Time isn't running out for you to become an entrepreneur
You aren't running out of time. You are collecting experience.
Welcome to RemoteThatWorks, a weekly-ish newsletter hand-typed by the Valentina Thörner, the Empress of Remote herself. I talk about product leadership, process design, and people (and their relationships). Proudly non-AI, and proudly all-opinions-my-own. To work with me, find me on MentorCruise. Oh, and subscribe so you don’t miss out on the next post.
If you live in [London/San Francisco/Tallinn/Berlin] and mingle with the [startup/entrepreneur/freelancer] crowd, it’s easy to forget that being a founder or seed-funding employee is not the only option out there.
And frankly, it might not even be your best option.
Unless you have a access to a huge trust fund and no one depending on you. Maybe then it is your best option.
Though frankly, even in that case, I might recommend you to get some work experience first so you can create solutions to real problems.
Why don’t you just quit and become a founder?
Quit your job and become a founder - it sounds inspirational. It’s also about as actionable as “live - love - laugh”. It looks good on a rugged piece of wood, on the wall of a coworking space, and it completely ignores your reality.
If you just quit…
If you “just quit”, how are you going to pay rent, groceries, new shoes for the kids?
If you “just quit”, how are you going to replace the doors opened by that logo you currently represent thanks to your corporate job?
If you “just quit”, what does that mean for your sense of safety and belonging?
Whoever is recommending you to “just quit” - maybe ask them how they are funding their life right now, and how that life looks like. Can you afford their reality? Do you want to replicate their reality?
Becoming a founder…
So you are supposed to become a founder. Once you are a founder you get investors. Those investors give you money so you can build something. And then at the end you sell and then you are rich.
The whole discussion about founders, investors, and adquisitions tend to ignore the pesky little detail that you need to be solving some kind of problem where someone is willing to pay for the solution.
And you are hopefully interested enough in that problem that you are going to dedicate the next couple of years to solving it, because most startups fail! So the payout isn’t guaranteed.
Which brings us back to the trust fund.
The merit of side hustles and experience
You can “just quit” and become a founder.
Or you can start working on your project on the side. Talk to some people who have problems you are familiar with. Learn what they want and what they need. Interview some more.
Start offering some help on the side. See what works, adjust, experiment. Take time to learn, both at your job as well as outside of your job.
And get experience. Learn how the corporate world works. Understand who does the purchase decisions and what they depend on. At your dayjob, investigate how new products or services are procured. And then figure out the real story (because there’s always another story underneath).
Then use that knowledge to expand your side hustle.
There’s no best-before date for becoming a founder. If you take the first half of your adult life to learn, you’ll probably be in your 50s before you are ready to become a founder. And that’s totally fine.
(At that point you’ll have run out patience for the hustle boys at those meetups - which is why you probably won’t go and hence no one realizes you exist.)
There’s also no shame in not becoming a founder. This is your life. You decide what works for you. You can be perfectly successful (by whichever metrics you choose) in a corporate job, as a freelancer, as a founder, as a stay-at-home parent, as a startup-post-series-B employee.
You live in a bubble - step towards the edges from time to time
We all live in our own bubble and it’s easy to forget that not everyone is like the people surrounding you. If you feel that you are the odd one out, check the bubble you are in. It’s very likely that your flavour of “odd” is normal somewhere else.
Now, it IS a lot of work to get out of your bubble, even temporarily. Online, it’s the algorythm that serves us what we believe already. Offline, the human tendency to socialize with people “like us” serves a similar purpose.
And yet, you can tweak your bubble. Add someone from a different generation to your network. Start talking to someone from a different sector. Engage with someone with a completely different career. Diversify your sources. The human brain needs to see examples to be able to design alternatives. Seek those examples, then design your own journey.
Maybe that means you’ll quit and become a founder.
Or maybe you find your niche exactly where you are, guiltfree.
This post was inspired by a question a mentee brought to me. If you are looking for a mentor with a pragmatic approach, reach out via MentorCruise. Or reply to this email - I’ll definitely read your message and while I can’t promise a personal reply, your question or comment it might spark another newsletter :)