Some entrepreneurs hustle till they make their inaugural sale or land their first client, memorializing the achievement by hanging their first $20 bill on the wall.
And then there are full-time employees at Goldman Sachs, one of Wall Street's most elite investment banks, who have a rare opportunity as entrepreneurship goes: To step away from their day jobs in finance to start their own companies, powered by Goldman's deep reserves of capital — all while still receiving a Goldman Sachs salary.
That's one of the promises behind GS Accelerate, an internal incubator program that Goldman Sachs runs with teams based in the US, UK, and India.
The goal of the program is to enable employees to pitch business ideas and compete for Goldman's venture capital. If they get it, they face a choice: Either stay in their current role and serve as an advisor to their new corporate brainchild, or pursue full-time entrepreneurship through the incubator with the aid of some of Goldman's top corporate leaders.
If they choose the latter option, here's the perk: They still get to collect the same paycheck they earned in the role they held previously, all while building up their new dream venture.
It's a luxury that few entrepreneurs can relate to, especially the ones who have learned to subsist mostly on sleepless nights and a feeling that straddles something between hope and desperation.
"We're not just about ideas, but we're about helping you make your idea into a reality inside the organization," Stephanie Cohen, the chief strategy officer at Goldman, told Business Insider.
What's more, anyone at the firm, from analysts to MDs, can pitch Goldman for capital, said Tanya Baker, the global head of GS Accelerate.
"Anyone at Goldman Sachs, regardless of title, tenure seniority, geography, can pitch an idea," Baker told Business Insider. "You literally could have graduated college a few weeks ago, started at the firm, been on day two," and submit a proposal for funding.
Business Insider got an exclusive look at some of the businesses that Goldman Sachs has been incubating
On Tuesday, GS Accelerate held its first virtual demo day, showing off seven of the businesses it has been incubating since the program launched in March 2018.
Business Insider was exclusively invited to attend the demo day, which was opened up for 4,000 staffers and interns of the company's roughly 39,000-strong worldwide workforce to observe.
A look at the kinds of businesses that Goldman has greenlit so far reveals some of the thinking the bank has about what kinds of tools the finance industry will need in the years ahead.
Many of the tech-focused concepts are aimed at streamlining the firm's operations.
One business, Louisa, positions itself as Goldman's internal LinkedIn network. It connects colleagues across borders based on highly-specific criteria, with the goal of "expanding your network, making more money, [and] serving your clients," said Rohan Doctor, the head of the company and an MD at Goldman.
Another business, Panorama, was founded by Christopher Locke, a controller for Goldman's global currencies and emerging markets business in London.
He expressed frustration at "reinventing the wheel" in designing solutions for problems he'd encounter on the job, which might have already existed within other areas of the firm.
"A year ago, from my seat in controllers, it was hard to keep up with what the latest innovation on my floor was, let alone what my colleagues in the New York and Tokyo offices were creating and using," Locke said.
"It was incredibly frustrating, because my team and I would spend hours developing new and improved ways to support our business, often to ultimately discover that another team in another division or region had already created something similar."
To address that problem, Locke helped create Panorama, a connectivity-focused platform that helps Goldman employees find tools that exist across the massive organization that would fit their needs. If they can't find something that already exists, they can identify relevant experts to help them create it from scratch.
And a third business, ClearFactr, was founded externally and subsequently acquired by Goldman Sachs as Accelerate's first investment in 2018.
It's a cloud-based financial modeling platform that demystifies the confusion from parsing through cluttered, data-heavy spreadsheets. Users can compare multiple forecasts based on different sets of assumptions side-by-side.
"The businesses that you are all building are focused on solving firm-wide problems and developing new solutions, and a nimble structure with potentially transformative outcomes," David Solomon, the firm's CEO, told the Accelerate entrepreneurs during the event.
"You are re-imagining our business models, improving the way we work, and creating new products to help our clients thrive."
Inside Accelerate: Who gets funding, how it works, and why it's aiming to boost diversity among entrepreneurs
Saying that most startups struggle to survive would be an understatement.
More than 90% of them fail, according to research from Startup Genome, which might help explain Accelerate's high bar for accepting pitches. It's hunting down the best of the bunch.
So far, of the 2,000 pitches it has received since the incubator's inception, Baker told Business Insider that the firm has agreed to provide funding for just 13 businesses — a stunningly low acceptance rate of 0.65%.
But once Accelerate accepts a proposal, it soups up that burgeoning business with two major advantages: venture capital, of course, and the knowledge and intuition delivered by designated corporate boards consisting of experienced Goldman professionals.
Each business gets a board: a group of roughly five to seven managing directors or partners who help to steer that business to success and decide, along with Baker's team, whether or not to keep investing capital or turn off the spigot.
Though no Accelerate business has yet been led by an analyst, Baker said that that scenario is certainly possible. Plus, she noted, young professionals are benefiting from the program another way: by joining the small, intensive Accelerate teams and growing through the unique learning experiences that those teams provide.
For young professionals, Baker described these entrepreneurship-oriented roles as "very different than if you're a new analyst on a 30-person desk, and you're really learning the ropes."
And Cohen said that GS Accelerate is focused on enhancing diversity among its entrepreneurial ranks.
"Our view is that diversity is a strategic imperative, and we believe investing behind diversity and inclusion is good for the business, and obviously good for the world," she said. "The world has now started to focus on that even more."
Are you a young person working on Wall Street? Contact this reporter via email at rhodkin@bjinnox.com, encrypted messaging app Signal (561-247-5758), or direct message on Twitter @reedalexander.
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