Unexpected things I learned through building Sidekick and SpendSimple — Episode 15

There were a few surprises on non-technical fronts too!

Hybrid Entrepreneurship (i.e. building your own dream while maintaining a salaried job) is actually feasible and sometimes desirable.

First, if you are genuine and transparent about your side venture, mature enterprises are actually quite open to this idea. Yes, there are a few compliance things you need to commit to (e.g. don’t use assets from your employment for your side ventures.) But they are all common-sense things that a conscientious employee would find it easy to accept.

Second, this strategy has some nice benefits:

1. For my side venture, I can truly commit to doing the right things; not for short-term survival.
2. For my corporate responsibilities, my side venture has helped me become better in very concrete ways. I am now forced to tackle the challenges other departments have to face, first-hand. Experiencing those struggles yourself is NOT the same listening to your colleagues talk about them over coffee.
3. This approach has allowed me to satisfy both my needs for helping more people today and now (in an established corporate setting); and inventing something meaningful that is entirely mine, from scratch.

Finally and perhaps most importantly for me, I can do things at the pace I like, rather than the swim-or-sink situation that most startup founders have to endure.

p.s. Interesting things I found while researching for this blog post:

• Founders who started their ventures while working day jobs (CNBC)
• Pros-and-Cons of Hybrid Entrepreneurship (Forbes)
• Google Area 120 — Google’s internal incubator
• Did you know Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game?