Why bankers make horrible businessmen
Look, we all know one: the banker who wants to leave his day job to start a company and finally create freedom for himself. Next thing you know, he’s sending out NDAs to family and friends, trying to raise $5 million for an AI-powered kombucha brand with an overworked deck, all the while he has zero customers and a team full of guys named Chad.
Bankers running businesses is like vegans running steakhouses—it sounds noble, but nobody's trusting the product.
Let’s get right into it:
1. They Think Excel Is a Business Plan
Bankers live in Excel the way rats live in sewers—comfortably, blindly, and completely unaware of the real world above. They’ll build a 50-tab model showing your business hitting $100M in revenue... with literally no idea how to get your first customer. Their idea of "execution" is fixing a formula error.
Ask them to actually sell a product? Watch them freeze like a deer staring at its own reflection in a Patagonia vest.
2. They’ve Never Felt the Terror of Payroll Friday
Real entrepreneurs know the feeling: it's Thursday night, your Stripe account looks like a desert, and payroll is tomorrow. Bankers? They get hives when their Amex bill posts. These guys panic if their third-quarter bonus is delayed.
They're not built for pain. They're built for catered lunches and conference calls with 7 people who all secretly hate each other.
3. They Think Strategy = PowerPoint
Bankers love strategy. So much that they’ll spend six weeks “strategizing” while your inventory catches fire, your supplier gets deported, and your top employee quits via Slack. Their big idea? “Let’s raise another round.”
Building a deck isn’t building a business. It's adult arts and crafts.
4. Their Risk Tolerance Is -17
They’ll call you reckless for launching a product without a focus group, but they’ll invest $20M in a pre-revenue startup because some guy they golfed with at Wharton said it’s “disruptive.” These are people who need permission to take a vacation but somehow think they’re qualified to lead a startup through a recession.
5. They Confuse Looking Busy with Being Useful
Bankers love to be “in the weeds,” which usually means sending emails, reviewing decks, and holding 15 meetings a week with no actual outcomes. Meanwhile, your average small business owner is out here taking customer calls from the bathroom while fixing a broken freezer.
One is playing corporate cosplay. The other is keeping the lights on.
6. They’re the Main Character in Their Own Delusion
Bankers believe they’re the smartest person in any room… mostly because they’ve never left the room. Drop them into a warehouse, a kitchen, or a Shopify dashboard and they look like a tourist asking where the minibar is.
They’ll name-drop their analyst years like it’s combat experience. Bro, you sat in Midtown for 80 hours a week formatting bullet points. Relax.
Final Thought:
Bankers are useful—like calculators, or backup generators. But you don’t let your calculator run the company. You use it when needed, then put it back in the drawer.
If you’re an operator, hire a banker to count the money after you make it. Just don’t confuse financial cosplay with actual business sense. One survives in a pitch room. The other survives in the trenches.
And if things hit the fan? Spoiler alert: the banker’s already updating his résumé and blaming the market.