How do I know if I’m good enough to be an entrepreneur?
As I work at amazon I get the feeling I’m capable of big things. I have the tech aptitude, am considered expert in my space, and have high attention to detail. In a certain sense I feel like I check all the boxes. I’ve run small businesses before but nothing that made nearly as much as my amazon comp. It all comes down to compensation risk for me. Plus, I like aspects of my amazon job a little bit. the social component is great compared to when I was a graduate student and was way more isolated. I also recognize that my productivity at amazon is a function of a ton of other stuff that people have built: the retail business, massive software teams, customer data, etc. it is clear that the value I generate well exceeds my comp but some of that is returns on Bezos capital rather than all me. How do I know when I’m ready and when it’s time to make the jump? I try to side hustle but I can’t solve the problems with the same perseverance that I have in solving amazon problems because I’m just out of gas from my day job. TC: 380k YOE: 6
If you can handle the risk and more importantly failure, go for it.
It does not get easier to take risks the longer you wait and the older you get. A ton of people are smart and have ideas; few have the work ethic, make the sacrifices, and maintain persistence to make it a reality.
You don't. As Spiderman once said, it's a leap of faith. You will know when you do it and everything is failing and you're crying alone in the shower cause your team is screaming at you and asking you what to do, and you don't know, and you're looking at your credit cards and they're all maxed out, and you have 2 months of runway left and you still haven't found an investor for the next round yet, and your customers are also calling you asking wtf man? And you realize you gotta let go of some employees to stay afloat, even though some of these guys have been with you since the very beginning. If you can still get out of bed every morning and grind despite all that, cause there's something you really believe in, then you should go for it Read this book called the hard things about hard things by Ben horowitz. If you can do what he talks about in his book, then you should give it a shot.
Odds are you won't regret it if you try and fail. It'll be a personal growth experience, and financially there's a lot of potential upside from just putting everything on hold for three years. You're still young and with that TC should have enough savings for it to not impact your lifestyle in the slightest bit
Running a startup is a whole diff ballgame, there are no technical proposals. There are no code reviews, no corporate ladder BS. You aren’t silo’d to working in a team / feature. You make all the features. You won’t have your cushy lifestyle from Amazon, it’s sweat and lots of balls. And 90% of startups fail. Depends on what your goal is really you have to HATE working for other people to some degree.
I’m a firm believer in “startups are counterintuitive”. Smart people generally can do it with the right attitude and willingness to learn some things you just can’t get good at without experiencing them. As a tech person, I’d say 80% of the work in a startup (measured in time) goes into non-tech problem solving. Tech is important, but you can get crushed easily by teams with shitty tech and better skills in other areas. Which can be demotivating, esp. if you execute tech at a high level. If you can figure out how to side hustle for a year and get lucrative consulting jobs to pay the bills, do that. I accidentally did it and learned so much without any real “compensation risk”.
Is there a way for me to consult with amazons noncompete?
That’s a really good question that I don’t know the specific answer to. I made it work at a company with a bit more WLB & flexibility there (company with less vested interest in developing and protecting IP).
Stay at Amazon. Don't waste your time and fail. Be an extreme saver for 5 years, then invest that.
If you don’t know then you are not. If you do, you are.
Thanks all. Started reading “hard things about hard things” book. I’m taking this seriously. I think I’m sold on trying to make this work as a side hustle but amazon’s noncompete will definitely restrict what I can do. I guess the best I can do is save money and get the side hustles to a functioning and expandable state and then go from there. The difficulty is that my career at amazon is also growing pretty fast so it will be hard to tell when the right time to leave is.
Which university did you go to?