Finally the SMS arrived:
“Tomorrow
morning 5am, flight number AZ610 from Rome to NewYork.”
An SMS hitting my
BlackBerry on Sunday evenings used to decide my destination and client for the
coming week.
I was working for one of
the top three global strategy consulting firms.
A life packed in a
suitcase. A consulting life where you miss out on everything and everyone in
life, except Excel spreadsheets. A fancy business life we are taught to be
ideal slaves of, at top business schools whose degrees we are proud to hold.
After few hours of sleep,
the private driver was taking me to the Rome Fiumicino airport so I could take
my fancy business-class flight to NYC. Upon arrival, I was checking in to a
fancy five-star hotel and heading to my client’s office afterwards.
The salary? It was fancy,
too. The company was proud to be among the top payers of the industry.
Parents
There was something wrong
with this consulting life, though. I couldn’t stand this bullsh*t any longer
and one day I called my parents:
“Dad,
mom, I just quit my job. I want to start my own startup.”
My mom almost had a heart
attack. It wasn’t the first thing a perfectionist mother wanted to hear after
encouraging me to graduate from the world’s top business schools with top
grades.
I tried to ease her
distress. No chance.
“Mom,
I hate it. All these consultants are pretending to be happy and they are taking
happiness pills. I get to sleep only 3–4 hours a day. All those benefits the
company promised don’t exist. Remember the fancy five-star hotel? I am working
almost 20 hours a day and I don’t even enjoy it. Fancy breakfast? We never have
time to have that. Fancy lunch, dinner? It’s just a sandwich in front of our
Excel spreadsheets.
Oh, by the way, instead of
enjoying a champagne, I stare at spreadsheets during my entire business class
flights, too. The fancy salary? I never have time to spend a single penny of
it.
I hate my life, Mom, it’s
such a loser life. I don’t even see my girlfriend. I can’t fake it anymore. I
want to start my own business.”
My parents had retired
after years of a 9–5 working routine at their secure and boring government
jobs.
I knew that coming from a
family with no entrepreneurial background, it would be difficult to explain my
situation to them, but I didn’t expect the call next morning.
It was my mom on the phone:
“Sooooooooo, how is your business doing?! Is
it growing?!”
No matter what I said, I
couldn’t explain to her that a business needs more than one day to grow.
Girlfriend, Friends &
Social Circle
Having had the most
supportive girlfriend ever, it was now time I shared the news with my friends
who were busy climbing the fancy career steps in the fancy corporate world.
I told everyone that I just
quit my job to follow my startup dream. Some of my friends gradually stopped
seeing me, probably because they thought there was something wrong with me
since it was the second “fancy” job I had quit in a short period of time.
While the rest of my
friends were supportive, there was, however, still something wrong with my
relationship with them:
I soon realized I was starting to pull myself away from
social gatherings.
Every
time I met with those friends, I didn’t have many updates to give them in
response to their repeated questions, such as, “So, how is your startup going?
You are going to be the next Zuckerberg, right?” “Oh man, we are so proud of
you and we are so sure you will soon receive a huge round of investment.”
Doing
a startup was a long journey and I was putting myself under so much pressure by
giving such a f*ck about what other people think.
Day
by day, I was getting lonelier and more depressive as I avoided social
occasions. My startup progress was not as fast as my social circle imagined it
to be and I was fed up with telling people it took years for startups like
Facebook and Twitter to arrive at where they are now.
The only comfortable place
was next to my few entrepreneur friends. It was true, only an entrepreneur
could understand an entrepreneur.
Cash, cash, cash.
As if the social pressure
and loneliness were not enough, I was meeting the mother of all stresses:
running out of cash much faster than I had imagined.
This was killing my
productivity and ability to make proper decisions. I was panicking and rushing
to be successful and to make money.
One day, I even found
myself asking my girlfriend for a few cents because I had no money to buy
bottled water. I didn’t know it was just the beginning of such a difficult life
full of ups and downs…
Today.
Enough with the drama: more than two
years have passed since those days. I am now writing this blog post in a
beautiful resort in Phuket, Thailand, while enjoying my mojito.
Wait, I am not selling a dream. No, I
haven’t become a millionaire startup founder.
However, my business has a constant
stream of cash that allows me to travel the world and to work from wherever
there is WiFi.
There are, however, five things I
wish I had asked myself before starting this painful journey. Five questions I
believe every future entrepreneur should ask himself before taking the first
step to entrepreneurship:
1. Are you ready for
the social pressure?
If you have friends and family who
are not entrepreneurs, they won’t truly understand what you are trying to
achieve and the public pressure will be even higher.
I cared so much about what other
people think of me– so much that it ruined my life.
I was so hard on myself and punished
myself with even more work so I could announce my success as soon as possible.
That is, until the day I realized no one gave a f*ck about me, so why would I?
You are no more than a few seconds of
attention other people give to a Facebook status. In 2014, no one has time to
care about others in such a crowded, noisy world.
If you care so much about what others
think, you will waste your time trying to prove that you are successful instead
of focusing on your startup.
Get a life. I got mine quite late.
2. Are you single or do
you have an extremely supportive partner?
As we grow up, we share more of our
life with our partners than with our friends or family. While I was lucky to
have such an amazing girl, it was so sad to see many of my entrepreneur friends
breaking up with their girlfriends along the way.
Doing your own business is tough –
way tougher than I could have ever imagined. Your mind is constantly f*cked up
with a million things going on inside and no other person, including your
girlfriend, has a single clue what is going on in there.
If you are not single, make sure your
partner understands it’s sometimes normal not to have a mindset even for a
simple kiss.
Yes, for a simple proper French kiss.
3. Do you have enough
cash to last at least a year?
Good, then multiply that amount at
least by three because you will be running out of your savings way faster than
you ever imagined. Along the way, there will be so many hidden costs,
accountant fees, lawyer needs, broken iPhones or PCs, etc.
Get ready for a smaller apartment,
smaller food portions, or counting your cents, which you never cared about in
your life previously.
The last few months before you
totally run out of your cash will be especially difficult and the pressure will
grow so exponentially that you won’t be able to sleep properly.
Success will come slowly, and cash
will burn fast. Be smart – plan from day one.
4. Are you ready to
sleep only few hours a day?
Having escaped from the corporate
consulting world, I was thinking I was finally going to live the dream by
working whenever I wanted to work – until I read Lori Greiner’s following
quote:
“Entrepreneurs are
willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.”
Thanks
for the photo, Ian, the awesome photographer.http://ianmurchison.com
It all started by little wake-ups in
the middle of the night. At the beginning, it was because I was too excited
about my ideas and I had so many of them. I simply couldn’t wait for the
morning to arrive so that I could start working again.
Then came the exaggeration phase. I
was working too much because I never had enough of working for my idea and I
wanted to do more. However, the more I worked and the later I went to bed, the
more difficult it was to fall asleep and the lower the quality of my sleep
became.
As a result, at least two or three
days of every week I was having days with almost no productivity.
Don’t be fooled by my fancy Instagram
picture above. Don’t be fooled by over-hyped funding news about startup
founders becoming millionaires.
The stories behind the scenes have so
many painful days, sleepless nights, and continuous rejections and failures.
The journey to success is long. Very
long. Very often, too long.
5. How do you define success?
Each of us has a different priority
list in life. For most people, money is the number one priority on the list,
while work-life balance ranks higher for others. Consequently, people define
success differently.
Depending on your definition of
success, the difficulty of your entrepreneurial journey will differ, too. If
money and public success are what matters to you the most, you are likely to
have a hard time along your journey.
Remember Hemingway’s wise words:
“It is good to have an
end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
Successful entrepreneurs are not
necessarily those who raise millions of investment rounds. Don’t forget, they
are one in a million.
There are, however, thousands of
dreamers out there who manage to bootstrap their startups or live so well off
on their own, but even they do not make it to the top of tech news.
No matter how much your journey f*cks
up your life or how difficult it will be, enjoy the ride and keep following
your passion. As Tony Gaskin puts it perfectly:
“If you don’t build your dream, someone
will hire you to help build theirs.”
https://medium.com/everything-about-startups-and-entrepreneurship/how-quitting-my-corporate-job-for-my-startup-dream-f-cked-my-life-up-3b6b3e29b318