According to Business Insider, Nathan Wangliao Yinan left global consulting giant McKinsey & Company in 2021 at age 27 after working there for just under three years. He first joined a Singapore-based AI startup to lead go-to-market strategy, an experience he found jarring after McKinsey’s structured environment. That startup was acquired in 2023, leading him to co-found his own company, Havana, which builds AI agents for student recruitment and enrollment teams. The transition from consultant to founder forced him to unlearn the habit of overanalyzing and seeking optimal data-driven solutions. Instead, he had to learn to make faster decisions with less information and speak up more authoritatively as the face of his business.
The psychology game
Here’s the thing he realized that most people don’t talk about enough: the hardest part isn’t the product or the sales. It’s managing your own head. He was told that point-blank, and it’s probably true for any high-stakes, uncertain career path. You see your friends in stable jobs and your brain starts whispering about how much easier their path seems. The real skill is learning to shut that noise off so you have the morale to figure out the actual work—the building and selling. Because if you lose that morale, you’re done. Anyone can learn to build a product if they work hard. Not everyone can keep their spirit intact through the rollercoaster.
What to keep and what to drop
So what did he carry over from the hallowed halls of McKinsey? Client navigation. That’s huge. Consulting trains you to walk into a room with people more senior than you, from different departments with competing agendas, and run an efficient meeting. Now, selling to universities, that skill is directly transferable. And that ruthless prioritization and structured thinking? Absolutely vital when you have a million things to do and no one to tell you what’s next. But then there’s the stuff you have to actively unlearn. Consultants are basically paid to overanalyze. They seek data to find the single most optimal solution. In a startup, you’ll never have enough data. Waiting for it is a death sentence. You have to pick a direction, run with it, and be ready to pivot fast when it (often) doesn’t work. That’s a complete mindset shift.
Finding a voice
And here’s another big change: learning to speak up. At McKinsey, his managers told him he needed to do more of that, to ensure senior leaders knew the work was his. In a startup, especially as the non-technical founder, it’s not a suggestion—it’s the job. You are the point of view for customers every single day. They don’t want a hesitant analyst; they want a leader with conviction, even if that conviction is just about the next step to test. It forces a kind of confidence that consulting, ironically, can sometimes train out of you with its layers of review and consensus-building. Now, he’s comfortable taking risks and making calls. Not because he knows for sure, but because he knows waiting to be sure is the biggest risk of all.
