Yeah, I think staying at a big company is a proxy for a few things that can work against entrepreneurship: risk aversion, used to "playing a role", divorce of your daily thinking from the marketplace... It's like at BigCo you become a specialized, mature cell. Startups require stem cells, ready to adapt into whatever the market requires.
Quite profound. Companies seem to thrive on sould crunching. My own experience leads me to believe so.
But would the inverse also hold true? Is unemployment a fuel to entrepreneurship? The longer you are unemployed or under employed leads to one just going for it?
I'd imagine that the number of successful entrepreneurs that couldn't find employment if they wanted to is pretty low. Personally, and from what I've seen, entrepreneurs and self-employed people just really really don't like working for 'the Man'. Even if 'the Man' is a great employer.
The part about being holed up in an apartment resonated with me. I worked for a startup in the valley and then moved to India to start a new company. So being in a place where running a tech company is not the default is a lot of friction!
Thanks but I wish that I had come up with a nicer way to say it. (And, I'm not a professor - I'm officially a part-time lecturer but I really just introduce speakers.)
Perhaps "There's nothing wrong with working on something for a long time but real founders ship".
