Marcus. We built it. They shut it down. Nobody was accountable.

I joined to build something genuinely new for Goldman — consumer banking, retail products, a business that wasn't just serving institutional clients. The pitch was compelling. The mission felt real. Three years in, the losses were mounting, the strategy was publicly questioned, and then it was over. Our division was wound down. The people who made the original decision to build it were untouched. The people who built it, who'd been recruited specifically to build it, lost their jobs. No senior leader responsible for the strategy lost their role. No accountability was publicly acknowledged. The memo about the wind-down talked about "evolving our strategic priorities." Nobody said "we got this wrong." We got it right. They got the strategy wrong. We paid for that.