Reflections on Bain

Following the end of my time at Bain, I wanted to take time to reflect on my experience. There's four areas that I want to focus on here that have appeared as the most relevant to reflect on with a final section on what I think I lose by leaving so soon. For context, I had a 3 month stint at Bain and left to join ZeroHomes - a Series A startup - on their strategy and ops team. So, take what I say with a grain of salt.

The quality of colleagues

What stood out to me first at Bain was simply the quality of colleagues that I worked with. Coming from Travelers in the insurance space, this is one of the first times that I was surrounded by people who often had me thinking that they were pretty good at what they did. They were far from perfect. In fact, some of the people I worked with, even the more senior ones, were deeply flawed in the way they approached things. Others were rockstars. Even at Bain, you're going to see high variability. That said, my overall understanding was that I had a lot to learn from these people. The way they thought and communicated was crisp.

Compared to working at Spawn (which is still my favorite working experience to this day), the people I worked with here were simply more experienced and had picked up many effective habits that I now practice today.

The problem with not being in it for the love of the game

My colleagues were incredible. At the same time, they weren't in it for the love of the game. One of the biggest problems with consulting is that it's a move that maximizes career capital early in your career. There are honestly few careers that give you as much capital as MBB. To this end, though, a lot of people aren't there for the love of the game. They're there to check off boxes and leave. You come in, learn the skills, and then leave Bain. Hell, that's what I did.

While a great place to use a launchpad, it does somewhat limit your growth. Perhaps this take is simplistic, but I simply do not believe that a work environment in which you completely log off of the weekend is the ideal work environment. This often feels far more like doing the work for the rest than doing the work for the joy in itself. I'm someone who does it for the latter, but Bain honestly made the whole thing feel a lot more transactional.

The problem I worked on and the problems I saw

To be exceedingly vague (and respectful to my NDA), I was on a supply chain cost-reduction case. I don't have too much to say about this other than this isn't the problem I wanted to work on. I told them as much. And I still got put on it. This wasn't a factor at all in me leaving, but it's just something to think about. I was going to be on that case for a long time and frankly I think my learning was already seeing diminishing returns.

What I learned

I learned A LOT from my time at Bain. Transparently, a lot of it were things that I had heard about during case prep, but it's a different beast when you live the principles instead of just applying them to cases. 80/20, Minto enumeration, being MECE, making my output comprehensible and zero defect - these are all things that I took to heart and I'll use in the rest of my life.

This list isn't super long, but I think a lot of the knowledge you learn in this space is far more implicit than it is explicit.

What do I lose by leaving

When making the decision to leave, the counterfactual I was evaluating was me 21 more months deep into Bain. In this time, I would be far beyond where I am today. I would have grown and been far more effective. One thing I'll totally miss out on now is development in the client-facing roles. I'm leaving the professional services world so that's not something I'll be thinking about much. And the truth is I lose a lot by leaving, but there's also some stuff that I don't place a premium on.

Knowing that I wanted to get into the tech startup space, there's a lot of extra stuff at Bain that I'd learn that frankly wouldn't help me so much. I don't want to go into PE or corporate strategy and that's honestly what Bain produces the most. For me, my end goal is to be a COO in the tech startup space. When I then consider the path of getting into ops now after a few months at Bain, trading in my Bain career capital for the career I want with a great career progression, the decision became pretty obvious for me.