Etosha Cave shares practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs on managing personal finances before launching a startup, including saving money and taking side jobs. She emphasizes adopting minimalism and simplified routines to reduce stress, and notes that entrepreneurial opportunities exist within larger organizations, not just in startups.
Are there things that you wish you had done or learned or thought about when you were a student that would have set the stage for making things easier now?
I can think of two. So one, I wish that I had thought a lot more about how doing a startup would affect my personal finances. Well, I, yeah, 'cause I, my family lives in Texas, I don't have any family in the area, and I accrued a little bit of debt while I was in graduate school. And when we started the company, we didn't really have any money. And even when we got our first seed funding in, we needed to really pay ourselves a relatively modest salary in order to hire people to really get the company going. So it ended up being kind of a, pretty high stress and burden to have to worry about my own sort of personal finances. And I ended up having to really cut costs pretty drastically. Like, I even moved into my car for a few months to cut costs and get ahead of my finances. So I wish I had sort of thought about that a couple years ago and had maybe saved more or maybe did a job on the side or something to really kind of reduce the stress with that. Another thing that I've done that I wish I started earlier was follow minimalism principles. So I have minimized the stuff that I have. Anything that doesn't bring any value to my life or has a functional purpose, I try to get rid of it. I've also done the— and I feel this is kind of cliché in the Valley, but the sort of work uniform where I have 14 of the same black shirts and I wear jeans to— the same outfit to work every day so I don't have to think about what what I'm gonna wear when I go into work. I've also just tried to minimize the number of goals that I ascribe to any given week or any given day and even to minimize my thoughts. Like when I'm in transit somewhere, instead of having these random kind of dialogues going in my head, I try to just focus on breathing and really appreciate the outdoors and the sights around me. And it has been huge in terms of reducing stress and increasing happiness. And just the idea that what you have and who you are is enough. I think that's been such a valuable mantra to ascribe to because I think so often, at least in my Facebook feed, you see what everyone has and all these great things and it can be easy to fall into that trap of always thinking you can buy something that'll make you happy. And just realizing that what you have is good enough. Yeah, that's all there is. Great.
Yeah, I think just when I graduated from Stanford, I went into a startup. And that was then the whole dot-com boom happened. And then I went to a couple of mid-sized companies and then a very large publicly traded company. And then now it's all come full circle back into startup again. And I think through that path, One thing that I wish I had been more front of mind is think about entrepreneurism in a broad sense. So I don't think entrepreneurship is just to be found in startups, just looking for bootstrap and very small opportunities. I think you can find entrepreneurism in a lot of different places. And I certainly found a lot of opportunity even in a very large company where you can carve out and identify opportunities to be entrepreneurial and to get a lot of progress made and things accomplished may not be as visible as being at a startup, but you also have the power of a lot of resources and different levers available within that environment. And I think that finding entrepreneurial opportunities even within larger organizations is something that is very valuable to large companies. And so I would, going back, I would think about the term entrepreneurism in a much broader way.
