Allison Sheehan, a 27-year-old wealth manager at Goldman Sachs, quit her corporate career to focus on building a consumer goods company around her custom-cake business. Her departure follows compliance pressure from the bank over her social media presence as the "Investment Baker," a handle Goldman's compliance team flagged as problematic.
The Goldman Compliance Clash
Sheehan had been juggling a full-time job at Goldman's New York office with a baking business that generated 1,000 followers by early 2025. She documented her 5 a.m. wake-ups and cake production in day-in-the-life content, landing high-profile clients including Goop, Valentino, Love Shack Fancy, Brooke Shields, and Gigi Hadid. She was baking and selling three cakes a week while filming before her shifts.
In 2025, Goldman's compliance team summoned her over the word "investment" in her TikTok and Instagram handles, instructing her to delete all posts across both accounts. The bank's code of business conduct tells employees to "exercise good judgement" and avoid content that "can reflect negatively on the firm." Sheehan complied initially, but later unarchived her posts to document her entrepreneurial track record for her MBA application to Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Three months later, Goldman's compliance team returned with renewed pressure. She decided to quit rather than continue the fight.
From Custom Cakes to CPG
After leaving Goldman, Sheehan ramped production to 10 to 30 desserts per week, a 300 percent increase from her previous output. She stopped renting a commercial kitchen space and instead convinced her neighbor to lend his kitchen in exchange for free dog walks.
But Sheehan's ambition extends beyond custom orders. She is now pursuing her master's degree at Northwestern while exploring how to scale her operation into a consumer goods brand called Alleycat Baking Co. She is weighing two paths: opening a brick-and-mortar bakery or launching retail baking mixes and frostings. To test the market, she has already worked with 14 suppliers, including raw materials suppliers, product developers, food scientists, and retailers.
Sheehan credits the skills she picked up at Goldman for her CPG strategy. The bank taught her responsiveness and operational discipline. She acknowledges that her income as a graduate student running a food start-up is far lower than what she earned at the $322 billion bank, but she says she is "so much happier" than she was working at a desk.