t be a good culture fit.

Showing enthusiasm is even more important in today’s tough job market. Competition for roles is especially tough, and many jobs are getting hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants. By the time a company has whittled down to a final list of candidates for a particular role, every candidate on that list more than meets the qualifications or technical skills required for the job. So what’s the differentiator that has them choose someone over others? At that point, it often comes down to whether they think they’ll like working with you.

On mindset: you have more leverage than you may think

Unfortunately, the norms around the recruiting and negotiation process naturally favor employers because job applicants assume that the companies hold all the cards. This can feel truer if you’re switching career tracks and feel brand new to the industry.

But remember, you as a competitive candidate have leverage too with your experience, qualifications, and optionality (i.e. you should always apply to multiple roles when job searching; never just one at a time).

Negotiating may feel risky, but reframing the process for yourself can have you show up in all your conversations from a more empowered state of mind. You’re not asking a company for favors, but you’re exploring together to find a win-win deal for all parties involved.

For more about how to get into the negotiation mindset, we covered this in-depth in this past newsletter.

More resources

Changing careers can feel like you’re starting over, but don’t let this move convince you that you don’t have leverage.

For more tips and resources if you’re job searching:

• Transition Doc - If you’re leaving your job soon, download our free template to organize and handoff your work to your backfills (your coworkers will thank you!)

• Book a free call for tailored job search and negotiation advice for your situation

• Subscribe to our weekly negotiation newsletter

• Download our free worksheet to keep handy during your job interviews

• GTM Engineer – Casper Studios (AI, Bootstrapped, Remote)

• Faculty Lead & Learning Engineer – Outsmart (Education, Early Stage, LA/SF/UT)

• Consultant - AI and Semiconductors – SemiAnalysis (AI, Growth Stage, Remote)

• Finance and Business Operations Manager – OpenRouter (Infrastructure, Growth Stage, Remote)

• Chief of Staff – Stealth (Life Sciences, Late Stage, Remote)

• Network Engagement Specialist, Harvard Innovation Labs – Harvard University (Education, Public, Hybrid - MA)

• Strategy & Growth Leader – Stealth (Pet Health & Nutrition, Series B, Hybrid - NY)

• Chief of Staff – Strange Ventures (Deep Tech, Startup, SF)

• GTM Manager (Customer Success) – Axle (Finance, Series B, NY)

• GTM Strategy and Ops – Mercor (AI, Series A, Hybrid - SF)

• Legal Operations Lead – Medibank (Insurance, Public, VIC)

• Bits in, bits out

• I’ll say it one more f*cking time: Be so delusional reality has no choice but to bend to your vision

• How to start a one-person business in 2026 (things changed)

• ❓Take my career exit quiz

• my resources

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people forging nonlinear paths.

Subscribe now

Julia Lynch Eckstein is the kind of person who, if you told her you were thinking about leaving consulting to do something that doesn’t map cleanly to a job title, would pull out her phone and connect you with three people before you finished your thought.

Julia and I met through following each other’s content on Instagram, and she was one of the first people who introduced me to the idea of a portfolio career.

She spent years in strategy consulting while building a career and personal branding strategy practice and a content platform with 160K+ followers. She left her consulting job in August 2024 to go all-in on her portfolio career.

Funny enough, we’re both (unofficially and officially) part of the Wharton community. Julia’s husband graduated with his MBA from Wharton a year ahead of me. Julia (who was very much part of Wharton student community during her two years in Philly) and I immediately bonded over how the cut-and-dry “MBA —> high-earning career success” path no longer exists. We both strongly believe that MBA programs need to catch up to the market—and not only teach students how to get a job, but build a portfolio career.

We got into how her career transition materialized, why she doesn’t call herself a coach, her concept of “relationship currency,” and what high achievers get wrong when they’re stuck.

If you’re thinking about building something on the side, curious about a portfolio career, looking to pivot, or just want to get better at networking — I think you’ll get a lot out of our conversation.

Following the herd (and realizing it wasn’t working)

Hannah: You went to NYU and then Kellogg, and then into strategy consulting. What were you initially looking for when you jumped into that path?

Julia: I was following the herd, honestly. I graduated from NYU and worked abroad in Asia for a year. I come from a family of lawyers. I’m actually the only non-lawyer in my family. The expected path was that Julia’s going to work abroad for a year and then go to law school.

I took the LSAT, scored well, but I just thought the content was so boring. I’ve always been really entrepreneurial, so I decided to go to business school and become a management consultant. You get so much business experience as a consultant, and it’s a great way to learn about businesses.

I ended up doing a Master of Management program at Kellogg. For any undergrad who’s not sure what they want to do and has a liberal arts degree, I highly recommend a program like this. The Kellogg program is now only open to current Northwestern students, but there are similar programs at Duke Fuqua and Michigan Ross. My undergrad was media, culture, and communication, so I needed some of that foundational business acumen. Coming out of the program, people either took the consulting path or the investment banking path. I figured slide decks were more aligned to my skillset than sitting in front of Excel all day. I never took calculus. Math was not my thing.

But from the beginning, consulting wasn’t aligned with my skill set. I felt like a paper pusher. I always felt like my strengths were really in brand strategy, people, communication. I was always the person people went to for career advice. Even when I was living in Asia, I was doing a little bit of that work with people who were much more senior to me.

What the pandemic changed

Hannah: When did you first start thinking about doing something beyond your day job?

Julia: During the pandemic, I was living in my parents’ basement like everyone. I was 27, single, coming home from work, watching Bravo, going on horrible dates. I just thought, I don’t think this is what your 20s should be like. I think I have more to give, and I don’t think consulting is for me.

So I started sharing on social media. Things I liked. I’m a big reader, I love listening to podcasts. I didn’t show my face at first, and I was just speaking to things I enjoyed. I had maybe 200 followers.

Then Covid hit and I said, this is an opportunity to give back. I was only working about 20 hours a week in consulting, so I had the bandwidth. I put it out to my 200 followers: if you’ve been laid off due to Covid, I will help you. I’ll do your resume. I’ll connect you to recruiters I know.

That turned into recruiting 65 volunteers. We were on national news. And then people started coming to me saying, “You’re really good at this. I’ve worked with executive coaches and career coaches before, but I want to pay you.”

It really turned from an act of service into a business, which is not the typical trajectory.

Balancing the day job with the thing you’re actually excited about

Hannah: There was quite a gap between when you started doing this on the side and when you went full time. How did you balance that?

Julia: Because I had a full-time job, there were natural limits on my time. But knowing there was something greater ahead of me, and feeling like day to day at my day job I was just kind of not over-performing, I got really excited about what I was doing for individuals and what I was sharing on social media.

I also felt that in consulting, I was no longer learning. And I think that’s the point where a lot of people feel like something needs to change. My advice would be: don’t let that feeling of “I’m not learning” persist for a long time, because your career is only so long and things accelerate very quickly. It’s easy to get trapped in patterns where you’re just clocking in and clocking out.

I’m not a parent, and I know you’re not either. I personally feel like these precious years before you have kids, you should be going to bed exhausted. I’m in this data collection year, speaking to people who run businesses or are really successful women in my network who do have kids. And you have natural limits on your time once that happens. So if you’re reading this and you don’t have kids, this should be your time to be exploring, doing, thinking before you have those limits.

Hannah: I really like that perspective. It’s stepping out from your day-to-day and looking at it with a different lens.

Building the portfolio career (and not picking one lane)

Hannah: You started posting on social media initially to feed your curiosity and share things you were learning. Then during Covid it evolved to career coaching. Now you also do personal brand strategy. Did all of those things develop naturally?

Julia: All the things I do dovetail really naturally together. Each pillar of my portfolio career informs the others and makes me better at each one.

Instagram and social media, yes, it’s a way for me to reach people I might not ever interact with one to one. But it’s also allowed me to build a network and friendships with people who I’m naturally aligned with and intellectually curious about. I was really looking for that when I started posting, because all of my friends were in relationships and my social life changed overnight. I almost created my own friendship circle from Instagram.

I have people I’ve met through Instagram that I’ve never met in person, who I consider dear friends, who we’ve helped each other immensely with our businesses. So if someone is looking to start a content presence, I’d say it’s not only for the views. It’s for the depth of relationships you’re going to get out of it. Relationship currency is core to everything I do, and it’s something people don’t talk about enough as a creator.

Your network is your job insurance

Hannah: I love that term, relationship currency. How do you define that?

Julia: I really believe your network is your job insurance. We have medical insurance, right? If I got hit by a car tomorrow, I’d have the fallback that my hospital bills would be covered. But a lot of people don’t think about their network the same way. It’s just, “Oh, this is something I have to do if I’m laid off or want to change careers.”

It should always be an undercurrent to what you’re doing. Layoffs are uncertain. AI is changing the way we work. Thinking of relationship currency, I really think of it as: if my business went away tomorrow, God forbid, would I have relationships and people who trust my expertise, where I could start from zero? Whether you’re an entrepreneur or in corporate, that same mindset should apply.

Letting go of prestige

Hannah: You went from management consultant to career coach, personal branding, content creation. Consulting is something a lot of people really aspire to. How did you step out of that prestigious position?

Julia: It was something I really struggled with. Even meeting some of my husband’s Wharton classmates, many of them didn’t know I had this business. Because those spaces are very much about your McKinsey, your Bain, your BCG. Those are the measures.

But ultimately I had to get over it and realize I was bored. I was never going to be a top 1% management consultant. Your career should be about optimizing for your God-given natural abilities. Mine are not sitting in front of decks, moving something 1 millimeter to the right, sitting in front of Excel.

A lot of people are wedded to “this is the path that should make me a lot of money.” But if you take a step back and think about what skills you have, you might not have that title, but you’re going to have more financial stability, more money, everything. A lot of career stuff is about perception. “I don’t want to move to this startup because I’ve had five amazing brands on my resume.” Well, ultimately, you’re the architect of that. If you want to live a specific life, you kind of have to let go of what people think of you.

I’ve talked to partners in consulting and managing directors in investment banking who wish they took risks earlier. That small AI startup, a completely different industry, entrepreneurship through acquisition. But they didn’t because they were wedded to that perception.

Not your typical career coach

Hannah: What drew you to career coaching specifically? I think something interesting about your branding is that you’re a very different type of coach - most people in consulting and finance don’t have the best perception of career coaches. How did you think about that when you started?

Julia: I don’t even like calling myself a coach because it’s kind of schlocky. It’s the same kind of label as “recruiter.” What I find in the career coaching space is that a lot of coaches operate more like therapists. My mom is a therapist, and of course there is a time and place for that. But there’s a missing piece: who are the individuals who can understand your skill set, map out your life goals, figure out where you operate in the top 1%, and help you activate your own network and social capital?

I call myself a career and personal brand strategist, because when you’re thinking about the next stage of your career, your personal brand is embedded in that.

My approach to clients is networking and storytelling. I won’t take on a client if I’m not comfortable introducing them to someone in my network and saying, “Hannah, this individual is going to add value to you. This person would be a value add for the role your startup is hiring for.” That’s very different from coaches who work with people in isolation.

A lot of my clients have gotten jobs through connections I’ve made for them. I don’t sell myself as a recruiter. But I say that when you exit our relationship, you’re not only going to have a stronger approach to networking and storytelling, you’re going to have core relationships you can bring into this next chapter. No one else really takes that approach.

What people get wrong about networking

Hannah: For a lot of people, when they hear networking, they think it’s gross and transactional. What do you think they’re getting wrong?

Julia: Networking is not always going to be an even value exchange. You might be a student trying to network with someone three levels senior. What’s a piece of value you can bring? Look at their LinkedIn. Maybe they’re into sports. Maybe they’re a restaurant fan. Recommend a restaurant you went to. Say, “I just graduated from college. Are you doing any research around Gen Z?” There are creative ways to position yourself as someone of value versus just thinking, “I’m not on the same plane as this person, so I’m intimidated.”

The other thing is follow-up and follow-through. I’ve talked to many senior leaders who have this “great little black book” but only reach out when they need something. They’re not making those relationships personal. They’re not following up and adding value at every turn.

If you can give something without the expectation of receiving, that’s when things come back to you. That’s how your career really grows.

On the 2026 job market and being “risk on”

Hannah: You work with a lot of high-achieving people. What would you say is the most important thing people need to understand about the job market right now?

Julia: Number one: be visible. I’m not saying become a content creator. But post on LinkedIn once a month. Go to a networking event. Meet individuals. Get some fresh blood in your life. Foster relationships externally as well as internally.

Also, the levers of wealth building are changing. The traditional consulting and investment banking paths, those are still paths to wealth, but have those salaries kept up with inflation? Absolutely not. So think about where people are earning a lot and whether you’re okay taking a risk.

In your career, with great risk comes great reward. If someone is 27, doesn’t have kids, and wants to make a big career shift, that’s the time to take a bet on a startup where they can really supercharge their skill set. That’s the time to move to a different city or do a boot camp in a new industry with growth potential.

Think of your career like an investment portfolio. At our age, we’re risk on. When we’re 60, we’re going to have the most boring portfolio of all time. If you think of yourself as a product and align your career the same way, you’re going to achieve success.

If you’re stuck and not sure what’s next

Hannah: For someone who’s a high achiever, willing to be risk on, but feeling stuck and not even sure what that next step would be, what would be your advice?

Julia: Do an accounting of your expenses. What does it take you to live? What is your lowest operating cost?

Then think about who in your life is thriving. Approach them and be vulnerable about your career ambitions and how they got to where they are. Applying for jobs is one thing, but collecting data from people who already trust you and know your skill set is ultimately going to open doors. Network with your close circle first, then expand to people outside of that who are willing to take a bet on your social currency and have a conversation with you.

Subscribe to Career Confessionals

If you’re curious about high-paying, non-conventional careers, Julia recently launched a Substack series called Career Confessionals. It spotlights professionals under 45 earning $250K+ in niche careers…and gives you a roadmap to replicate that same path for yourself. It is one of the few Substacks I pay for (and it’s worth every penny of the $5/month). I LOVED the first one about a meth addict turned millionaire 👀

Connect with Julia on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn!

• Director, Operations Strategy – Create (Consumer Health & Wellness, Startup, NY)

• BizOps – Salient (Fintech, Series A, SF)

• Analyst/Associate – Equal Ventures (Venture Capital, Early Stage, NY)

• Content Engineer – Virio (Technology, Startup, SF)

• Senior Strategy & Operations Associate, Growth Strategy – Lyra Health (Mental Health, Growth Stage, Remote)

• Chief of Staff – Superpower (Healthtech, Series A, SF)

• Strategy Lead, Global Membership – Uber One (Rideshare, Public Company, Hybrid - NY/SF)

• Chief of Staff – Stealth (Startup, NYC/Remote)

• Operations – Relay (Fintech, Growth Stage)

• Founding Growth Associate – Plot (Software, Seed Stage, NY)

• Product Finance & Strategy Manager – Nextdoor (Social Network, Public Company, Hybrid - SF)

• Strategy & Operations, Enterprise Business Partner – Anthropic (AI, Late Stage, Hybrid - SF/NY)

• Chief of Staff to CEO – Ashaki (Fashion & Media, Startup, SF)

• How to build a profitable personal brand in 30 days

• The Brand Age (Paul Graham)

• Labor market impacts of AI (Anthropic)

• Forum: B2B startup accelerator for idea-stage founders

• ❓Take my career exit quiz

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people with unconventional paths.

📣📣 TAKE MY CAREER EXIT QUIZ 📣📣

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while (or even if you just found me), there's a good chance you're thinking about making a career move. After talking to hundreds of you about your career transitions, I started noticing the same 4 patterns. I turned it into a 2-minute quiz that tells you your exit type and what to actually do next.

What's your exit type? →

I posted a video this week that resonated with a lot of people - articles for people figuring out what’s next in their career, so I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss them.

I think these resonated because they’re the kind of smart career advice that feels like a rare find for those of us who are ambitious but want to succeed on our own terms, so “normal” career advice doesn’t usually fit the bill. Some of these articles feel tech and startup coded because of who they come from (the founders of YC and a16z), but I think the ideas are bigger than that and applicable to anyone with a nonlinear, portfolio career.

These are 5 articles that shaped how I think about my career post banking and tech - here’s a quick overview of each, who each one is for, and what I took away.

I’m curious: have you read any of these? Which ones resonated most? I’m always looking for stuff like this, so if you have articles or books that helped you figure out your own path, send them my way.

1. “How to Do What You Love” by Paul Graham

Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, and this essay is one of the most-read things he’s ever written. It’s about why smart people end up in careers they don’t actually enjoy, and what to do about it.

The part that changed my thinking was what he says about prestige. When I was in banking, I couldn’t articulate why I’d chosen it beyond “it was the hardest thing to get into.” Graham puts words to that:

“Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”

That line is what made me realize I chose my career for the wrong reason. I didn’t love banking. I loved that other people were impressed by it.

Who this is for: If you picked your job because it was competitive to get, or because it looks good on Linkedin (formerly guilty of both…), read this.

2. “Hell Yeah or No” by Derek Sivers

This one is short and it’s a framework more than an essay. The idea: if you’re not saying “hell yeah!” to an opportunity, say no.

This is useful because sometimes we have an easier time knowing what we don’t want than what we do. And if you’re someone who says yes to everything because you’re afraid of missing out on the right thing, this reframes the problem.

Who this is for: The person with 14 tabs open, three job applications half-finished, and a Google Doc of unfinished side project ideas. If you’re spread thin and can’t figure out what to focus on, start here.

3. “How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)” by Tim Urban

This is a long one (it’s Wait But Why, so expect stick figures and 10,000 words), but it’s the most thorough thing I’ve read on why career decisions feel so paralyzing.

Tim Urban has this concept called the Yearning Octopus. The idea is that you have all these different parts of yourself that want different things at the same time. Your ego wants prestige. Your lifestyle tentacle wants comfort. Your social tentacle wants your family’s approval. Your practical tentacle wants financial security. And they’re all pulling in different directions.

The key insight is that you have to untangle which yearnings are actually yours and which ones belong to someone else - your parents, your peers, society. Most people never do that. They just follow whichever tentacle is loudest.

Who this is for: If you feel pulled in ten directions and can’t make a decision, this will help you understand why. It’s especially good for people early in a career transition who feel paralyzed.

4. “Make Your Work Your Calling” by Arthur C. Brooks

This feels like the most pragmatic one on the list, and it’s for a different stage than the others. The articles above are about figuring out what you want. This one is about what to do when you already know your current job isn’t it, but you can’t leave yet.

Brooks’ argument is that you don’t need to wait for your calling to find you. You can turn whatever work you’re doing into your calling by focusing on what’s intrinsically interesting about it and finding ways to serve the people around you.

I know that sounds a little idealistic, but I actually think it’s a good bridge for people who feel stuck. You don’t have to love your job to get something real out of it while you figure out your next move.

Who this is for: If you’re not ready to quit but need to stop dreading Monday mornings while you plan your exit.

5. “Pmarca Guide to Career Planning” by Marc Andreessen

I saved my favorite for last. Marc Andreessen is the co-founder of a16z and one of the most influential people in tech.

His core advice: don’t plan your career.

“Do not plan your career. Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities. I believe you should look at your career as a portfolio of jobs/roles/opportunities.”

This resonates with me because it’s basically how my career has worked, even though I didn’t plan it that way. I went from banking to tech to startups to business school to content creation, and none of that was on a five-year plan. Each move made sense at the time because I was following skills and opportunities, not a predetermined path.

This is just the first part of Marc’s career advice - the other parts delve into more tactical advice like how to pick degrees and job functions. Great read all around.

Who this is for: Anyone who’s driven and talented but feels behind because their career doesn’t look like a clean ladder.

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis - the infamous viral “stock market fanfiction” this week

• Unoptimized - love these mini essays from Quartermile!

Jobs

• Associate, GTM Finance & Operations – Ramp (Fintech, Late Stage, Hybrid - NY)

• Operations Associate – Initialized (Venture Capital, Seed Stage, Hybrid - SF)

• Growth Manager – Pond (Crypto, Startup, SF)

• Chief of Staff – Walker Hamill (Venture Capital, Boutique, UK)

• Manager or Sr. Manager of Strategic Finance – GridCARE (Infrastructure & Energy, Series B+, Hybrid - CA)

• AI Builders – Wealthsimple (Fintech, Growth Stage, Remote)

• Operations Manager (Finance) – Revolut (Fintech, Late Stage, Remote)

• Senior Manager, Strategic Operations – 1Password (SaaS, Late Stage, Remote)

• Chief of Staff – Route 66 Ventures (Healthtech, Early Stage, Remote)

• Engagement Associate - Partner Engagements – Aleph (Fintech, Early Stage, Remote)

• Partner Strategy & Operations – OpenAI (AI, Frontier Tech, Hybrid - SF)

• Senior Associate, Innovation & New Bets - Strategy & Operations – DoorDash (SaaS, Public Company, Remote)

Resources

• ❓Take my career exit quiz

• your 30 day side project plan

• my resources

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people with unconventional paths.

📣📣 TAKE MY CAREER EXIT QUIZ 📣📣

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while (or even if you just found me), there's a good chance you're thinking about making a career move. After talking to hundreds of you about your career transitions, I started noticing the same 4 patterns. I turned it into a 2-minute quiz that tells you your exit type and what to actually do next.

What's your exit type? →

“I Was a Harvard Grad and Goldman PM. Now I’m Unemployed and in the Woods. How Did I Get Here?”

This was the title of the viral YouTube video that introduced me to Yuqi Hou. We have a lot in common — left prestigious jobs, started creating content, and building in public. I’ve been following her ever since so asking her to share more her story and how she “figured it out” felt like a long time coming.

Yuqi spent five years at Goldman, moved to London as a Senior PM at a unicorn startup, got laid off, and grew a YouTube channel to almost 10,000 subscribers while figuring out what she actually wanted. She just moved to San Francisco for a developer community role at an AI startup.

We talked about how she went from optimizing for prestige to building a career on her own terms, how she leaned into creative pursuits like content creation and novel writing, and what 20 months without a job taught her.

She shared what her dad used to tell her, “Why are you so stressed out at work? If you don’t like it, quit. You can always find another job.” It took getting laid off, a 20-month gap year, and moving across two countries before she finally believed him.

Getting into Goldman (and then wondering what’s next)

Hannah: You started at Goldman right out of Harvard. What were you looking for in that first job?

Yuqi: Prestige, status, and to be amongst my peers. A lot of people I admired in college were getting internships at Goldman. For me, it was a way to feel like I was at a peer level with them. If I wanted to come and chat with them and feel like I’m at the same level, I felt like I needed to have that internship. And it’s Goldman. You kind of wonder what it’s like really on the inside. If I had a chance to find out, I wanted to find out.

Hannah: You started as a program manager, then moved into developer advocacy and product management. How did those shifts happen?

Yuqi: I was very lucky. My first year I had an internship in UX, then I met a bunch of PMs that summer. When I came back full time in PM, my manager left, so I had this new manager who was doing something totally new. It was just me and him. He spun up a data business and needed somebody to do anything and everything, which meant I was doing product, developer advocacy, all of it. I got to try out a lot of different roles.

My advice to everyone is: if you can join a startup within a big company, that gives you a lot of flexibility to try things you might not normally get to, because you have some stability but also some room to experiment.

Hannah: When did the “prestige halo” fall away?

Yuqi: Pretty early on. Once I got there, I realized I hadn’t thought about what would happen beyond Goldman. It was like, this is the pinnacle, so I will stick and be stable. I didn’t even think there were other levels beyond where I was.

I got promoted early, got my bonus, and the question of “what’s next” just kept coming up. I tried having a life outside work, and that just made the difference between work and what I found interesting even more apparent. I wanted to bridge that gap.

Hannah: How so?

Yuqi: After work, I started writing a novel. And I realized I was basically two people. Nine-to-five Yuqi and then creative Yuqi outside of work. I just think life is easier when things flow into each other. Like right now, I go to tech events and get ideas about events I want to put on, which helps me in my day job. If I’m writing outside of work, that helps me communicate better at work. Everything compounds.

Whereas if you’re doing completely different things outside of work than you do at work, you’re not compounding anything.

The startup, London, and what broke

Hannah: What made you leave Goldman for Jellysmack?

Yuqi: Jellysmack was one of those big, unexpected moves. I found it through Indeed. I didn’t know anything about the company. I was just blind applying to a lot of places because after six years at Goldman, I’d lost a lot of confidence in my ability to do something outside of it. When you’re somewhere that long, you almost wonder, is this the best I can do?

Jellysmack was one of the first companies I applied to. The interview process was quick, I liked all the people, and the most important thing was it was creative. Their users were all YouTubers. I was thinking about how to build products for YouTubers to make more videos, make them faster. That really led to wanting to do YouTube myself.

Plus, the team was split across the US, London, and Paris. I really wanted to travel, and I thought this job would help me get to London and Paris. Which it did.

Hannah: You moved to London for this role. Was that planned from the start?

Yuqi: Not really. I threw out “I’m willing to relocate” as a Hail Mary because I was getting laid off at the time. During the layoff meeting, it was my HR and my head of product in a room, and I got the news, and I said I’m willing to relocate. Two weeks later they said, okay, let’s do it. I thought I was going to Paris. They said London. I took it because when else am I going to have the chance to live abroad?

I actually learned from this that I enjoy building a social circle from the ground up. I started from zero in a new country. One of my first videos was “How to Make Friends in London: 9 Places to Find Friends.”

The gap year (that turned into 20 months)

Hannah: When you got laid off from Jellysmack, what did you think the time off would look like?

Yuqi: I thought I would do something like 12 apps in 12 months. Ship something every month and it would tell me if this is the direction I can go. But instead I spent so much time with friends and family. I went on a month-long trip to China with my family because I decided family is super important. I wanted to reconnect with my dad’s side of the family. That was worthwhile because now I have the sense that I’ll go to China every couple of years and stay better in touch with extended family.

Hannah: How long did the gap end up being?

Yuqi: Twenty months. Eighteen months of that was the true gap, and two months was intense job search. I was lightly job searching at the beginning because in London you need a work visa, so that was always in the back of my head. I was very conflicted about whether I should commit to the UK or come back to the US.

Hannah: What did the gap year teach you that you couldn’t have learned while working?

Yuqi: The confidence of knowing I’m going to be okay. I spent 20 months figuring it out, and now that I have a job, I realize this thing that was very scary to me at the time, taking a career break, I wasn’t even going to allow myself to do it. The only reason I did was because I got laid off. I wouldn’t have quit on my own because I had no confidence that I could figure it out or even get a job afterwards.

My dad used to always say to me, “Why are you so stressed out at work? If you don’t like it, quit. You can always find another job.” Very chill, very grounded. I just didn’t believe it, even though I knew logically I could probably get another job. But now I feel that confidence. I get what my dad was saying.

Hannah: For people worried about the financial side of taking time off, what do you know now that you didn’t then?

Yuqi: I didn’t know that I could take even more risk. I was really worried about burning through rent money, but now I know so much more about how much I can stretch my savings. I didn’t calculate my runway before I started. I only got on top of my personal finance because I started making YouTube videos about it and had public accountability to give people updates on my real-time experiment.

YouTube and building in public

Hannah: How did you go from wanting to ship 12 apps to making that first YouTube video?

Yuqi: YouTube was something I started probably one or two months before I got laid off. I was building an AI assistant for content creators and felt like I’d get more understanding if I just did it myself. So I made my first video. Didn’t do anything. Two months later, got laid off, and I thought, I have no excuse now.

I started documenting what I was making, put it out, and realized making products successful takes ongoing effort. So you know what’s easier? Vlogging. That was the thing I could keep consistent at more than building apps.

Hannah: You had a video blow up. What was that experience like?

Yuqi: I felt so much more self-conscious after. I was trying to maintain consistency between videos, and whatever I talked about needed to come on the same topic so people understood where I was going.

Initially I was making videos about how to find your social circle, my hobbies, trying tennis, travel, surfing. I stayed away from sharing a personal story for a really long time. Then one of my early commenters asked, “Can you tell me why you started this gap year? You’ve talked about it but never shared why.” That’s when I went into my history. That was the video that blew up.

I’m so glad I started out with the random videos, though, because I had proof that I was more than prestige and names. I wasn’t just banking on brand names.

Hannah: How did creating in public change how you thought about what you wanted to do next?

Yuqi: I’d consider myself somebody who builds in public and shares in public more than a content creator. At some point I started doing content full time and realized I was making content about the process of being a content creator, whereas I want to just be doing things, like traveling or building a community, and sharing what I’m learning from that. The documentation is a byproduct. The main thing is living a life worth documenting.

Developer community and moving to San Francisco

Hannah: You recently moved to SF for a developer community role. For people who don’t know, what is that?

Yuqi: Developer community is a subset of developer relations. Dev rel is anything you do for a company that faces and supports developers of your product. A lot of people are probably more familiar with developer advocates, who write the guides and technical tutorials and give talks.

Developer community is putting together rooms where developers can talk to each other and the company, and creating a way for people to get into and use the product through their relationship with each other. I do a lot of meetups, hackathons, and moderating our Discord.

I work at an AI infrastructure company, so everyone who uses it is basically a developer.

Hannah: How did everything you were doing during your gap year lead you to this role?

Yuqi: The through line for me has been bringing people together and forming relationships. At the beginning of my gap year, I was thinking, I really want to invest in my friendships, my relationship with my family.

Towards the end, I was like, I really need a community to help me because I’m 18 months in and I feel a little lost. I need people who are similar to me. If we’re all independent builders, we can support each other and I can learn from them.

So I started hosting meetups for creators and solo founders. That community was really helpful because there were people who’d gone through the exact same thing. Plus, I just love solo founders. Every solo founder I’ve met has been a really amazing person.

I was also making tech maps of different cities, mapping interesting tech companies and startups in DC, London, and SF. Those did really well on LinkedIn. It made me feel more connected to the tech community in the cities I was in and gave me a better understanding of which companies were interesting.

If you’re job hunting, I say to everybody, make a tech map.

Walking away from product management

Hannah: PM is often touted as the ultimate tech role for a lot of people. What was it like to walk away from that?

Yuqi: I did wonder, is this the right decision? But I knew during my interviews. I did not want to continue cold-applying to product jobs. The interview process is very case study heavy now. That’s a big reason I never went down the consulting or pure finance path either. I didn’t enjoy the case study interview. I only got into product before they did case studies.

The interviews I enjoy are the ones where I just vibe better with the person I’m talking to. That’s all I can say about it.

The “9-to-5 door” and what’s next

Hannah: You once said on YouTube that going back to a 9-to-5, that door feels closed. Now you have a full-time job at a startup. How do you think about that?

Yuqi: I didn’t join a 9-to-5. I joined a 9-9-6. I’m putting in so many more hours just because I think about what I need to do for this job outside of the job. I enjoy putting on events and bringing people together. I go to a lot of tech events for fun anyway. I probably would have been showing up to community events even if I wasn’t in community myself.

And it really did feel closed at the time. If I was applying to any jobs when I made that video, I would have felt a personal block. You know when you logically know you need to do something, and you try to go through with it, and you just feel dread? I did not want to go through with those calls.

Hannah: I’ve been someone at different points who’s said a 9-to-5 is not for me. And I stand by that. I think the nuance is that neither of us has a true 9-to-5 where we clock in and clock out and don’t think about it again. It’s a flywheel with the rest of our lives.

Yuqi’s advice for people feeling stuck

Hannah: For someone feeling stuck, burnt out, not sure what to do next, what would you tell them?

Yuqi: Everybody is at their own pace. I took seven-plus years before I took this break. A lot of people feel this pressure, like I need to have it figured out sooner.

For me, it took 18 months to figure out what I wanted to do next. In fact, I didn’t really figure it out. I just felt ready to start applying to jobs, which I didn’t feel before. Then through the process of elimination, applying to many jobs and having many different interviews, I landed on developer community.

What helped me was being around people who I admired and aspired to be like, who showed me all these different paths I could take and who made it seem like, okay, I can have a salaried job, but still have a lot of freedom and be expressive and be myself.

Connect with Yuqi on YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram!

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• WTF is a portfolio career?

• Don’t let the machines do the living

• [Podcast] Stop rambling: the 3-2-1 speaking trick that makes you sound like a CEO

Jobs & Resources

• ❓Take my career exit quiz

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart, ambitious people making big pivots.

💼 This week’s jobs in tech/startups (as always, reply to this email if you have a role you’d like to share with the community!)

Matt Shumer, an AI founder, posted an essay on X this week called “Something Big Is Happening” that now has more than 80 million views. I posted a video about it and a lot of you saw it, but short-form video doesn’t leave much room for nuance, and this topic needs it. So I want to dive deeper here.

Despite being a big vibe coder and AI dabbler in my own life, I don’t write about AI in this newsletter. It’s not my expertise and I already spend way too much time thinking about it in my 9-5. But I’m making an exception because I think a lot of you are in industries like finance and professional services where nobody is having this conversation. Frankly, even at most tech companies and startups, people aren’t having it either.

After reading the article, the counterpoints, and sitting with it for a few days, the takeaway I keep coming back to is this one:

Everyone is going to have a nonlinear career soon, not by choice, but because the linear path is going away.

“The honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind”

Shumer said he wrote this article for his parents, not for tech Twitter. He said he keeps getting asked “what’s the deal with AI” and keeps giving the polite version, because “the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind.”

The honest version: he says he is “no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.” He describes what he wants built in plain English, walks away for four hours, and comes back to the finished thing with nothing to correct.

He’s writing to people who tried ChatGPT a year ago and thought it wasn’t impressive. He says the free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. And what he’s talking about isn’t the chatbot you ask simple questions. He’s talking about AI agents that control your browser, open multiple apps, and do your work for you.

He lays out this timeline:

“In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.”

He says this is happening in tech first but lists out every industry it’s coming for: law, finance, consulting, customer service, writing. Anything you do on a computer, and not in ten years — in one to five. He cites Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicting 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs gone within that window. And he says people in the industry think Amodei is being conservative.

The pushback

This shouldn’t be a one-sided conversation, and there were some responses this week that I think are worth reading.

John Coogan wrote a piece on TBPN called “AI Is Not Covid”, rejecting Shumer’s comparison of the AI revolution to Covid, and I think his core point is fair. Covid could infect anyone at any time, which is why it made sense to warn everyone. AI disruption won’t work like that. It won’t hit everyone at the same time or in the same way. A surgeon’s patients still want her holding the knife. A teacher isn’t getting replaced by a robot next school year.

Where I agree: the urgency is different depending on how close your work is to a screen. If you’re a junior analyst building models in Excel all day, your timeline is very different than a surgeon’s. If you’re in an operations role that’s mostly email and spreadsheets, you should be paying more attention than someone whose job requires them to physically be in a room with people.

Where I’d push back: I think Coogan underestimates how many people’s jobs are closer to a screen than they think. And the fact that disruption isn’t evenly distributed doesn’t mean you should wait to see if it hits you. By the time it’s obvious, the window to prepare has closed.

Then there’s Will Manidis, who wrote a piece called “Tool Shaped Objects” that I think is the most interesting counterpoint. His argument is that a lot of AI right now functions as what he calls a “tool-shaped object” — something that looks like a tool, feels like a tool, produces the sensation of work, but doesn’t actually produce work. He compares it to FarmVille: you click, the number goes up, you feel productive, but nothing was built. He says people are setting up elaborate AI workflows whose primary output is the existence of the workflow itself. The setup is the product.

I’ve seen that. But I think it actually strengthens the case for paying attention. If some people are going to waste time playing AI FarmVille while other people are using these tools to do real work in a fraction of the time, that gap is going to widen.

Subscribe now

Five things I’d start doing

Despite the pushback, Shumer gives concrete advice in the article and I agree with most of it. Here’s what I’d tell you, combining his suggestions with my own.

Start using AI for real. If you’re on the free version of ChatGPT, you’re falling behind. It’s like how only your mom and grandma use Facebook now. Get Claude, download Claude Code, and learn how to use Claude Skills, which is how you give AI specific instructions to do real work for you. Use the latest model, not the default. Don’t ask it questions you can google — feed it a contract, a spreadsheet, an actual doc from your job. Go vibe code something with Lovable.

As Shumer writes: “if [something] even kind of works today, you can be almost certain that in six months it’ll do it near perfectly.” Spend one hour a day doing this — not as a search engine, but in your actual workflows. He says if you do this for six months, “you will understand what’s coming better than 99% of the people around you.”

Invest in relationships. The most valuable people in 2-3 years will be the ones who can connect pieces across teams and stakeholders, not the ones who can build the best spreadsheet. Trust built over years, connecting dots across people, reading a room — AI can’t do any of that. Roles like sales, chief of staff, customer success, parts of product management and marketing are still going to matter, even if they have different titles.

Get your finances in order. As Shumer puts it: “if you believe, even partially, that the next few years could bring real disruption to your industry, then basic financial resilience matters more than it did a year ago.” Build up savings, be careful about new debt that assumes your current income is a given, and give yourself options.

Start building something for yourself. I’m not saying quit your job tomorrow. But you have a window right now where you still have income and stability, and a year from now that might look different. Start a side project, build a small audience, create something.

Build a personal brand. If entry-level roles in finance, consulting, and law are disappearing, then “analyst at X firm” stops being an identity. Your job title is not going to carry you. Being known for something will.

Every career will be nonlinear

A lot of you follow me because you have nonlinear careers, or you want one. You’re in finance but thinking about tech. You’re in consulting but want to build something. You’ve changed jobs multiple times and people keep asking what you actually do.

This AI wave is going to make that the norm, regardless of how big you think the impact will be. The stable, linear career path most people spend their whole lives optimizing for is in the line of fire. Everyone will have a nonlinear career, even if they didn’t choose one, because the linear path stops existing.

But if you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know how to

Subscribe now

operate in that world. The five things above are the same things that have always separated people who navigate change well from people who get caught off guard: use the tools, invest in people, stay financially flexible, build something of your own, and make sure you're known for more than your job title.

And above all of them is the one skill that always compounds: learning how to learn fast. The people who will be fine aren't the ones with the best current job or the most stable industry, but the ones who can pick up new tools, adapt to a new normal, and figure things out in real time.

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• “Something big is happening” by Matt Shumer

• “AI Is Not Covid” by John Coogan

• “Tool Shaped Objects” by Will M.

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for ambitious people with unconventional paths. Follow me for ~weekly posts on pivots, portfolio careers, and personal brands.

💼 This week’s jobs in tech/startups (as always, reply to this email if you have a role you’d like to share with the community!)

I sound like a broken record every time I say this, but my favorite part of building a personal brand over the past year has been meeting people through content. I’m constantly grateful for the smart, thoughtful community that’s found me and resonated with what I share.

That’s why I’m excited to share this conversation with Andrew, who started his career in investment banking, moved into private equity, and transitioned into an operating role at a startup in London. He originally found me through content and has shared his story with me over the past year. (Small world - Andrew is also a Columbia grad who moved abroad to work in banking!)

In this conversation, we talked about how Andrew made sense of each move, what banking and PE taught him, why he started questioning the distance between his work and its impact, and what it actually looked like to try to pivot out of finance.

We also get into the less glamorous parts of the process: applying to dozens of roles, doing case studies while working full time, being seen as “too finance-y,” and learning to trust intuition over perfect analysis.

If you’re thinking carefully about your environment, motivation, and what kind of work you want to be closer to in the long run, I think you’ll find this one useful.

Early career and optionality

Hannah: How would you describe your career so far?

Andrew: I usually think about it in terms of values, because those have driven every move.

In college, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I studied comparative literature and political science at Columbia, and I was interested in a lot of things, but nothing stood out as an obvious career path.

That background trained me to think critically, synthesize ideas, and connect things that are not obviously related. But when it came time to choose a job, I was worried about boxing myself in too early.

Finance felt like a place where I could build transferable skills and keep my options open. I also wanted something technical. I considered consulting, but learning how to understand businesses through financial statements and numbers felt valuable.

Banking and private equity

Hannah: What was banking like for you?

Andrew: The culture was very execution-driven. You are rewarded for saying yes, putting your head down, and doing things the established way. There is not much incentive to think creatively.

What stood out to me was how removed the work felt from actual decision-making. Even senior people were mostly pushing paper around. At the same time, I was constantly interacting with investors and felt like they were the ones actually shaping outcomes. That’s what pushed me toward private equity.

Hannah: Did private equity feel different?

Andrew: In some ways, but the core issue stayed the same.

I ended up in a niche credit investing role at Carlyle, focused on NAV lending. The work was intellectually demanding, but I still felt very far removed from the underlying businesses. We spent a lot of time writing long memos, building detailed models, and adjusting assumptions, and I kept asking myself what the real impact was.

Culturally, I also struggled with being in financial services more broadly. There is a lot of anxiety driven by fear of losing money. People tolerate difficult environments because of that fear, and over time it becomes draining.

That combination made me start questioning whether this was the right long-term environment for me.

Deciding to explore something different

Hannah: When did you start seriously exploring roles outside of finance?

Andrew: Earlier in 2025. I started pretty casually in the spring, just taking conversations and looking around, and then I really ramped things up in May and June.

Hannah: What did that process actually look like?

Andrew: Much harder than I expected. I applied to 99 jobs before signing an offer.

I completed around ten case studies, usually spending six to eight hours on each. That was honestly the most draining part of the process.

A lot of companies were very risk-averse, especially when it came to candidates switching industries. Even when I felt qualified, I could tell there was hesitation.

Hannah: Hesitation in what sense?

Andrew: Even my current company mostly hires former MBB consultants. Coming from finance, I was very aware that I wasn’t the obvious candidate. There was definitely a perception gap around whether my background would translate.

Hannah: How did you think about risk while making the switch?

Andrew: Financially, startups are obviously riskier. I tried to mitigate that by being selective about where I spent time.

I focused on companies founded by people with deep industry experience who had identified a clear gap in the market. I also cared that my current company isn’t VC-backed. It’s funded by revenue and angel investors, which made the business model feel more sustainable to me.

At the same time, staying where I was felt risky in a different way. I knew I needed to leave, even if the next step wasn’t perfectly defined.

Finding the role and positioning himself

Hannah: How did you actually find your current role?

Andrew: I took a very methodical approach on LinkedIn.

I searched for people in London with Ivy League backgrounds working in tech, not finance or consulting. A lot of people still fell into the latter categories, which made filtering easier.

When I found a company that looked interesting, I reached out to someone who was a Columbia alum. That initial conversation led to interviews.

The entire process took about four months and included multiple rounds and case studies.

Hannah: What did you learn about yourself during that process?

Andrew: Initially, I targeted strategic finance roles because they felt like the safest fit. But through the case studies, I realized I do not enjoy owning models or spending all day in Excel.

That pushed me toward broader roles like business operations or chief of staff.

The way I positioned myself was by emphasizing learning speed. I studied literature and political science, then learned finance from scratch. That story helped people feel more comfortable with the transition.

Life at a startup, careers and intuition

Hannah: How have the first few weeks been?

Andrew: The culture has been the biggest difference.

There is a strong emphasis on transparency and openness. My managers are approachable and involved, which I really value after my previous experiences.

The workload is real, but I am not working weekends, and I feel comfortable pushing back if needed.

The company is at a growth inflection point. A lot of my work is focused on revenue operations, defining our ideal customer profile, and building outbound strategy. That will be a big focus going forward.

Hannah: Looking back, what stands out about how you’ve made career decisions?

Andrew: Overthinking has never solved my problems.

Every meaningful transition I’ve made was driven by intuition. Either I was being pushed away from something that no longer felt right or pulled toward something that felt more aligned.

Trying to perfectly analyze the next step kept me stuck longer than necessary. Taking action and adjusting afterward has been far more effective.

Hannah: Looking back now, is there anything you miss about private equity or finance more broadly?

Andrew: I respect the attitude in finance of “we will get this done no matter what it takes.” My senior colleagues pushed me to my limits under this mantra, but also unlocked a sense of belief in myself despite adverse circumstances. My recent career switch is a good example of how natural it felt to push myself through rounds of interviews and case studies — I had lived experience of perseverance paying off despite some short-term pain.

Hannah: For someone in private equity or finance who’s considering a move into startup ops, what do you think they should be clear on before making that leap?

Andrew: Be honest with your intentions. Why do you want to leave your current job, and why might you thrive better in a new job? Many people in banking and PE have never had to truly question their occupational purpose, since for many IB → PE is a safe, default “path” out of college. The sooner you’re honest with yourself, the sooner you’ll find a path that truly fits you.

Also, use your company diligence skills to your advantage. As a startup employee, you’re effectively an equity investor in the business, so don’t be afraid to bring a DD list to management and grill them a bit. Good CEOs will appreciate your critical thinking, and solid answers reflect a good place to park your capital.

Trust that you’ve done enough thinking. Take action, then reflect. The answers will come quicker this way.

Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn!

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• Shopify President: While Everyone Chases AI, Sell These Products

• Inside the invitation only stock market for the wealthy

• WisprFlow: Voice dictation that helps me write/respond 10x faster

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

💼 This week’s jobs in tech/startups (as always, reply to this email if you have a role you’d like to share with the community!)

There’s a term I came across last year that finally put words to something I’ve been thinking about for years.

The Bermuda Triangle of Talent.

Simon van Teutem, an Oxford grad who turned down offers from McKinsey and Morgan Stanley, coined it after studying why the smartest people at elite schools keep funneling into banking, consulting, and law.

His research explains how these firms cracked the psychological code of insecure overachievers, drawing them in with money, status, and optionality. By the time they realize they’re deeply unfulfilled, they have “golden handcuffs” on and can’t leave.

As a former investment banker who fell into the prestige trap, I admire Simon for bringing this to light with research.

His proposed solution involves better institutional design—places like Y-Combinator or Teach for America that redirect ambitious people toward more meaningful work.

But as someone who quit banking, applied to YC and considered impact-oriented work…and still felt stuck for a long time before exploring several startup roles and the creator economy, I think institutional design is only part of the story.

YC has become its own prestige trap - many high-achieving young people building the millionth “AI-powered B2B SaaS meeting note app” for the money and status, not because they want to solve real problems. And a lot of TFA people I know ended up in banking afterwards. Institutions never change as fast as we need them to.

What’s actually shaking things isn’t a new institution. It’s that the old ones are falling apart.

McKinsey is thinking of cutting 10% of staff. Goldman and Morgan Stanley have conducted multiple rounds of layoffs since 2023. Big Law lays off more associates every year. Tech laid off 100,000+ people in 2025 alone.

The golden handcuffs are coming off whether people want them to or not.

I’ve seen this in my own path and in others around me. We’re pivoting, starting businesses, buying small companies, joining the creator economy, building side hustles until they can go full-time…

Not because any institution told us to, but because we’re figuring out what actually matters on our own terms.

This is my story of getting sucked into the Bermuda Triangle of Talent, quitting, hitting rock bottom, and eventually finding my way out through startups and the creator economy.

This is what I wish someone had told me when I was deep in it.

How I got sucked in

In college, I was never a finance major. I landed an internship in Sales & Trading at Morgan Stanley knowing close to nothing about banks and converted it into a post-grad offer. After a few months working full-time, I realized S&T wasn’t right for me. I was more interested in digging into one company’s operating model than tracking how 100 stocks traded on a short-term basis.

So I read enough Wall Street Oasis articles to convince myself that Investment Banking would be the best place to learn. I also convinced myself I would gladly trade a consistent 60-hour week in S&T for 90-hour weeks in IBD because the work would be more interesting.

Classic Bermuda Triangle logic: optimize for exit opportunities, prestige, and “learning” without asking whether I’d actually like the work.

I hustled. Applied to every opening. Studied accounting ratios like crazy. Got rejected again and again for lack of experience. Eventually made it into a sector coverage team through an internal transfer.

The gratification of finally landing my long-coveted IBD job lasted about two months. The thrill of getting staffed on my first deal. The fast-paced environment where I was learning new things about the sector every day from smart people. The new title on LinkedIn. Building my first model. Not thinking twice about being at the office on a Saturday. Wearing 90-hour weeks as a badge of pride.

I knew it was coming—but when the non-stop Friday night staffings, page-long 3am comments, and 100th version of an already perfect slide deck came, they came and they didn’t stop.

I stopped learning. I stopped performing at a high level. Instead, I was constantly fearful of the work to come. I quickly realized that 90% of the work I did on any given deck or model ended up being unnecessary, usually because of poor communication and planning from management or clients.

I became miserable, anxious, and unhealthy. Every waking moment spent with my friends and family became an endless complaint about the injustices I suffered and the pointless comments I stayed up all night to turn. I dreaded weekends. I was constantly anxious to receive messages and phone calls on nights out. The negativity poisoned and paralyzed my attitude and my relationships.

I needed to quit.

Rock bottom, then somewhere new

I felt lighter the day I quit. The day after, I felt like a complete failure.

What had I just done? I threw away everything I’d been working towards for years. I’d never make that much money again. What would I say to my classmates making associate at PE firms while I was unemployed?

If so many people went through this for longer and handled it well, why was I so weak? Wasn’t this exactly what I had signed up for?

I tried to escape by changing my environment. I left to backpack in South America with my boyfriend at the time. Of course, you can’t escape yourself. My relationship fell apart, and I found myself jobless, single, and directionless in a hostel in Patagonia wondering if I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.

I spent months at what felt like rock bottom, eventually moving back in with my parents. I read books like Design Your Life, The Pivot Year, and The Mountain is You. All great books, but they didn’t give me the clarity I craved.

Eventually I started applying to jobs. I didn’t care about the title or industry. I just wanted to work somewhere that had nothing to do with finance and sounded interesting.

I interviewed with a tech company hiring for a Product & Operations role launching a food delivery platform in Mexico City. I didn’t care about Product or Operations or food delivery. But Mexico City sounded fun.

A few months in, I was shocked to find that I actually liked my job. I went from working on $50M deals I didn’t care about to $10 food deliveries that I felt obsessively responsible for. I talked to our customers and drivers every week. When things broke, I saw it within seconds. When things worked, I saw that too.

I was still working a lot sometimes, but it didn’t feel the same. There weren’t pointless last-minute fire drills. No 100 versions of a PowerPoint deck that was already perfect. We were trying to do things quickly and well enough to get them into market.

We helped thousands of drivers and small restaurant owners make a living. The business grew fast. I got promoted after a year and led a strategy team for new launches across Latin America. (Not bad for thinking I’d be bad at every job after banking!)

After five years abroad between Hong Kong and Mexico City, I went back to the US for business school. I got an MBA, interned as a Big Tech PM (found it wasn’t for me), and eventually landed in product marketing at a startup. I started building content on the side and turned it into a six-figure business that I’m excited to keep building every day.

It’s been a nonlinear path. I took a pay cut to work at my first startup, but I’ve since tripled my income doing work I actually love.

The escape isn’t linear

Leaving the Bermuda Triangle isn’t a single decision. It’s an ongoing process, and here are a few things I’ve learned:

Don’t do it for the prestige (…but it’s hard not to). Prestige was why I did banking, got an MBA, and tried Big Tech PM. When I stopped optimizing for prestige—taking the Mexico City job, joining a no-name startup, building content—things got better. That said, I can’t say I’ve fully escaped. Maybe I’ve just replaced banking prestige with follower counts, honors like LinkedIn Top Voice, or “top VC-backed startups” on my resume. The pull is always there, but now I’m more aware and know how to fight it.

It’s okay to quit. It's okay to not buy into the suffering culture that leads to burnout—the idea that you need to undergo 2 years of grueling hours to "earn" a good exit opportunity…of doing more of the same work that drains you. The institutions won't change as fast as we need them to, but we can. People don't talk about why they quit these prestigious institutions or what went wrong because they want to preserve a certain image. I'm telling you mine. Share yours. Find people who will tell you theirs.

You can’t think your way to clarity or courage. I read all the career books. I journaled. I optimized my fitness routine and diet on paper. None of it gave me real answers. What worked was trying things—taking the Mexico City job on a whim, building content on the side, writing the first page, doing the first workout, surrounding myself with the right people, saying yes to opportunities that sounded like an insane detour.

The Bermuda Triangle experience is a double-edged sword. It isn't all bad. Banking made me much better at quickly analyzing information, structuring communication, and getting up to speed on any company or sector. And let's be honest—the prestige still opens doors, even on unconventional paths. In content creation, saying you did banking gets attention. There's a reason every article about Simon’s research mentions McKinsey and Oxford. But swimming in the Triangle also made me prestige-obsessed, less empathetic, more rigid, and deeply impatient. This takes years to undo.

People are everything. In banking, I rarely felt like my teammates were in the trenches with me or cared about my development. At my startup jobs, I built relationships with people across the world I still lean on today. When you’re on a path to doing something different, you need to be around others who share your journey. Startups and content helped me do that. If you’re only spending time with people from your past life stuck in the Triangle, you’ll feel bad about yourself and get dragged back into comparison traps.

The Triangle gives you clues if you pay attention. It can be overwhelming to figure out what you actually want all at once. What helped me was noticing the small binaries. I liked talking to companies about their business model, but hated formatting slides at 3am. I liked building an operating model from scratch, but hated the 100th round of comments on it. Eventually those small observations became a larger conclusion: I like analysis, but only with a clear link to action. This led me to become an operator in tech and a creator on the side—not an analyst. You might find the opposite to be true.

Work-life balance isn't the fix (at least for me). Between my startup job and building content, I probably work more hours now than I did in banking. But it doesn't feel the same. In banking, it was the irregularity and lack of agency that killed me—the sudden Friday notice of a deck due Sunday night, the uncertainty of whether I'd get summoned over a holiday weekend. That created a constant anxiety. Now, I wake up every day and know I've chosen how to spend that day. I have flexibility, support from teammates, and ownership over what I'm building.

If you're the type of person trying to escape the Triangle, you're probably not going to be satisfied with a chill 9-5. Maybe a chill 9-5 that gives you space to build something on the side—but not one where you're just coasting.

I’m no longer in the Triangle. Or at least, I’m swimming toward the edge.

And I've been thinking a lot lately about what would have helped me when I was deep in it. The career books didn't do it. The self-help stuff didn't do it. What actually helped was finding people who were on a similar path, trying things that didn't fit neatly into a traditional trajectory, and learning from others who had figured out pieces of this before me. Not just the career stuff, but the life stuff too: the mindset, the personal development, the whole picture.

I’m working on something for people who are ambitious, thinking about what’s next, and maybe feeling a little stuck. If that sounds like you, I’d love to learn more about where you’re at.

I’d be grateful if you’d take 5 minutes to fill out this survey. Your answers are shaping what I build next, and two people who complete it will win a $150 Amazon gift card.

>>> [TAKE THE SURVEY] <<<

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

💼 This week’s jobs in tech/startups (as always, reply to this email if you have a role you’d like to share with the community!)

📣 I’m building something new, and I need your help 📣

I’m working on something new for people who are ambitious, thinking about what’s next, and maybe feeling a little stuck.

If that sounds like you, I’d love to learn more about where you’re at right now.

I’d be grateful if you take 5min to fill out this survey. Your answers are shaping what I build next, and two people who complete it will win a $150 Amazon gift card as a thank you for your time!

>>> TAKE SURVEY <<<

One thing I’ve come to appreciate more as I get older is learning from people who are a few chapters ahead of me, especially when their paths look different from what I imagine for myself.

These conversations tend to challenge my assumptions in the best way, because if there’s one message I want you to take away from my content, it’s that there’s no one right way to build am ambitious, successful career.

Ed Essey is a Senior Director at Microsoft who built a 20-year career at the company and grew an Instagram audience of 100K+ in just the last few months, creating content for high performers in corporate.

There’s something grounding about hearing from someone who has seen multiple cycles, made tradeoffs over time, and built conviction slowly instead of chasing every new opportunity.

We talked about how Ed built cross-functional influence early in his career, why he started advocating for better work instead of waiting to leave, and the moment he realized his internal credibility wouldn’t translate outside Microsoft. We also discuss how he grew his Instagram to 100K+ followers and the framework he uses to help high performers who feel stuck.

(here’s a candid too!)

Starting a Career During the Dot-Com Crash and 9/11

Hannah: To start, how would you describe your early career?

Ed: I graduated from college in 2001, which was an absolutely wild time. The dot-com bubble had just burst. A week before finals, my job offer was rescinded. I already had an apartment in Mountain View and had moved out there early.

Then a second offer was rescinded. A third one, I showed up for one day, got called into jury duty for three days, and when I came back, the office was gone. Literally butcher paper on the windows. The company had shut down without telling anyone.

Hannah: That’s a pretty chaotic way to start a career.

Ed: It really was. At one point I was doing the classic “five MIT guys in a basement” thing while interviewing. I flew out to interview at Microsoft, and that same day our startup was supposed to put out a press release to attract VC funding. That day was September 11th.

I flew into Boston. Family was panicking. VCs stopped answering calls. Everything froze.

Around the same time, my girlfriend’s father wanted me to work for him at Enron. Enron had just collapsed too.

So I ended up taking a job at Microsoft, even though I didn’t see myself as a Microsoft person at all. I saw myself as a startup guy.

Why Ed Stayed at Microsoft

Hannah: And yet you stayed.

Ed: Yeah. What’s funny is Microsoft kept putting me on “startup” teams internally.

I worked on early versions of products like InfoPath and Office Server. Later I moved into DevDiv working on parallel computing. Almost everything I worked on was net new.

Every year, I was still interviewing externally. I always thought I’d leave.

Hannah: What kept changing your mind?

Ed: Every time I’d get an offer elsewhere, I’d go to my manager and say, “I want to work on different problems.” And my manager would say, “I agree. Let’s shape your role around that.”

Over time, I realized something important. I didn’t actually need outside leverage to advocate for better work. I just needed to articulate what I wanted to learn and why it mattered to the business.

So my role kept changing. It kept getting better.

Hannah: That kind of support from a manager feels pretty rare. How did you build that kind of relationship?

Ed: I was explicit about what I wanted to learn and how it tied back to real business outcomes. I didn’t frame it as dissatisfaction. I framed it as growth.

Managers respond when you’re thoughtful about impact and not just personal advancement. Over time, that builds trust.

Hannah: When you say you advocated for better work, what did that actually look like?

Ed: It meant having ongoing conversations about scope and direction, not waiting until I was burned out. I’d say, “Here’s what I’m seeing, here’s what I think I could contribute, and here’s why it matters right now.”

It wasn’t about asking for permission to leave but rather proposing a better use of my time.

Leaning into to Public Speaking and Teaching

Hannah: Was there a moment where things really shifted for you?

Ed: Yes. At one point I said, “I want to get really good at design thinking.”

I talked to the central design thinking group, and they said, “Actually, we think you’re already one of the best people at this. Would you teach it?”

Hannah: You’ve said you were terrified of public speaking. What made you say yes anyway?

Ed: I knew it was the thing I needed to do, even though it scared me. I didn’t feel ready, but I felt called to it. So I said yes.

I spent a year teaching design thinking to engineers, eight hours a day, about 200 days and I trained over 22,000 engineers. That experience completely rewired my confidence.

Hannah: Did you realize at the time how much that year would change things?

Ed: Not at all. I thought I was just developing a skill. Looking back, it changed how I saw myself and what I believed I could do.

How Cross-Team Collaboration Became Ed’s Source of Leverage

Hannah: You talk a lot about cross-group collaboration. Was that something you intentionally built towards in your career?

Ed: It was intentional very early.

People act like working across teams is reserved for senior leaders. But I joined one team late in its lifecycle and immediately saw how much integration opportunity there was with other groups.

Because I was new, building a relationship with someone on another team took the same effort as building one on my own team. So I just started doing it everywhere.

Over time, I built a huge network of trust across the organization.

Hannah: Did that change how leadership saw your role?

Ed: There was a moment that really stuck with me. Microsoft used to rent out the Mariners stadium for internal all-hands.

Bill Gates got on stage and talked about how important it was for one product, InfoPath, to connect with the rest of business. And I realized he was describing my job. That’s when it clicked that what I was doing was strategically meaningful.

How to Build Influence Beyond Hierarchy

Hannah: You coach a lot of people now. What do you see holding them back?

Ed: People get very hung up on hierarchy.

There’s a psychological behavior called leveling. People are constantly assessing whether they’re above, below, or equal to someone else, and then behaving accordingly. I never did that. I treated everyone as a person trying to solve a problem.

Hannah: You mentioned that you have a metaphor you use for this.

Ed: Yeah, the puppy analogy.

If a stranger rang your doorbell and handed you a puppy, you’d be confused. Even if you like dogs, it’s weird. A puppy isn’t free. It changes your life.

That’s how a lot of people try to add value at work. They show up with solutions before understanding context.

Hannah: What does that look like in practice?

Ed: It means understanding the other person’s circle first. Their goals, constraints, incentives.

Once they see you as part of their circle, trust forms naturally. Otherwise, you’re just handing people puppies they didn’t ask for.

Why Ed Built His Personal Brand

Hannah: You already had strong internal credibility. What made you realize that wasn’t enough?

Ed: About ten years ago, I started thinking, what happens if I get laid off?

My business card opened doors, but not because of me. Because of Microsoft.

If I lost the title, my name wouldn’t carry me anywhere.

So I started building a brand around my thinking. Writing, blogging, posting on LinkedIn, speaking, and eventually getting invited into innovation communities around the world.

Ironically, that helped Microsoft too, because I could bring outside experts into internal conversations.

Later, I got cancer at 37. That was the real forcing function.

It made me deeply aware of how short life is. I realized my calling was helping people understand their worth and use their gifts to make meaningful change.

Creating Content and Learning the “Language of Instagram”

Hannah: You eventually moved to Instagram. How did that happen?

Ed: I wasn’t even an Instagram user. I had maybe 220 followers, mostly friends and family.

At first, I talked about innovation and intrapreneurship, which was my area of expertise. It didn’t work.

I had to learn the “native language” of the platform.

I found that what resonated was the term high performer, especially people navigating politics, burnout, or toxic environments.

Once I reframed my message, things clicked. In six months, the account grew to over 100,000 followers.

The content that resonated most was about toxic bosses, not because people wanted to complain, but because they wanted more agency.

The Framework For High Performers Who Feel Stuck

Hannah: You create content for high performers. Who do you consider a high performer and how do you help them?

Ed: First, I don’t define “high performer” for people. If you believe you are one, you are.

What I see consistently is that high performers struggle with boundaries because they don’t know what they’re protecting.

So I teach a framework I call the Four Cs that every high performer should get clarity on:

• Core — who or what you won’t let down

• Calling — the impact you want to make

• Care — how you care for your body, mind, and environment

• Community — who nourishes you and whom you nourish

If you don’t know these, boundaries erode. Decisions become reactive. Burnout follows.

Everything else — navigating toxic bosses, career growth, leadership — builds on that foundation.

What’s next for Ed

Hannah: As you look ahead, what’s exciting you most right now?

Ed: I’m really focused on my book, The Inside Job, which comes out February 12.

It’s about everything we’ve talked about here. How people build leverage, influence, and meaning from inside the systems they’re already in, without waiting for permission or blowing everything up.

Writing it forced me to put language to patterns I’ve seen over decades. It feels like a natural next chapter.

Connect with Ed:

• Instagram

• LinkedIn

Ed’s book, The Inside Job, will be available for purchase on Feb 12. Learn more about it and sign up at https://edessey.com/book for early and behind the scenes access.

I hope this conversation was helpful if you’re wondering whether reinvention always requires leaving your environment, or if you’re starting to build your personal brand.

If you have a story you think should be shared, my inbox is always open!

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• How to spot a breakout startup

• Jack and Jill: I tried this tool that lets you get on a call with Jack, the AI recruiter, who helps you get hired at top startups. Most “AI recruiter” tools feel scammy or generic, but this one somehow understood the nuances of Product Marketing in B2B vs B2C, so I’m bullish - give it a try if you’re looking for clarity (and leads) for your next step

• A new approach to living a good life comes from a most unlikely place

• Podcast: if you have multiple interests, do not waste the next 2-3 years

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for ambitious people with unconventional paths.

Subscribe now

Follow me for ~weekly posts on pivots, portfolio careers, and personal brands.

5 questions to ask before you start a newsletter

Out of all my content channels, this newsletter has been the least strategic yet most rewarding.

I got back from the holidays earlier this month and opened Instagram to see three different people announcing new newsletters. Then I checked LinkedIn and saw two more. Everyone is starting a newsletter in 2026.

It makes perfect sense. People are tired of short-form content. Consumers are tired of quick dopamine hits that keep them in an endless scroll. Creators are tired of fighting algorithms - they look to long-form for higher quality engagement with audiences they own.

The newsletter makes for an attractive side project or creative outlet. The startup cost is one of the lowest. You don’t need to film or edit, and writing on Substack feels less cringey than broadcasting to your network via reels or LinkedIn posts.

I started this newsletter a little over a year ago. I have over 9,000 subscribers now. And yes, I recognize the irony of writing a newsletter about writing a newsletter, but I wanted to share my experience for anyone starting or thinking about starting one.

I’m not going to tell you about my great, well-researched newsletter growth master plan. I never had one. I started a newsletter a few months into creating content on Instagram because I panicked about the algorithm controlling who saw my content, changed my approach multiple times, and spent months feeling overwhelmed by the idea of writing it before having everything figured out.

If you’re thinking about starting a newsletter - whether you’re exploring an idea or side project outside of work or adding a channel for your personal brand - here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started.

1. Why start a newsletter?

The owned audience argument (and the tradeoff)

If you’re still reading, you’ve decided that a newsletter might be a good way to broadcast your thoughts to the internet. You’re weighing it against other channels - short-form video, LinkedIn, whatever else you’re already doing or thinking about doing.

A newsletter lets people get to know you, how you think, whether they trust you. Eventually they might buy from you or stick around long enough that you can monetize the attention through partnerships, land speaking opportunities, or even get a new job out of it.

The big selling point is that a newsletter is an owned audience - no algorithm controlling who sees your work. But here’s the tradeoff: growth is much slower than social media because there’s no algorithm to push out your work. You’re asking people for their email instead of a follow. That’s a higher bar. (Yes, Substack has some built-in discovery - more on this below!)

As a marketer, the convention I’ve heard is to have one long-form and one short-form content channel you’re good at so you can balance the pros/cons of each.

The best deciding factor

Do you like to write?

I love to write. Looking back, it probably would have made more sense for me to start here instead of with Instagram. If you don’t love to write, a newsletter can feel like drudgery. If you prefer creating in another format more, start there instead. That said, writing a newsletter can also be a great way to improve your writing.

Two models for thinking about ROI

As an ex-finance girly, no I can’t forget about the ROI! There are two ways to look at a newsletter - a binary but useful heuristic.

1. Your newsletter can be your product - paid Substacks where the newsletter itself is what people pay for.

2. Your newsletter can be marketing for your product. Your product might be you - your personal brand, just your ideas if you start it for fun. Or it might be how you sell courses, coaching, other services.

For me, it’s the second one. I use my newsletter to build a specific audience and occasionally sell sponsorships.

I don’t substantially monetize my newsletter itself and that’s intentional. I have 2 paid posts that I only gate because we value what we pay for more. I’d only do this with high-value guides. (Maybe I should with this one, but it feels weird to gate a newsletter post about starting a newsletter!)

I use it as a deeper form of engagement with my audience because I don’t have time for consistent creation on YouTube. And I’ve found it’s a valuable additional channel for sponsorships.

2. How do I start?

Platform: what I tried and what stuck

I’ve tried three platforms. Compare more platforms.

Beacons (don’t) I started here because that’s what I used to collect emails in my Instagram link in bio. Beacons isn’t built for email. The editing experience is poor, you need a lot of formatting and templating. Skip this.

Kit (depends on your use case) I moved here after hearing the founder speak at an event. I’d heard good things and it was cheaper than Beehiiv at the time. But the pricing scaled as you grew in ways that made more sense for brands selling programs or digital courses because they need drip campaigns, growth loops, all that infrastructure. Wrong use case.

Substack (where I landed) The editor is simple. I like that there’s discovery built into the platform. I’ve heard creators who prioritize their paid newsletter offering say it’s not the best because of platform fees, but I like it here for now.

Figure out who you’re writing for

Same advice goes for starting any personal brand: know your why, your audience, and your positioning. Your newsletter is just an avenue for your brand. It’s less about picking a niche - more about an angle or specific audience you write for. I wrote one of my few paid posts about this.

Getting your first subscribers

This is personal. You need to test.

More than half of my subscribers came from Instagram because I was collecting emails through lead magnets before I even started the newsletter. Substack has some discovery built in - you can grow through Notes. I also grow via Linkedin by restructuring every newsletter as LinkedIn posts and link back to Substack for the full read. Your first subscribers could be friends and family. Your most sustainable growth may be through shares and referrals.

Good exercise: Think about whether someone in your target audience would share each post as you write it.

Newsletter growth guide from Beehiiv

3. How do I sustain it?

The time commitment (and the invisible work)

1-2 hours per week, give or take, but probably more because I’m thinking about it all the time. Every week I know what I’m going to write about before I sit down. I think about what questions my audience might ask and start answering them in my head before I open the doc.

Making it sustainable

You have to enjoy it or make it enjoyable. If you’re challenging yourself to do this, create a ritual. Saturday morning. Coffee and breakfast. Deep thinking time.

This is my weekly anchor to think about my audience - who they are, how they think, how I connect with them, what I want to say.

How I never run out of content

Create content flywheels. You might remember my welcome email where I ask what you’re interested in and what goals you have. I get topics right there. (If anything, my problem is too many ideas.)

Use LLMs (strategically). I created a Claude writing style of my voice. I dictate drafts using voice, get Claude to structure it, and review/rewrite the whole thing. I’m fastidious about how I sound on long-form and I’ll take a few typos over AI slop. If you ever see me use the word “quietly” when it makes no sense in the context, I’ve been hacked.

I repurpose like crazy. Whenever I go on a podcast, speak at an event, or have a conversation with someone interesting - boom, that’s a newsletter.

4. How do I grow it?

Where my subscribers come from

Here’s my growth over the last 90 days. Imports are from lead magnets, Instagram is through my bio and stories.

The cold start problem (and how I avoided it)

I didn’t have a cold start. I used free lead magnets I distributed on short-form to get a few thousand newsletters. You can also start on Substack and grow via Notes.

You need to give yourself an initial boost, but the best long-term growth hack is writing good content. Think of your newsletter as your product and short-form as your marketing.

How this became my content flywheel

My newsletter content has been chaotic and inconsistent until recently.

I wrote a few posts last March and April. I had no idea who I was writing for or what consistency meant. I tried to match my lead magnet topics. That was fine but I struggled to find ideas that I cared about. It also felt like one more thing to create.

Then I switched to a weekly jobs list that my assistant helped curate. I still include this in every post. It drove growth but not engagement or trust. A jobs list is a utility - people aren’t learning anything about you.

In November, I decided it had to change. Brandon Smithwick writes about content and mentioned his version of a content flywheel in his newsletter - a long-form piece that feeds everything else.

That’s what my newsletter became. It’s the central thing I do every week. Even if I don’t do anything else, I write this. It gets repurposed into at least one Instagram carousel, one video, a few LinkedIn posts. It’s also a thought exercise. I get deeper on my thinking around one topic and research it thoroughly.

My subscriber growth after I stopped being lazy with my newsletter in November:

5. Is it working?

How to measure success

Go back to which operating model you’re using (newsletter as marketing or newsletter as product).

Set three metrics: one acquisition (subscriber growth), one engagement (replies or shares), one outcome (related to your goal - could be booked meetings, link clicks, or sponsors).

My newsletter is working (I think)

I have an email list ready for when I launch something. The trust, engagement and ownership often feel more meaningful than my 100K audience elsewhere, even if it doesn’t bring in as many direct dollars yet.

It gives me clarity of thought and an anchor for consistent messaging across channels every week. It helps me stay focused on building for an audience, not an algorithm, and it makes me a better writer in my 5-9 and my 9-5!

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• 10 new interesting startup and side-project ideas: good products for your newsletter to market!

• a16z: How to hire a Chief of Staff

• Breaking into strategy: good post on people who want to work in strategy, especially if as fractional advisors/consultants.

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for ambitious people with unconventional paths.

Subscribe now

Follow me for ~weekly posts on pivots, portfolio careers, and personal brands.

I sound like a broken record every time I say this, but my favorite thing about building my career in public is the people you meet along the way. And I’ll never stop saying it!!

I met John Crowley almost a year ago when I first started creating content. John is an HBS grad and startup operator who also had a 5-9 as Co-Founder of M7A, making MBA admissions consulting work for Gen Z.

I loved that John and his cofounders (also HBS grads) were doing this alongside their full-time jobs and how they built in public (35K on Tiktok!).

I spoke with the M7A team about:

• Why I went to business school (my real reasons vs. what I wrote in my essays)

• How I thought about school selection

• What I found valuable (and surprising) about the MBA, and my #1 takeaway

• How I pivoted from product management to product marketing post-MBA

• Why I started building a personal brand

Here’s what I said! I hope this is helpful for anyone curious about, actively applying to, or currently in business school. Or you can watch the video.

I also have some VERY cool jobs to share this week!

Why business school?

I first started thinking about business school during my senior year of college, so the idea was always here. I bought the GMAT book and never took the exam. If there was one thing I could go back in time and do, I would have taken it that year I was still in “study mode” because the exam ended up being a huge hurdle when I applied later.

After I quit investment banking, I was considering several paths. I wanted to do something else, but didn’t know what. A lot of people in that boat consider grad school, and business school made sense given my background in finance.

When I think about the “why” now, I’d tell anyone starting the application process to ask themselves three questions:

1. Is this going to help me pivot my career?

2. How is this going to change my long-term compensation picture?

3. Is growing my network valuable to me, and is business school the best way to do that?

If you can answer those three questions in a way that affirms you should do this, it’s also going to give you direction on where to apply.

My real MBA goals vs. what I wrote in my essays

They weren’t the same. And that’s something I regret looking back.

When I was writing my essays, I was thinking through what would look best on paper. What’s the best story to tell? For me, at the time, it was a story about how I had worked in finance and then in tech as an operator, and why those experiences made me want to be a VC investor.

To some extent, I did want to explore VC. But later, when I took a real look at my career interests and stopped optimizing for an admissions committee, I realized I was more of an operator than an investor. I also concluded that in order to be a good investor, you have to be a good operator first. I didn’t want to be an investor, at least not then.

My more “real” MBA goal was to move back to the US with a softer landing. I’d spent a lot of time internationally and didn’t feel like I had much of a business network in the US. I also wanted to explore what being a product manager in a US big tech setting would look like.

How I chose Wharton over Booth

I got into Wharton and Booth, and the decision came down to geography.

Booth employment data showed that two-thirds of their grads ended up in the Midwest. I’d never lived in the Midwest and didn’t see myself building a life there, so it didn’t make sense to build my network there through the MBA.

I did see myself coming back to New York (where I went to college), and Wharton was basically a satellite to New York. I also liked that Wharton had a Semester in SF program for people in tech to get more hands-on learning and in-semester internships.

The other reason was more “vibes based”. I’d worked with a few Wharton alums at my last company. I thought they were smart and likeable. They helped me when I applied and shared enough about their experiences that dispelled my long-held belief that Wharton was just “the finance school.”

What helped me stand out as an applicant

I love Wharton’s essay prompt because it’s straightforward, no fluff: What are you bringing to the program, and what are you hoping to take away?

I see it as a Venn diagram between you and the school. On one hand, what’s unique about you and your background? On the other hand, what’s unique about the school or something they want candidates to resonate with? Where’s the intersection?

One thing that was unique about me was my international work experience. I’d worked in Asia and Latin America. Wharton has a lot of global programs, so I wrote about that angle. I’d also worked on logistics marketplaces, and Wharton had a future mobility club, which was fairly niche.

The more specific you can get with the Venn diagram between you and the school, the more it feels like you did your research. The best way to do that is to speak to actual people - current students and alums. Use their language and their stories to inform yours. This applies to every school, even if their essay prompts are more abstract!

My first year vs. second year experience

Your first year feels different than your second.

My first semester felt overwhelming, especially at a school like Wharton with 900 people per year. You come to campus with ideas and a vision of what you’re going to do, and it’s hard to stay grounded because you have so many opportunities - internships, fellowships, clubs…It’s like a buffet you have to pick and choose from before you fill up on junk you didn’t go there for.

You’re trying to build your network, milk everything you can out of this expensive degree, get all the opportunities, and recruit for internships. You’re meeting hundreds of other career-oriented overachievers, going on international trips with huge groups of people you just met, and it can be hard to find your people.

Second year is when things settle down a bit. You get to know your classmates, build meaningful relationships, get more intentional about how you consume at the buffet, and figure out what you want your life to look like after graduation.

I about 5 things I wish I knew about business school before I started (3,000+ people on Linkedin found this helpful so I figured I’d share it again here!)

How I pivoted from product to product marketing

My career was nonlinear before business school. I thought it was going to be more linear during and after, but that wasn’t in the cards!

I went in thinking I’d try product management in big tech and got an internship doing product at eBay. And I had a similar experience to a lot of people in huge teams at big tech: spending a lot of time optimizing a tiny part of a huge platform, feeling like a cog in a machine. The work-life balance was nice compared to a startup, but I craved more impact.

That brought me back to the drawing board at the start of 2nd year. I returned to the Venn diagram of what jobs are attractive to me versus what unique skills I bring. I realized I wanted to be distributing a product rather than building it because I wasn’t technical and didn’t want to get more technical. I felt I had a better competitive edge on the distribution side - storytelling, marketing, sales just came more naturally for me, while still letting me use what I had learned in product management.

Long story short, that led me to a chief of staff role at a B2B SaaS company on the go-to-market side. I ended up shifting to product marketing quickly in that role due to both experience in GTM strategy and the business needs, and I still work in product marketing now.

Why I started building a personal brand

After graduating, I worked a 9-5 remote job for the first time in my life. I’d never had that much free time before.

On one hand, I needed a hobby. On the other hand, I felt like if I wanted to do product marketing, I had to put in the work to learn marketing. I had to prove that I could execute, not just do strategy and messaging.

So I started tinkering on the side, posting first on Instagram. I shared my own career experiences and missteps, built a community of people who’d navigated difficult transitions and explored different things. People who felt like they weren’t tied to one corporate ladder. I wasn’t thinking about it as “building a personal brand. I was just doing something that felt useful and interesting. Once I got traction, I also started posting on LinkedIn and writing a newsletter.

Recently, I started a new job in product marketing at a series A startup. I got this job because my company found me on LinkedIn. They saw what I was creating, and it was proof I could do the work.

That’s when it clicked. I hadn’t set out to build a personal brand, but I’d built one anyway. And I started to understand its power. I used to believe my credibility came from Columbia, Wharton, Morgan Stanley. And for a while, it did. But increasingly, especially in tech and startups, those credentials don’t carry the same weight. These companies don’t care where you went to school - they need to see that you can do the work. What I’d built became my way of broadcasting my intentions and demonstrating my capabilities at the same time.

My #1 takeaway from business school

Most people go to business school to recruit for finance or consulting, but most of the classes are about successful businesses and the people who built them. You study strategy, capital raising, and business plans.

My #1 takeaway is that you have to own something, and there are more ways to do that than you think. I used to believe starting a business meant raising VC funding - that was the optimal route. But in business school I learned about search funds and entrepreneurship through acquisition, where you buy an existing business like a dental practice or a car dealership instead of starting from scratch. I learned about bootstrapping and debt funding. And now I’m learning how you can be a content-driven solopreneur.

I’ve taken a “middle path” for now. I have a full-time role at a very entrepreneurial company where I have equity, but I’m also building leverage for myself on the side. Because at the end of the day, if you learn business, you realize that working for a salary is only going to get you so far. You have to own something, whether that’s equity in a startup, a side business that cash flows, real estate, or even a personal brand. Business school taught me what ownership could look like. Building in public is teaching me how to actually create it.

Reads, Ideas, Tools

• Shortlist NYC: Andrew Yeung launched a new platform for startup founders to pitch to job seekers

• Can you optimize love?: A friend shared this thought-provoking read on tech startups building AI for dating

• Wonder Tools: If you ever “wonder” where I hear about new tools and products!

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears (updated ~weekly)

• my resources

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for ambitious people with unconventional paths.

Subscribe now

Follow me for ~weekly posts on pivots, portfolio careers, and personal brands.

Happy new year! I hope you got the chance to slow down, rest, and recharge in the last few weeks. I spent the holidays with family, enjoying great food and warm weather.

I got back to New York yesterday and had dinner with friends at Rubirosa, where a conversation about new years resolutions got me thinking about how I’ve spent most of my career maximizing for optionality.

One person asked if we had resolutions. Another said he doesn’t do resolutions. Instead, he picks a theme word to guide various aspects of his life. So I thought, what’s my word?

For 2025, my word was maximization.

(And experimentation and optionality. Am I really a maximizer if I pick just one word??)

I started creating content because I wanted optionality from my 9-5. I “brute forced” my way to 100K followers. My content strategy changed on a weekly basis, I got caught in comparison traps with other creators and responded to trends more than I focused on building for an audience.

I launched a newsletter after using a lead magnet to get a few thousand emails because I wanted optionality from algorithms.

I started posting on LinkedIn to diversify channels and got nowhere for months before finding my voice.

In many ways, this mirrors a pattern throughout my career.

I went into investment banking for the exit opportunities. When I pivoted into tech, I started in a product/ops role because it would allow me to go into the most things afterward. I got an MBA where the M could stand for “maximizer” given how common that tendency is among my classmates. Before business school, I applied to YC with a cofounder, struggling to narrow down on an idea because we had so many and couldn’t commit to one.

If you worked in banking, consulting, or tech, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. You optimized for optionality at every turn. You picked the role with the most exit opportunities rather than the one you were most excited about. You’re five or ten years into your career and still “figuring it out.”

If you’re thinking about starting something - a business, a personal brand, a side project - it might be even worse. You have a list of 15 ideas and you’re researching all of them instead of committing to one. You’re consuming content about which niche to pick, which business model is best, which platform to build on.

I still find myself falling into the same trap, even after finding more focus in marketing and the creator economy, thinking: I could sell digital products, bootstrap a micro SaaS, get a full-time job in the creator economy, start a podcast…The options feel endless!!

The external environment doesn’t help. The world is full of trends and predictions, whether you’re curious about starting a company or pivoting to a new role. Everywhere you look, there’s something else you should be doing to become successful:

• 20 societal shifts that make it a great time to build a company in 2026

• The world is f*cked up but here are 5 great startup ideas

• Gary Vee’s top 5 consumer trends in 2026

(These are all great pieces of content by the way - I highly recommend reading them to understand what’s happening in business and tech)

I’m also guilty of contributing to this, having shared a recent post read by 10,000 of you on 11 unconventional career paths for high performers.

But here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: keeping your options open is one of the most expensive things you can do in life.

I know this sounds backwards. We’ve been taught that optionality is smart - that the best move is to delay commitment until you have perfect information. Go into banking because the exit opportunities are unlimited. Get an MBA to pivot into anything. Take a generalist role to figure out what you want.

But what actually happens when you keep your options open is you don’t build anything. You spend years accumulating credentials and optionality while the people who picked a lane are compounding skills, reputation, and wealth in a specific direction.

It’s like getting two pizza halves at Rubirosa because you want to try everything, then realizing one wasn't as good and you should have just gotten a whole tie-dye pizza. 😔

So my word for 2026 is FOCUS.

If you find yourself in a similar spot - many options, many ideas, not 100% sure on what path is right - here’s what I’ve learned about why we maximize and what’s actually helped me start choosing.

I know writing about “nonlinear careers” and focus may seem like oxymorons, but writing this piece made me realize that they’re two sides of the same coin. Nonlinear careers let us explore in order to find true focus.

Why we maximize

We’re afraid of choosing wrong (and not being able to go back)

Fear of choosing something irreversible has driven a lot of my decision making. Coming out of banking, I had two job options: a startup product/ops role at a global tech company, or a strategy role at a social enterprise in Southeast Asia. I picked the first because the second felt too pigeonholed. Then I ended up feeling pigeonholed anyway. The fear didn’t protect me from the outcome I was afraid of.

We compare ourselves to people on different paths

You see other people raise a $10M seed round or get a VP promotion in PE - people who seem to be “doing better” than you - and think, wow, I should do that. (This is exacerbated by social media.) But you don’t see the shit they slog through, the tradeoffs they made that you’d find unacceptable, or the day-to-day of the work that you’d hate if you were in their seat. The same path that makes one person successful can make the next person miserable.

We’re genuinely interested in many things

First, recognize this is a good thing - it means we embrace an abundance of opportunity and an open mind. Like many successful people with “founder, investor, advisor” on their LinkedIn profiles, we call ourselves multi-hyphenates or multi-passionate.

But what we often fail to see is that these people usually don’t start that way. For a long period, they were laser focused on doing one thing well. The multi-hyphenate identity came after they’d built credibility in one lane, not before.

Exploration is what we should be doing early in our careers. But at some point, we have to ask ourselves: am I still exploring, or am I just avoiding commitment?

One more question worth asking: is this a pattern in other aspects of your life?

Are you always trying to find the best restaurant, the best partner, the best apartment? I used to do this in dating before I met my current partner. Later I realized it was a combination of being younger and needing to see what’s out there (exploring), and that the people I was dating just weren’t the right fit. Once I met someone who was, the maximizing stopped. You might find the same is true in your career - you’re not indecisive, you just haven’t found the thing that makes the decision obvious.

What’s helped me find focus

Name the reason you can’t choose.

Does your inability to commit come from wanting to maximize learning and growth and try everything? Or does it come from comparing yourself to others who seem to be “doing better” and thinking you should be doing what they’re doing? These require different solutions. The first is about giving yourself a needed period of exploration. The second is about detaching your sense of progress from other people’s paths.

Go back to your Ikigai.

Ikigai is a Japanese concept that refers to the intersection of what you’re good at, what you love doing, what the world needs. I reorient around this all the time. I’m good at writing and storytelling, I love doing it, and this skill is more important than ever in the era of AI and personal brands. So this is what I’m focused on in 2026.

Challenge your assumptions about irreversibility.

Most decisions are reversible. Some aren’t - if you shut down a company and fire everyone, you can’t undo that. But if you quit a job, chances are you could go back if you have a strong network and reputation there. Maybe you think starting your own company means you’ll never have the stability of a 9-5 paycheck again. Not true - many ex-founders find their way back to company roles. We overestimate how permanent our choices are.

Calculate the cost of waiting.

Warren Buffett was able to compound ~$150Bn of wealth because he started investing when he was 11 years old. Same goes for your career. Every year you spend keeping your options open is a year you’re not compounding in a specific direction.

Read advice widely, but filter it ruthlessly.

Most people who create online amplify their own worldview through content to get you to follow them or buy something.

I do this too - I believe that monetizing your skills through a personal brand gives you greater financial freedom and leverage than staying silent in a corporate job. A different creator might think product management is the best career in tech, so their advice centers on why you should become a product manager.

Be wary of this when taking advice and wanting to maximize your options.

Write a manifesto.

No, not like the communist manifesto. Write an anchoring statement for what you want to accomplish this year in your life, career, or business. It can be a page or even a paragraph. What do you want to learn? What do you want to grow in? If an opportunity doesn’t fit the manifesto, don’t pursue it.

(This is a must-do when it comes to building a personal brand or marketing a business - let me know if you want me to share more on how I do this.)

Figure out what you don’t want.

Sometimes clarity comes faster through elimination than selection. You might not know exactly what you want, but you probably have a growing list of things you know you don’t.

I didn’t know I wanted to work in marketing until I’d ruled out a bunch of other paths. I didn’t know what kind of creator business I wanted to run until I learned I didn’t want to perform endlessly for an algorithm or be a career coach. Pay attention to what drains you, not just what excites you.

Give it time.

This feels like a cop-out answer, but early in your career, generalism increases the surface area for you to find what you’re good at and enjoy. Some people find it earlier than others.

For me, it’s been a journey in phases. I was obsessive about specific interests when I was younger - I knew exactly what I liked. Then I entered the business world and started exploring because I didn’t see anything that captivated me the same way. Now I’m slowly getting back to obsessive, but only after I’ve had enough time and opportunities to test assumptions and rule things out.

That’s the key: it’s usually not time itself that unlocks clarity. It’s that time gives you reps - chances to try things, learn what doesn’t fit, and narrow down what does.

Bottom line - ask yourself: are you exploring or are you hedging?

Exploring is active. You’re trying things, getting data, learning what fits and what doesn’t.

Hedging is passive. You’re keeping options open because you’re afraid of making the wrong choice and not being able to reverse it.

If you’re exploring, keep going but set a deadline.

If you’re hedging, pick something. Literally anything. The choice matters less than you think. You can pivot. What matters is that you start compounding in a direction instead of spinning in place.

You can always change your mind. You can’t get the time back.

Happy new year - here’s to a ambitious and fulfilling 2026.

What’s your word this year?

Recent Reads, Ideas and Tools

• Kevin Kelly: building a career on ambition and joy - a fun and beautifully written portrait

• Why we sleep: if you need a kick in the butt to prioritize sleep, this is it. I needed it!!

• Mailbrew: been using this to build a newsletter of all my newsletters

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears

• (mostly) free resources

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

Find me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for ambitious people with unconventional paths.

Subscribe now

Follow me for ~weekly posts on pivots, portfolio careers, and personal brands.

I had this newsletter post outlined and ready to go in my Notion.

I was going to write about how I’m planning for 2026 - goals, vision boarding, how I plan and execute…

But it feels fake. That version is organized, structured, and tactical. The reality over the past few weeks has felt like anything but that.

I write for a living, both as a marketer and a creator, so packaging scattered thoughts into 'value,' numbered lists, and strategic frameworks feels like instinct.

But it’s against the ethos of why I started sharing content about nonlinear and portfolio careers, where the reality of growing and reinventing is messy.

I’m saving the vision boarding for when I have more mental space and clarity next week. (If you’re getting a head start, this is the template I use to turn my vision board into a phone wallpaper.)

Here’s what a real day looked like this week. Vs what things look like when I zoom out to reflect on the full year.

Portfolio careers can feel like chaos day-to-day

My 9-5 (let’s be real…9-7)

I lead marketing at a startup. Worked on the plan for a product launch. Finalized our website redesign. Had a call with a freelance content marketer. Another call to brainstorm a conference speaker submission. Another with a news outlet about partnering on thought leadership in the new year. Started drafting a customer story (didn’t finish).

My content business

Connected with a founder who quit finance to build a CPG business. Posted on LinkedIn because I saw interesting news about McKinsey hiring a creator economy advisor. Read a social media trends wrap I’d bookmarked weeks ago. Drafted notes for this newsletter because I didn’t want to forget. Responded to a brand I’m negotiating a partnership with.

My personal life

Ate my first meal at 1pm. Wanted to get my nails done but couldn’t find the time. Got the apartment ready for friends coming into town this weekend who are dog sitting for me over the holiday.

It’s only when you zoom out that you see the bigger picture.

I went to Othership on Friday evening after all the busyness of the past few weeks because I knew I needed to slow down.

That’s when I finally started getting perspective on everything that happened this year. (Yes, I’m crazy and need a sauna + ice bath to do that.)

This year, I pivoted into marketing at a high-growth startup and grew my content business to 130K+ followers and six figures.

January: I was a few months into my content creation journey and did my first brand deal ever. I wanted to post on LinkedIn but was scared. At the same time, I felt stagnant in my full-time role. I’d just pivoted from strategy to product marketing internally and didn’t feel like I was learning in a slow environment.

April: Hit 100K on Instagram but felt burnt out from making videos. Started posting on LinkedIn more intentionally but was barely getting visibility. Felt more antsy in my full-time role.

June: Finally started getting traction on LinkedIn and steady partnerships on Instagram with major brands. Got inbounds (to my surprise) on LinkedIn from startup founders for marketing roles because of my content, even though I lacked the formal experience.

September: Started a new job as first marketer at a Series A startup, which felt like drinking from a firehose. Still grew to over 10K followers on LinkedIn and continued to partner with major brands.

November: Got more into a rhythm at my full-time job. Decided to revamp my Substack (paid off - grew 600 subscribers in the last 30 days!). Started thinking about the direction for my content in the new year, not just as a creator but as a business.

Now…I AM TIRED.

We think we can sprint at full speed indefinitely. We can’t. We need time to rest. And then run at full speed again.

Here’s what I’m focusing on over the next two weeks.

Rest for real. Spend time with loved ones. Sit on the beach. Read the newest Dan Brown book. Actually recharge and not try to turn everything into content (probably fail a little.)

Reflect and plan from first principles. How do I want to design my life? How do I want the next year to look - not just professionally but personally?

Rethink my business strategy with fresh eyes. How do I build a business driven by content as the marketing engine, as opposed to where content is the product? Something built intentionally for you and with you.

A few more thoughts on a portfolio career:

You have to be ruthless about where and how you spend your time. 80/20 rule, prioritizing big bets, outsource and delegate wherever possible…

When you have creative pursuits, you need time to rest and recharge to feed that creativity. It’s not being lazy - it’s the fuel that keeps you going. I’ve had weeks where I forced myself to push through and create anyway, and everything I made felt flat. Then I’ve had days where I did nothing but read and walk and let my brain wander - and suddenly the ideas come rushing back.

Balance feels impossible some days when everything is truly important and energizing. I have days when I want to quit my full-time job - which gives me so much learning and growth and meaningful interactions - to go all in on my own thing. I have days where I want to give up on content entirely (they’re rare). But then I get Substack replies and DMs saying how my content has resonated - and that feels like a calling.

Surround yourself with examples of people building successful portfolio careers, whether in your personal life or online. It’s easier to do hard things in community.

Be ok with saying: when there comes a time that balancing doesn’t serve me anymore, I can choose one. I can pivot. I can go a different way.

But for now, balancing is still the plan. Here to soak it all up!

See you in the new year. Until then, I hope you find time to rest and recharge. Thank you for being here.

Subscribe now

This is my favorite content to create every week. Thank you for being here!

A year ago, I still thought “personal branding” was for people selling courses on how to sell courses.

I’d scroll Linkedin and see “thought leaders” posting preachy garbage about their management tips or shilling their consulting businesses with bios like “I help Fortune 500 companies unlock synergies.” It was gross. I wanted nothing to do with it.

I had real credentials and experience. I went to an Ivy League school. I worked in investment banking and tech and had good performance reviews. My work spoke for itself.

Or so I thought.

When credentials and experience stop working

I left banking wanting to prove I could operate a “real business”, not just make slides about it. But a lot of companies I interviewed with were skeptical.

“You’re too strategic,” they’d say. In other words: you think about things and make fancy slides, you don’t do them.

My resume showed my track record in banking, so most tech companies only wanted to interview me for finance roles. It didn’t prove I could run operations for a food delivery business or do marketing at a Series A startup. I had the skills - I just couldn’t prove it on paper.

I’ve since spoken to dozens of people with the same problem I had. You know you can do the work. But your credentials are locked into what you’ve already done, not what you want to do next.

This is where personal branding comes in.

But let’s clear something up first - personal brand isn’t being a content creator or influencer. It’s not “posting online”. (I don’t blame you for thinking that - lots of people online use these terms interchangeably when they’re…not.)

You already have a personal brand.

If your previous wins were internal at a big institution, your personal brand was what people said when your name came up. “Oh yeah, Hannah - she’s our best analyst on the real estate team.” (I was not…shhhh…)

That works great inside a closed network. It breaks down the second you want to do something outside that network.

When you want to pivot, start your own thing, or join a company where no one knows you, that internal brand stops working. Your credentials prove what you’ve done, not what you can do next. You need evidence beyond your resume.

So, you need a new personal brand, and posting online is a way to accelerate that.

Here’s 3 ways your personal brand can help you land your next job, be invaluable to a company, and grow your own business.

#1 Skip the job search and attract your next opportunity

AI has made it too easy to fake competence. You can generate a resume, cover letter, and portfolio with ChatGPT in 20 minutes. You can use bots to submit hundreds of job applications.

Recently, we were hiring for a role at my company. We got flooded with applications. Many were clearly AI-generated. The burden of sifting through resumes where we had no idea if the person actually did the work they claimed was exhausting.

Most of the people we interviewed came from referrals or had worked at a similar company in the same role with a track record we could verify.

But the person we ended up hiring landed the job from their “personal brand”.

They’d posted a portfolio publicly, including a teardown of one of our competitors showing how they’d redo the competitor’s marketing.

We reached out, interviewed them, and hired them. They didn’t have the exact title we were looking for. But they showed they could do the work.

This happened to me too. I got two job offers in the last five months. Both came from startup founders who reached out after seeing my LinkedIn content.

Both found me via LinkedIn search for the role I had. Posting publicly helped me not only rank higher in search, but also gave the hirer a whole body of content that showed what I was capable of. They could see how I think, how I write, and what I care about.

When you’re attracting opportunities with a personal brand, you hardly need to call it a job “search”.

#2 Learn a high-value skill that companies are paying top dollar for

Just as AI has made applying for jobs easier, it’s also made building products easier. When there are thousands of AI chatbots, AI notetakers…AI agents for finance out there, the key differentiator is your ability to tell the story of your product or build a brand around the founders and employees.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that job postings mentioning “storyteller” or “storytelling” doubled in the past year. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Vanta are hiring people specifically to communicate their value. Vanta, a compliance company, is offering $274,000 for a “head of storytelling.” In other words, they’re hiring people to build the team’s personal brands.

Deloitte created a “corporate influencer” role - someone who became the face of the company on LinkedIn, generated 400 million impressions last year, and brought in 10,000 leads. That has a $13 million marketing value and they now have 250 employees doing this part-time.

a16z launched a “New Media Fellowship” - a program for “operators, creators, and storytellers shaping the future of media.” Translation: they want people who can build distribution and credibility for their portcos.

The skill of building a personal brand is something companies are actively hiring and paying for. If you build this skill and combine it with real expertise, you’re valuable.

#3 Build and grow your business

For early-stage companies and solopreneurs, founder and team led marketing (i.e. personal branding!) is some of the cheapest and most effective marketing out there.

Poppi (back when it was early stage) built a brand through founder-led content before anyone knew what the product was.

Cluely is an infamous example - product was subpar, but team got great awareness from their differentited personal brand content and raised a round for a16z. (Jury’s out on their approach to building a company via controversy and rage baiting, but no doubt the marketing “worked”.)

Personal brands aren’t just for consumer companies. Rillet, a niche example you might only know if you follow B2B SaaS startups on Linkedin, is trying to replace NetSuite for CFOs. Boring as hell - but their Head of Finance found success building a brand by speaking directly to CFOs on LinkedIn and openly credits LinkedIn as their biggest marketing lever.

I’ve had MBA grads from Wharton and Stanford reach out asking how to grow on LinkedIn because they’re building businesses and need distribution.

Personal brands are also the driving force behind solopreneur businesses. Justin Welsh is a great example, as is Sahil Bloom.

I made over $100K this year from building my personal brand, but I didn’t start posting on social media because I wanted to be an influencer. I wanted to reach people I wanted to advise, work with, and help.

I’ve always seen personal branding as more of a way to practice marketing, reinvest any $$$ from sponsorships, and build credibility for more intentional entrepreneurship down the line.

I’m focused on this next year, even if it’s a less lucrative, bumpier road to start. I want to build for you and with you, and bring you behind the scenes. ~more on this soon!!~~

Your personal brand isn’t built in a day

Whether you’re pivoting roles, trying to develop a high-value skill, or marketing your own thing - your personal brand is a shortcut.

I’m not a woo woo girl, but I believe without a doubt that perception shapes reality. Your personal brand shapes people’s opinions of you before you ever meet them.

When someone’s deciding whether to take a call with you, hire you, or work with you, they’ve often already made up their mind based on what they found about you online or heard about you from their network.

You don’t need to post every day. You don’t need a following. You just need to start with sharing one piece of evidence that shows you can do the thing you’re trying to do next.

Start doing this in January (read this if you need help getting started). Come back to me in six months and tell me how it changed your life.

Jobs & Resources

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears - updated weekly!

• (mostly) free resources to grow your career

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

follow me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube

Subscribe now

Thank you for being here!

Getting a job 🤩 vs. starting a job 😔

You did it! You finally got the job you spent months (maybe even years) working towards - dozens of coffee chats, apps that disappeared into a black box, final round interviews that gave you false hope…now you’re onto the next phase of your career!!

But now you’re a few days before starting and thinking: I can’t do this…You start missing your old job where you knew how to do everything, who to ask for what, because it felt comfortable.

How I’d onboarded myself again

Three months ago, I left my comfortable remote job at a thousand-person tech company where I was one of five product marketers to join a 40-person startup where I’m the only marketer. I went from remote to in-office, structured to chaotic, and into an industry I’d never worked in before (fintech/crypto). Most 30-60-90 day plans didn’t feel like they fit.

Last month I posted a story on IG about how hard the first few months felt, and how it finally started clicking around month 3. I got dozens of DMs from people about to make similar moves: switching industries, taking pay cuts for long-term upside, joining smaller companies where they’ll be the first or only person in their role.

They all wanted to know: what do you actually do when there’s no structure and you’re expected to figure it out yourself?

Here’s how I’d do it again:

1. Set these 3 goals before you start

2. Expect the 3-month rollercoaster

3. Build your 4-pillar onboarding plan: team, customers, product, industry

4. Ask (the right) questions

5. Know if you should quit

Read more

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my career in marketing started way before I ever had that job title.

In high school, I stayed up at 2 a.m. teaching myself how to use Photoshop to make GIFs for a fandom blog 🙃 It felt like procrastination, but looking back, it was my first marketing class: experimenting, storytelling, learning what makes people pay attention online.

Years later, when I switched from finance into tech (and started a content side hustle), I found myself back in those same tools—this time using Illustrator and Adobe Express to design campaigns and content. That’s why this partnership with Adobe Digital Academy to help you level up your career feels full circle.

What is Adobe Digital Academy

Generative AI and the creator economy are changing what creative and tech roles look like—fast. For anyone early in their career or thinking about a pivot, this is the moment to upskill.

The Adobe Digital Academy is a collection of self-paced specializations and courses built to help you level up in creativity, marketing, and responsible AI. It’s designed for people who want to stay ahead of the curve, whether you’re breaking into tech or growing within it.

Here’s what you get:

• Future-focused training. Learn how creativity, marketing, and AI actually work together in today’s market.

• Beginner-friendly. You don’t need prior experience—everything’s structured to guide you step by step.

• Flexible paths. Take one course or go all-in on a specialization, on your own schedule.

• Hands-on access. Depending on the course you choose, you’ll either get 4 months of access to Adobe Creative Cloud (including tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express) or a 3 month trial of Adobe Express.

• Shareable credentials. Earn certificates recognized across the industry and share them directly on LinkedIn for future employers to see.

What I’m exploring:

AI Foundations for Creativity (course) — A beginner-friendly introduction to Adobe Firefly and Creative Cloud. Learn to use generative AI to amplify ideas, not replace them.

If you’ve been thinking about your next move—or how to stay relevant in a rapidly changing market—this is a great place to start.

Explore the Adobe Digital Academy on Coursera here.

Resources & Guides

• cool jobs for ambitious nonlinears - updated weekly!

• (mostly) free resources I’ve created over the past year

• a mini AI tool I made to help you write cold emails

follow me on: Instagram, Linkedin, Tiktok, Youtube