A pain point in my Wall Street schedule inspired me to leave Citadel to found a laundry startup

• Maria Cabral Menezes came up with WashWise, a 'dry shampoo for clothes,' while working on Wall Street.
• Menezes watched fellow traders at Citadel carry smelly gym bags and rewear clothes at conferences.
• She said Wall Street skills helped her raise $1.2 million in pre-seed funding and secure investors.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maria Cabral Menezes, 27, who founded the brand WashWise, a "dry shampoo for clothes" that refreshes items between washes. WashWise raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, as it announced on August 10. Backers range from people in the laundry industry, like the CEO of Cents, to executives associated with Pickle, JPMorgan, Soho House, and SoulCycle, according to a press release. Business Insider has confirmed her previous employment at JPMorgan and Citadel, as well as her enrollment at Wharton. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I knew the laundry space was broken when my fellow traders at Citadel would walk into the office with stuffed, smelly gym bags. That pain point was so common on Wall Street — I would take an early class at Barry's, shove my clothes into a little plastic bag, and carry it around all day.

Before that moment, I never planned to be an entrepreneur. I was always set on finance, with internships at banks throughout my time at Wharton and a job at JPMorgan after graduating from college. I got hired at Citadel around a year later, and traders often arrived at the office before the market opened, after an early workout.

Conferences brought the problem of half-dirty clothes. I would rewear one blazer, which would get sweaty or wrinkled after sitting in my carry-on. I was spending hundreds of dollars each month on dry cleaning, and my husband, who works at a hedge fund, used to do the same for his collared shirts.

Making the choice to leave Citadel

I started looking at some publicly traded companies in the detergent space and realized there are a few dominant brands and almost no innovation.

We needed a laundry company that rethinks the chore from the ground up, and starts doing it in a way that matches how we live: working out daily, traveling all the time, living out of a carry-on, wearing polyester and nylon, renting, reselling more than ever, buying more expensive items. Most people don't have time to do laundry every day, or enough laundry to justify a load. I wanted to create a whole new category of laundry, for the time between wear and wash. A chemist and I started investigating at home whether we could make a spray that cleanses, neutralizes odors, and reduces wrinkles — basically all of the attributes of a laundry machine. I wanted to make sure the product was feasible before going all in on the business.

I enjoyed my job and envisioned a long-term career at Citadel, but I started to wonder whether I'd blindly gone down the finance path without first asking whether it played to my strengths. The opportunity cost of leaving rises every day, as you value stability more and earn more. I didn't handle leaving particularly well, and cried after leaving the building on my last day. This was such an unnatural next step, with so much unknown.

My background in finance has helped me build the business

When I was a trader, I served as the eyes and ears of the entire market, and I learned how to identify assumptions, which helped me see the idea for WashWise in the first place. I inherited Citadel's obsession with perfect and scaling processes, even for things as small as setting the right flow on an email.

My husband and I have turned our second bedroom into an office, full of boxes, computers, and WashWise products, where I sit all day with my head of marketing. I've tried to keep some of the structure I had as a trader and get up around the time my husband does to finish emails before my head of marketing arrives at 9:00 a.m. I somehow work more now than I did at Citadel, including on the weekends, and go to sleep way later.

My connections in the finance world helped secure some investors, since a big part of my job was relationship upkeep. Really, though, I wanted to use the cap table for both cash and expertise I couldn't hire — I can now ask some people involved about shipping costs, others about product placement at Surf Lodge, others about laundry chemicals.

For all I've brought from finance, I'm having to unlearn my relationship to mistakes. At Citadel, the public markets spoke for themselves — there was either red or green on my screen. A bad mistake risked my job. I'm now living in a gray area, where I can't even tell if mistakes are mistakes until years out.

Some smaller habits remain as the orders come in. I find myself obsessively checking ShopMy notifications, the same way I used to check stocks.