Why Having A Job Compliments Your Startup Dream

I have read many posts and heard alot of casts where people talk about quitting their day jobs or dropping off school to build their start-ups, that’s cool and all but make sure you take a minute or several minutes to rethink that decision. With the present state of the economy, I can see why anyone would give up on searching for a job and focus fully on their start-up. We’ve all read those fairytale stories of how Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, how Tim Ferriss quit his corporate job to build a successful business etc… but we never read those stories about how Joe dropped out of college to build a start-up but ended up homeless and hungry. The world we live in glorifies those success stories but forget the failures, not realizing how important it could be in teaching young Entrepreneurs to make the right decision.

If you feel as a young Entrepreneur that you have enough money to last you through your entire start-up process, then by all means follow your heart. The thing people don’t realize is that the money is not the only element of gain about having a job while chasing a start-up dream. If you know that your current job consumes too much of your time and you need to have a less demanding schedule, here’s a thought: find a part time job, a consulting gig at a start-up and keep a cashflow rather than giving it up all together. I always encourage Entrepreneurs to try associating themselves with other start-ups. If you can get a job at a start-up, try your best to! It’s a learning process that will prove immensely valuable. If you can’t get a full-time job there, truth is that a lot of start-ups outsource some aspects of their jobs – cease this opportunity, be active on their blogs and community, study their moves and make sure you learn something. It will come in handy. Here are some reasons why having a job helps your pursuit of start-up success:

1.) It keeps the money coming in. There’s always money floating around silicon valley and Investors are always looking for promising Entrepreneurs to invest in, BUT they are now very very careful with how much they spend. It’s more difficult to get money from investors these days if you are a first time Entrepreneur and the state of the economy can be blamed for that. Most Entrepreneurs have now turned to bootstrapping as the way of funding their business. How can you afford to bootstrap if you don’t have cashflow? even if you have money saved up somewhere, do you know how long that will last before you need more?

2.) It offers the opportunity to gain some useful experience. If you have a job whether in a start-up or not, you are bound to learn a thing or two that would be useful later on in your career as an Entrepreneur. You might find yourself learning how to manage other people, how to make the right business decisions, marketing and so forth. The possibilities are many. Now imagine if you were working at a start-up, you will see first hand what it takes to build/run a start-up. You are bound to learn important lessons, lessons like how to pitch investors, how to find the right work force, effective marketing strategy, carrying out customer tests etc..

3.) Having a job means Networking Opportunities. A lot of people associate Networking with having time to travel from event to event. On the job networking might be over-looked but there are many stories of people building relationships with co-workers, bosses or even clients and have gone on to build successful businesses with the help of these people. I can’t count how many ex-google employees, ex-paypal employees that have gone on to build start-ups that are performing better than okay at the moment. These people took advatage of the people they met while working at their old jobs and the results are obvious. So if you are a recent grad, it helps to atleast try looking for a job, rather than just focus fully on starting up a business.

4.) Having a Job means something to fall back on. Whether you like to hear this or not, most start-ups fail within the first year. I know every Entrepreneur believe it can’t be them, we all expect to succeed! After all we are the optimists and those investors are pessimists. But what if you do fail? what then? Having a job means something you can fall back on in this tough recession period where it’s more difficult to find a new job than it is for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle.

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Tagged as: Employment, entrepreneur, gen y, investor, job, marketing, startups, Tim Ferriss, unemployment