Apr
Drop Out
Entrepreneurs take risks.
They see an opportunity and they jump at it.
They are willing to stop what they are doing and “drop out” to pursue their dreams.
Here are 4 examples of how I dropped out in my career to pursue my own startup dreams.
One thing that very few people know about me is that I dropped out of school twice.
The first time I caught the startup bug was in 1991. I was a sophomore in college at the time and I parlayed volunteering in the beginning days of Bill Clinton’s 1st campaign for President into a fulltime gig. When they offered me the job it took me all of about 60 seconds to make my decision. An opportunity like that only comes once in a lifetime. My parents surprisingly were very supportive. They only asked that I promise myself (and them) to go back and finish what I started sometime soon, which I did after we won.
The second time I caught the startup bug was in 1999. I was a 2nd year MBA student at Stanford and, well, it was 1999 and the Internet was blowing up around me. I was approached with an opportunity to join the founding team of a well funded dot-com. Again, I didn’t hesitate. The company didn’t survive (most didn’t) but I learned a ton. (Footnote: And again, I went back and finished what I started afterward, ultimately graduating a year late in 2001).
The third time I dropped out was in 2003. I was in a pretty awesome corporate job at T-Mobile at the time, working on cool products like HotSpot, the first color-screen Blackberries, and the first smartphone devices. While there, I came up with this idea that I could build a company around using social networks for hiring. Mind you, this was before Facebook existed. The idea became an obsession and then 2 months later I “dropped-out” to pursue it fulltime. This was probably my hardest drop-out decision because the job I was in paid really well and it was very safe and comfortable while still working on some innovative stuff, and I had never started my own company and had no idea what I was doing. But I saw the opportunity, caught the bug, and in the end I had no choice but to pursue it; had I not I would have driven myself crazy. (Footnote: My original idea was essentially LinkedIn, but while Reid Hoffman and his team nailed it, we didn’t do nearly as well at Jobster).
The fourth time I dropped out was in 2009. I had sold my 2nd startup company, socialmedian, to XING AG (The LinkedIn of Europe) and I was having a blast working in Hamburg, Germany as Chief Product Officer of XING. The people at XING were amazing and we were making some incredibile strides during my tenure there at modernizing the XING product and making it more social and user-relevant. The problem was that I’m a startup guy and XING is a company of 300+ people. And, I had 20+ startup ideas banging around in my head and after a year it was killing me that I wasn’t pursuing any of them. I ended up dropping out a-year-to-the-day from the acquisition (and leaving some considerable money on the table), in order to pursue my next startup.
It strikes me that a lot of entrepreneurs have this recurring theme of dropping out to pursue their dreams.
In many cases it’s a tough decision to leave the comforts of a corporate job to live the tough startup life.
If you’re anything like me though, it’s not that hard of a decision. The harder decision for an entrepreneur is to not do it. I’d even go so far as to say that’s a solid test for whether you are ready to be an entrepreneur: If you’re grappling and struggling with the decision whether to “drop out” or not, maybe entrepreneurship is not for you. If the decision to “drop out” is a no-brainer, then you’re a startup guy/gal.
Entrepreneurs are not afraid to drop everything to pursue their dreams.
What do you think?
I’d love to hear some of your dropout stories.
21 Notes
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