Ozan Sonmez walks through how to leave a corporate job for a startup without crashing. Get a paying customer first, build your founder network while employed, and expect 12 to 24 months before matching your old salary. Spousal buy-in matters more than you think.
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Hi everyone, Ozan here, your brutally honest mentor. Today I'm going to talk about shifting from a full-time job to building a startup. Over the years we have seen a lot of founders in different programs that are trying to become entrepreneurs or have a dream, have an idea, and they are just hesitant to become an entrepreneur full-time. Balancing that life, balancing that decisions is not easy. Becoming a founder, the transitioning from a full-time job holder to a founder, it requires discipline, hard work, and a lot of sacrifice. So one of the first things you need to ask yourself if you are working in a corporation, have a long-time career, is that you need to ask yourself, is this the right thing for me? It's a lot more work that you need to be putting into your startup than just working for a large corporation. There is a distinction between building a startup between a founder, you might be building a small-medium enterprise, which is great, but that's probably not what we're talking about here. It's not like creating a Third Wave coffee store or anything else that's very stable, it's a small-medium enterprise. We're talking about startups that are really demanding, that needs to be driven to grow. And we'll talk about a few of the experiences that we have running Foundry Institute in Turkey, which is a program designed to help founders transition between their work and to a full-time founder job. One of the largest, most successful examples is Udemy. It's actually been founded by a Turkish founder, Eren Bali, in the US, and it's really important to kind of follow his story. He went to the US without too much help, but he joined the network, the Foundering Institute network, and he built his technology, he built his idea while having a full-time job, which was required to go and study in the US. Another example is a new company that I invested personally, again, a graduate of Foundry Institute called Bridger. The team was also working full-time when they had the idea, and they transitioned from being a full— being an employee to being a founder. Key things to mention in that transition is the networks that you have in your corporate environment through your university, through your work, is very different than the networks you need to get into the startup world. You need a lot of help and you need to know the right person to be able to ask for help. If there's no founders around you that you can ask guidance from, it will be very difficult at times to figure out what's not going on well and very difficult to figure out where help can come from if everybody around you is like 9-to-5ers. So you need to network with founders before even considering leaving your job and becoming a founder. One really key factor in this transition is also expectations management with especially your loved ones, with your significant others, your wife, your husband, your girlfriend, boyfriend, or whatever you want to bring in that into that basket of significant others. You need to be very clear with that. I had the pleasure to interview Charles Huang a while back in San Francisco in Startup Grind conference actually, where Charles is the founder of Guitar Hero. And with his brother, when they were trying to build Guitar Hero as full-time founders, there came a time where they had to get the absolute buy-in from their wives because they needed to Uh, pay for the first shipment of the devices, uh, where in order to do that, they didn't have enough money, they didn't have investors, they needed their wives to agree to mortgage their houses. And that's how important your significant others will be. It's not only where you see the impact of the stress that's being built while building a startup, but it's also the future that you need to plan together. So with significant others, you need to be talking to them. There's not going to be a fixed time where they can go to vacation. There's not going to be a certain amount of— there's going to be a lot of stress when somebody leaves their work and reduces the income of the household. So these things need to be sorted out before you even consider becoming a founder. Then comes time management. If you are willing to spend some time figuring out if you're like, you're cut, your cloth is cut to become an entrepreneur, you really need to start spending time and see if you can stretch the time that you can start learning. If you can stretch the time and manage your time better to become more productive, you need to start learning something new and it has to be fast. So try to blend in that learning experience into your life before you start that. And Try to de-risk your jump with designing a pregame, which is try to build a network and talk to customers, understand the problems, where you can try to do that hand in hand with your full-time job. My recommendation, and this may not be— it's like 51%, take it with a grain of salt— is try to find your first paying customer before you jump ship. Some corporations will not allow you to create a separate company of your own, So that might be a compliance problem, but if that's not the case, try to go really into finding your first customer. And if you do that, then you'll have at least some confidence that you're going to be getting some revenue in the door. That's going to be very critical. I think it takes in general 12 to 24 months, a year to a year, to reach the same level of income. And this is In the terms of time, it might seem too long not living, not getting an income for 2 years, but this is a good-case scenario. Most of the founders who jump ship and become entrepreneurs find it very difficult to come to the same level of income and saving power or spending power within that time frame. So it's really difficult. Fundraising or not, we're talking about startups, not necessarily SMEs. So at one point, If you are feeling that you found a niche, you're trying to grow, you have a team, then it will come to fundraising. The problem with that is you do not need to assume, or you shouldn't assume, fundraising will come. And you should not make plans to an investor that is going to come and invest in you in order to jump ship. We have seen this over and over with our founders and our partners. They come, they have a good idea, they come and they get some traction, they come, they have a product, and they keep asking, if somebody funds me, I'll leave my job. It doesn't work that way. For investors to be 100% sure of what you're doing, you need to be 100% committed. It's very, very rare that we see founders that got investments from angels or others before they started committing, because that commitment is key to your success. If you want my money, you need to show commitment. If you want my money, you need to show that you're not waiting for me to give you money. It's not an external source to help you become a founder. It's an internal energy. You cannot not do the startup. And so you've done everything you can to de-risk The growth or revenue, you did everything you can to make sure your significant others are in line and you have shared responsibilities and everybody's in a kind of time map and you have a roadmap to get to a level of income that you're happy with. But again, if you haven't done any of these, don't become a founder. This side of the table is hard to live with. It's hectic, it's stressful, and if you still don't like your manager, try to have multiple managers which will be your customers because every one of them will be relying on you to deliver them some products. You'll be managing a lot of people and it's not going to be hired by some hiring manager. You will be the one who will be finding these people, motivating these people, firing these people if need be. And try managing that life if you're still complaining about your manager being da da da da da da. So again, for entrepreneurship should be a driving force internally. You should always be looking out for new things and come up with new ideas and find ways to execute on those and learn from those customers. But eventually, it comes to a leap of faith. So if you have that structure in your mind, if you have an idea, first share it with us, reach out, let us know if there's anything we can do to help. And thanks for watching. I hope you found these little tricks helpful. And I hope these prevent you from making a mistake of being super excited about an idea and jumping ship and then realizing you actually are the 101st to do it. And it's going to be very unpleasant. So Like and subscribe for more videos and content, and any questions and comments are always welcome. Feel free to contact us as well. So see you in the next video. Take good care. Bye.
