Not every career story ends with someone climbing the corporate ladder. Sometimes the biggest leap forward looks like walking away from the job everyone told you to want.
Anthony Scotto III spent his childhood washing dishes in his family's Manhattan restaurant, which happened to sit on the same block as BlackRock's old headquarters. Watching employees from the investment giant come in for lunch, he decided by age 12 that finance was his ticket to a different kind of life. He interned there in college, landed a full-time role after graduation, and rose to assistant portfolio manager on one of the firm's flagship funds. He was, by his own account, the first in his family to graduate from college and break into corporate America.
Then the pandemic hit, his family's restaurant lost its main source of income, and everything he'd built started to look less permanent than he thought.
Here's what his story offers anyone rethinking their own path:
1. A "dream job" can still be the wrong job for this chapter of your life.
Scotto wasn't unhappy at BlackRock — he'd fought hard to get there and knew exactly how rare that opportunity was. But when his family needed him, the calculus changed. Sometimes the right move isn't about escaping a bad job; it's about recognizing that circumstances have shifted what actually matters to you right now.
2. Give yourself a safety net before you leap.
Scotto didn't burn the boats. He told himself that if the restaurant failed, finance would still be there. That mental cushion made the decision feel possible instead of reckless — a reminder that a backup plan isn't a lack of commitment, it's what lets you commit fully in the first place.
3. Your "unrelated" experience is rarely wasted.
Scotto didn't leave his finance skills behind — he uses them constantly, applying his training in real estate underwriting and financial modeling to site selection, lease negotiations, and forecasting for the restaurants. The specific job changed; the underlying skill set didn't.
4. Ownership changes your relationship to failure.
One of the more striking lines from his story: he said that if the business fails, it's on them, and if it succeeds, that's on them too. Working for someone else's fund is a different psychological experience than building something you and your family actually own. If you're weighing a jump to something more entrepreneurial, ask yourself how much you value that kind of direct accountability — some people find it energizing, others find it exhausting.
5. Growth requires a willingness to be bad at something new, publicly.
The restaurant's first few months were rough — an early ordering system didn't work, and they had to rebuild the customer experience piece by piece through what Scotto describes as hundreds of small adjustments. Neither he nor his mother had run a restaurant before. They course-corrected in real time instead of waiting for a perfect plan, and the business hit profitability by month three.
6. The tradeoffs are real — go in with eyes open.
This isn't a "follow your passion and everything works out" story. Scotto now works seven days a week, rarely takes time off, and describes the stress as unlike anything he experienced in finance. Any major career pivot — especially toward ownership — tends to trade one set of pressures for another. The question worth asking isn't "will it be easier," it's "are these the pressures I'd rather carry."
The bigger takeaway for anyone eyeing a career change: the most valuable thing Scotto brought from BlackRock to the restaurant business wasn't a specific technical skill — it was a way of thinking about risk, numbers, and decision-making that transferred across a completely different industry. If you're considering a pivot, the real question isn't whether your experience "counts" in a new field. It's how to translate it.