I had 17 years of experience. Turns out, some of it was the firm's.
I walked into Entrepreneurship Mastery thinking I had a head start.
Seventeen years at Goldman Sachs, Executive Director, four countries, two continents, three different functions. The last five years I was doing something that looked a lot like entrepreneurship from the inside — launching new capabilities, building data infrastructure from scratch, navigating regulatory stuff that would make your head spin, driving adoption across the firm. I shipped real things with real consequences. So yes, I thought it counted.
It did. Just not in the way I expected.
There's one word that cracked something open early on: borrowed. The clients, the authority, the brand on my email signature, the infrastructure I never had to think about because someone else built it… I moved inside that machine well. Really well. But the machine wasn't mine. And the moment I stepped off, I had to look at everything again — what was actually mine, what was the firm's, what I had assumed about myself for years that I now wasn't so sure about.
That's what the program did first. Before the frameworks, before any of the offer or content stuff, it made me see what I was actually working with.
I've run multiple marathons, triathlons and a full Ironman. I know what hard looks like. But here's the thing — an Ironman is a particularly hard. The suffering is real, your legs stop cooperating around mile 18 of the run, your mind goes somewhere weird... but the course is marked. There are aid stations. Someone hands you water. You know roughly what the next few hours are going to ask of you.
Building something entirely yours? Different sport.
There is no marked course. No aid stations. No firm absorbing your mistakes before anyone notices. When you get something wrong, it's just you, and that level of exposure was something I really did not see coming. The program didn't make it easier — it made it something I could actually move through, with frameworks that held under real weight and a community of people who knew exactly what I meant when I said I wasn't sure what was mine anymore.
Six months later, here's what I've built: The Seat Advisory — a private advisory practice for newly promoted VPs in financial services and fintech, focused on their next promotion. Not coaching. Advisory. I get embedded in live decisions, real stakes, real timelines. And alongside it, an operating system for content, sales, strategy, presentations — the way Goldman's infrastructure used to run alongside me. Except this one I built. This one is mine.
What surprised me most? How much quieter it is. No firm absorbing the noise, no brand softening anything for you. Just the work, and whether it's good enough. Most days, it is. And the days it isn't, I figure it out.
Six months ago I had a career. Now I have a business — and I have no idea how I'm this lucky to have stumbled into the program at exactly the right moment.
Beijos,
Mari
Mari