Simon van Teutem clapped, too, but for him, the irony was unbearable.
“I knew where everyone was going,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “Everyone did. Which made it worse — we were all pretending not to see it.”
Van Teutem took on the project after watching the prestige treadmill siphon talented, creative kids into trivial work—and then close the door behind them. Everyone always says they’re just doing their banking job just to get their foot in the door, he noted, but they always end up staying.
“These firms cracked the psychological code of the insecure overachiever,” Van Teutem said, “and then built a self-reinforcing system.”
At McKinsey, where he interned next, the work seemed more polished but no less hollow.
“I was surrounded by rocket scientists who could build really cool stuff,” he said, “but they were just building simple Excel models or reverse-engineering toward conclusions we already wanted.”
He declined the full-time offers and instead began interviewing the people who hadn’t. Over three years, he spoke with 212 bankers, consultants, and corporate lawyers—from interns to partners—to understand how so many high-achieving graduates drift into jobs they privately despise. The damage, he concluded, wasn’t villainy, or even greed, but lost potential: “The real harm is in the opportunity cost.”
Money, he found, wasn’t the magnet, at least not at first.
“In the initial pull, most elite graduates don’t decide based on salary,” he said. “It’s the illusion of infinite choice, and the social status.”
At Oxford, that illusion was everywhere. Banks and consultancies dominated career fairs; governments and NGOs appeared as afterthoughts. He remembers his first brush with the system: BNP Paribas hosting a dinner at a fine restaurant in Oxford for “top students.” He applied because he was broke and wanted a free meal—and ended up interning there.
“It’s a game we’re trained to play,” he said. “You’re hardwired that way. You’re always looking for the next level, the Harvard after Harvard, the Oxford after Oxford.”
By the time many graduates realize that there is no gold star at the end – that the next level is simply higher pay and a longer slide deck—it’s already too late. Most people believe they can leave the corporate world after two or three years to follow their dreams, but very few actually do.
He tells the story of “Hunter McCoy,” a pseudonym for a man who once wanted to work in politics or at a think tank, to illustrate the point. McCoy imagined a future career in advocacy. Fresh out of university, McCoy joined a white-shoe law firm and told himself he’d stay two, maybe three years, just long enough to pay off his student loans. He even had a name for the finish line: his “f–k you number.” That was the sum that would buy him freedom to pursue policy work.
But freedom, it turned out, was a moving target. Living in an expensive city, surrounded by colleagues who billed a hundred hours a week and ordered cabs home at midnight, McCoy was always the poorest man in the room. Each bonus, each new title, pushed his number a little higher.
“High income stimulates high expenses,” van Teutem said. “And high expenses breed more high expenses.”
By his mid-forties, McCoy was still in the same firm, still telling himself he would leave soon. But the years had calcified into guilt.
“Because I never saw my children, because I was always working so hard, I told myself no, I want to continue for a few more years,” McCoy told van Teutem. “Because then at least I can buy my children a house in return for me missing out on so much.”
The saddest part, he said, was McCoy’s uncertainty about what would remain if he ever walked away.
“He told me he wasn’t sure his wife would stay with him,” van Teutem said quietly. “This was the life she’d signed up for.”
The confession struck him as both raw and deeply tragic, a glimpse of how ambition hardens into captivity.
“It made me happy I didn’t go into it,” he said. “Because you think you can trust yourself with these decisions. But you may not be the same person three years later.”
What van Teutem describes, however, is part of a systemwide phenomenon that’s been decades in the making.
As these firms captured an ever greater share of the nation’s profits, they became synonymous with meritocracy itself: exclusive, data-driven, and ostensibly apolitical. They offered graduates not just jobs, but a sense of belonging and identity.
How many early-career jobs pay more than $136k, or £60k a year? If a 22-year-old comes out of college with the natural desire to explore the big city, a la Friends or Sex in the City, but doesn’t have the cushion of parental support, they have to be within the narrow band of roles that clear the threshold. That means many careers only begin by chasing a salary level rather than pursuing mission-driven work.
Incentivizing risk taking
Van Teutem doesn’t think the solution lies in moral awakening so much as in design.
YC worked because it reduced the cost of risk: small checks, fast feedback, and a culture that made failure survivable.
“In Europe,” he added, “we do a really bad job at that.”
Governments, he argues, can do the same. In the 1980s, Singapore began competing directly with businesses for top graduates, offering early job offers, and eventually linking senior civil service pay to private-sector salaries. Controversial, sure, but it built a state that could keep its best talent.
“They use the exact tricks from McKinsey and Morgan Stanley,” van Teutem said, “not as charity, but as a springboard.”
He hopes that universities and employers copy the YC model: lower the downside, raise the prestige of trying.
“We’ve made risk-taking a privilege,” he said. “That’s the real problem.”
