Goldman Sachs staffer resigns after compliance flags baking side hustle

Goldman Sachs drew the line at the word “investment.” Allison Sheehan, a 27-year-old former wealth management staffer who had worked at the bank for four years after joining in 2021, said repeated compliance scrutiny over her “Investment Baker” social media presence helped push her to leave Wall Street and bake full time. The dispute shows how quickly a personal brand can become an employee-conduct problem when the name sounds financial and the posts look public.

Sheehan said she woke up around 5 a.m. to bake and film videos before her Goldman workday, building an audience under the handle “investment__baker” and later under Alleycat Baking Co. She said her colleagues generally supported the videos, but compliance officials objected to the word “investment” in her handles and asked her to delete posts documenting her life as a baker while she was still working as a wealth manager.

For Goldman staffers, the useful lesson is less about baking than about the boundary between a hobby and outside business activity. Goldman’s exact social-media rules are not public, but its code of business conduct and ethics tells employees to exercise good judgement and avoid content that could reflect negatively on the firm. A side project can move into a gray zone fast if it implies a financial relationship, uses a name tied to the bank’s core business, or begins attracting clients who know the employee through work.

Sheehan said her online following eventually helped land business from Goop, Valentino, LoveShackFancy, Brooke Shields and Gigi Hadid. She later left Goldman to focus on baking and is now pursuing an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management while building Alleycat Baking Co. Business Insider previously reported that she described burnout and worsening health while juggling Goldman, baking and GRE preparation. Goldman has not publicly commented, leaving the case as a cautionary example for bankers whose side hustles become part brand, part reputation risk, part compliance headache.