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Regret Minimization When She Quit Capital Group

The Story

Kyla graduated in 2019, moved across the country to Los Angeles for her Capital Group job, then the pandemic hit a few months later. The role was prestigious — “a really cool job in LA working for, you know, a pretty big institution and was in their top program there” — but the fit wasn’t right (Source 1).

“At a lot of firms… there’s a copy-paste model. Like they kind of want you to think a certain way, which makes sense. They want you to do things a certain way. There’s like their way of doing things and For me, I just wasn’t maybe as focused on that. I wanted to do things in a different way. I wanted to focus on new things” (Source 1).

She made the decision with a pro/con list, weighted toward regret avoidance. “Well, when I was doing — I did like a pro/con list, and when I was doing that, a lot of it was around, I should take a leap. I can take a leap. Why wouldn’t I try this out? And it was a lot of regret minimization. So I was like, if — will I regret not doing this? And the answer was always yes” (Source 1).

The framing was personal, not financial. “I have to see, I have — because if I live this life without ever knowing, like, what I could have done, I would be very sad. And so I was like, I just want to prevent me being sad about that. And being sad about that was more powerful to me than being sad about, you know, leaving that job” (Source 1).

There was no business plan. “I had a little bit of proof of concept, but nothing to where it was like, this is going to work versus won’t work. Like things were going okay, but there wasn’t like a solid business plan in place” (Source 1).

There was no safety net. “I just was like, sure. So it was, it was thought out, but it was also terrifying, you know” (Source 1).

She remembers the moment physically. “I remember riding my bike to the gym. I used to bike to the gym, and I remember riding my bike to the gym and being like, I cannot believe I’m leaving this incredible, amazing job that I don’t even know if I should be here. And I had so much like imposter syndrome and I had so much worry about it” (Source 1).

Someone from the previous firm told her she wouldn’t make it. “Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was somebody at my previous firm who was like, you’re not going to — like, you’re not going to make it” (Source 1). She used it as motivation: “got to prove them wrong, sort of out of spite” (Source 1).

She didn’t go directly to full-time creator work. After Capital Group she took a role at On Deck building a finance curriculum and only went full-time as a creator after Bankless offered her a content deal in autumn 2021 (Source 2).

Lesson for Creators

Regret minimization is a cleaner decision frame than upside maximization when the upside is genuinely unknowable. Kyla didn’t have a P&L for her future career — she had a TikTok account and a blog. What she could estimate was how she’d feel in five years if she stayed. The pro/con list wasn’t really about pros and cons; it was about which version of “sad” she could live with. The other piece worth copying: she didn’t leap directly from corporate finance to full-time creator. She used On Deck as a bridge that paid bills and matched her mission, then jumped once Bankless made the math obvious. Two smaller jumps, not one giant one.

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