{"id":910978,"date":"2026-06-07T10:12:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T15:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/07\/this-gen-zer-got-reprimanded-at-goldman-for-making-cake-videos-as-the-investment-baker-she-quit-her-job-and-is-building-a-dessert-empire\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T10:12:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T15:12:26","slug":"this-gen-zer-got-reprimanded-at-goldman-for-making-cake-videos-as-the-investment-baker-she-quit-her-job-and-is-building-a-dessert-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/07\/this-gen-zer-got-reprimanded-at-goldman-for-making-cake-videos-as-the-investment-baker-she-quit-her-job-and-is-building-a-dessert-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"This Gen Zer got reprimanded at Goldman for making cake videos as the \u2018Investment Baker.\u2019 She quit her job and is building a dessert empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

The internet has become captivated by a booming genre of content: corporate professionals sharing day-in-the-life TikToks that chronicle their aspirational lifestyles. Allison Sheehan pulled back the curtain on her routine, sharing videos of her mornings making elaborate cakes before her day job as a wealth manager kicked in. Her double life as the \u201cInvestment Baker<\/a>\u201d led to the end of her Wall Street career, but also marked the beginning of her next act as a founder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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It was 2024, and Sheehan was juggling her wealth-management day job at Goldman Sachs with a budding baking presence on social media. She would document the intensity of her days; 5 a.m. wake-ups leading straight into whipping buttercream, frosting tiered heart-shaped cakes, and filming content before picking up her shift at an undisclosed company. At that time, she had around 1,000 social media followers and a growing list of notable clientele\u2014including Goop, Valentino, Love Shack Fancy, Brooke Shields, and Gigi Hadid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

The Gen Zer was baking and selling three cakes a week, posting content to a growing community of viewers. But after one year into her content creation, she says Goldman Sachs\u2019 compliance team brought her in for a hard talk: taking issue with Sheehan\u2019s use of the word \u201cinvestment\u201d in her TikTok and Instagram<\/a> handles, the firm instructed her to take down every post on both accounts. Goldman\u2019s exact social media rules aren\u2019t public, but the company\u2019s code of business conduct and ethics instructs employees<\/a> to \u201cexercise good judgement\u201d and avoid making content that \u201ccan reflect negatively on the firm.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Giving in out of fear and the pressure of being in trouble, she temporarily took her content down, despite widespread acceptance among her work team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI did not think that anything was wrong with what I was doing,\u201d Sheehan tells Fortune.<\/em> \u201cThey loved it, always asking, \u2018Allison, what did you make this morning? Show us! Are you gonna bring one in?\u2019\u2026Even people on my floor were like \u2018Oh, you\u2019re the baker,\u2019 or, \u2018Are you baking for the Halloween party at the office?\u2019 Everybody loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, the entrepreneur decided to unarchive all her social media posts and put them back up. Sheehan had her sights set on attending Northwestern\u2019s Kellogg School of Management, and needed the accounts back to prove her entrepreneurial track record. But this time, it only took three months for Goldman\u2019s compliance team to come knocking again. After being torn apart, she decided to call it quits on her Wall Street career and pivoted to a life as a founder. Now, the 27-year-old is running her Investment Baker socials followed by tens of thousands of users, helming her cake business, and pursuing her MBA at Northwestern. And she\u2019s even looking to build a CPG empire in leveraging business skills from her Wall Street days.<\/p>\n

Fortune<\/em> reached out to Goldman Sachs for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From sorority side-hustle to the \u2018Investment Baker\u2019<\/h2>\n

Sheehan\u2019s earliest childhood memories were spent watching her mom mix and whisk up pastries from biscuits to pavlovas. And that same passion filled up her spare time from an early age; but it wasn\u2019t until her senior year of college that she recognized the economic opportunity. The undergraduate student began selling two cakes a month to her sorority sisters at SMU Cox School of Business, charging around $100. Her micro-bakery operation quickly scaled out to the whole student body, and even extended into the broader Dallas area. But despite amassing a customer base, the fervor wasn\u2019t enough to sway her towards baking as a full-time career. Corporate America was still calling, and Sheehan landed a job at Goldman right out of college.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t see [baking] as a viable career. I definitely fell victim to the herd mentality of \u2018You have to work a corporate job, it\u2019s the only way to make money,\u2019\u201d Sheehan says.\u00a0 \u201cSo I fell for it, and I\u2019m happy that I did that. Honestly, I had a great experience in finance up until the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

Sheehan briefly worked in equity trading operations at Goldman\u2019s Salt Lake City campus before finagling a job at the company\u2019s New York City office. And she had big plans for when she touched down in the Big Apple<\/a> in September 2022, starting by reviving her baking Instagram account\u2014later renamed to the \u201cInvestment Baker\u201d\u2014which then had only about 500 followers. She stayed consistent and updated her accounts three times a day, posting day-in-the-life vlogs, expertly shot cake pictures, and clips of towering heart-shaped desserts for her clients. At this point, the home-baker\u2019s cake production bumped up to three a week.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t paid advertising or viral fame that catapulted her success\u2014Sheehan credits her growth to word-of-mouth buzz. And only six months after she moved to NYC, she started landing bigger customers. Wellness brand Goop hired the amateur baker to make a cake for its birthday campaign; she\u2019s also whipped up a confection for brands like Love Shack Fancy and celebrities like Gigi Hadid. In a bid to expand her business, the young wealth manager rented out a commercial kitchen in the Lower East Side for six months. But juggling while working full-time on Wall Street proved to be too much, so the second time Sheehan got in called in for her accounts, she officially ditched the corporate career to fully realize her academic and business dreams.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI got fed up by denying like 90% of my orders while I was sitting at my desk at work, doing some dumb estate planning that I didn\u2019t care about,\u201d the 27-year-old explains. \u201cI just wanted to be baking.\u201d<\/p>\n

New horizons and scaling AlleyCakes into a CPG brand<\/h2>\n

When the Gen Zer quit her 9-to-5 job at Goldman to pursue her cake business, it was all hands on deck. Production increased by 300%, with Sheehan churning out 10 to 30 desserts every week from mini confections to statement wedding cakes. Without her cushy Wall Street salary, she could no longer afford to rent out a commercial kitchen space. So to make ends meet, she wound up convincing her neighbor\u2014who was out at the office every day\u2014to lend her kitchen in exchange for free dog walks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Sheehan wants to be known for more than being the custom-cakes girl. And as her product line has expanded, so have her entrepreneurial aspirations. The home-baker is currently weighing the option of scaling her operation into a CPG brand, Alleycat Baking Co., while getting her master\u2019s degree from Northwestern. Opening a brick-and-mortar store is also on the table.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could either open a storefront and open a bakery, maybe become the next SusieCakes or Baked by Melissa. Or I could launch in retail and try to just expand my footprint via baking mixes and frostings,\u201d Sheehan says. \u201cI have a deep interest in consumer goods.\u201d<\/p>\n

The entrepreneur has already been testing the waters. She\u2019s worked with 14 suppliers to bring her CPG vision to life\u2014including raw materials suppliers, graphic designers, product developers, food scientists, photographers, sales representatives, retailers, and logistics professionals. And Sheehan credits the skills she developed at Goldman for helping her out; the bank taught her the importance of responsiveness, even though retail moves at a snail\u2019s pace compared to finance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Running a small business comes with its hardships; progress moves slowly, and Sheehan says she\u2019s still learning how to relinquish control. Being your own boss and betting on yourself also comes with a lot of responsibility; her income as a graduate student running a food start-up also pales in comparison to what she made working at the $322 billion bank. But she\u2019s never wavered on making her business a success.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so much happier, and I would not trade what I\u2019m doing to go back to working at a desk ever,\u201d Sheehan says. \u201cIt took so much confidence and conviction for me to take the leap, but I\u2019m really proud of myself, and I am so confident that it\u2019s going to work out. It\u2019s important to retain a level of delusion if you\u2019re going to be a founder, because you just really have to assume that it\u2019s gonna work out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Emma Burleigh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The internet has become captivated by a booming genre of content: corporate professionals sharing day-in-the-life TikToks that chronicle their aspirational lifestyles. Allison Sheehan pulled back the curtain on her routine, sharing videos of her mornings making elaborate cakes before her day job as a wealth manager kicked in. Her double life as the \u201cInvestment Baker\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":910979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,150036],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-910978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-goldman","category-reprimanded"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}