Goldman Sachs asked her to take down her baking TikToks, but this Gen Z employee had other plans; she quit Wall Street instead and is now turning her baking side hustle into a full-fledged business and made cakes for Gigi Hadid, others

Allison Sheehan was balancing two very different worlds — managing wealth at Goldman Sachs and baking elaborate cakes before her 5 am workday began. Her social media videos, which documented the unusual routine, earned her the nickname ‘Investment Baker’ and a growing following. But the side hustle soon became a source of friction with her employer, eventually leading her to walk away from Wall Street and pursue baking full-time.

At 27, Sheehan has turned that decision into a new career. She now runs her own cake business, has built a social media community of tens of thousands and is pursuing an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She is also considering expanding her venture into a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand.

From selling cakes to sorority sisters to building a business

Sheehan's baking journey began long before her Goldman Sachs career. Growing up, she watched her mother prepare pastries, biscuits and pavlovas, developing an interest in baking from an early age.


However, she only recognised its business potential during her final year at Southern Methodist University (SMU), where she began selling cakes to her sorority sisters. Initially, she sold around two cakes a month for approximately $100 each.

The small operation soon expanded beyond her sorority, attracting customers across the university and Dallas.

Despite the growing demand, Sheehan did not initially consider baking a viable full-time career. She joined Goldman Sachs after graduating, briefly working in equity trading operations at the bank's Salt Lake City campus before moving to its New York office in September 2022.

She revived her baking Instagram account around the same time, initially with approximately 500 followers. Posting up to three times a day, she shared day-in-the-life videos, cake photographs and glimpses of her baking routine.

Word-of-mouth recommendations helped her reach a wider clientele. Within six months of moving to New York, she had started working with bigger customers, including wellness brand Goop, which hired her to make a cake for a birthday campaign.

She also began receiving orders from fashion brands and celebrities, including LoveShackFancy and Gigi Hadid.

Goldman Sachs compliance team objects to her ‘Investment Baker’ social media accounts

In 2024, Sheehan was juggling her wealth-management job at Goldman Sachs with a growing baking business. She would wake up at 5 am to prepare buttercream, frost tiered and heart-shaped cakes, film content and then head to work.

At the time, she had around 1,000 social media followers and was baking and selling approximately three cakes a week. Her clientele was also growing, with brands and celebrities such as Goop, Valentino, LoveShackFancy, Brooke Shields and Gigi Hadid among her customers.

However, about a year into her content creation journey, Goldman Sachs' compliance team called her in for a discussion. The firm reportedly objected to her use of the word 'investment' in her TikTok and Instagram handles and instructed her to take down all posts from both accounts.

Although her colleagues were supportive of her baking activities, Sheehan initially complied, fearing trouble at work.

“I did not think that anything was wrong with what I was doing,” she told Fortune, recalling how colleagues would regularly ask about her cakes and even encourage her to bring them to office events.

Goldman Sachs' exact social media rules are not publicly available. However, its code of business conduct and ethics asks employees to exercise good judgement and avoid content that could reflect negatively on the firm.

Why did she eventually quit her Wall Street job?

Sheehan later decided to restore her archived social media posts, partly because she wanted to demonstrate her entrepreneurial experience while applying to Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.

But the decision brought her into conflict with the compliance team again. Within three months of restoring her content, she was called in for another discussion.

This time, she decided she had had enough and chose to leave her finance career to focus on baking.

“I 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’t care about,” she told Fortune. “I just wanted to be baking.”

How her baking side hustle turned into a full-time business

As orders increased, Sheehan rented a commercial kitchen in New York's Lower East Side for six months. But managing the business alongside her full-time finance job became increasingly difficult.

After leaving Goldman Sachs, she was able to devote all her time to baking. Her production increased by 300%, with her making between 10 and 30 desserts every week, ranging from smaller treats to elaborate wedding cakes.

However, giving up her Wall Street salary also meant cutting costs. Unable to continue renting a commercial kitchen, she persuaded a neighbour who worked from an office to let her use their kitchen in exchange for walking their dog.

From custom cakes to a potential CPG brand

Sheehan now wants to take her business beyond custom cakes. She is exploring plans to scale Alleycat Baking Co. into a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand, with baking mixes and frostings among the products she could eventually sell through retail channels.

Opening a physical bakery is another possibility. She has also begun working with 14 suppliers, including raw material providers, graphic designers, product developers, food scientists, photographers, sales representatives, retailers and logistics professionals, to explore her expansion plans.

She credits her experience at Goldman Sachs with helping her develop business skills, particularly the importance of responsiveness. However, she acknowledges that running a small business comes with its own challenges, including slower progress, financial uncertainty and the difficulty of giving up control.

Her earnings as a graduate student running a food start-up are also considerably lower than what she made at Goldman Sachs.

Yet, Sheehan says she is happier pursuing her entrepreneurial ambitions and has no plans to return to a corporate desk job.

“I’m so much happier, and I would not trade what I’m doing to go back to working at a desk ever,” she told Fortune.