Leaving the Big Company, Slowly
Notes on building something of your own without a dramatic exit, and why the slow version might be better.
Most stories about starting your own thing begin with a rupture. The resignation letter, the last day, the empty calendar that follows. There is something I enjoy about that narrative as a reader, but I do not find it applicable to my own life, and I suspect it is not applicable to most people’s.
What I am trying instead is the slow version: treating the departure not as a moment but as a long transition. There is nothing romantic about it, but it has a few very practical advantages.
What the slow path buys
The most obvious one is that risks taken while income continues are not really risks. Trying an idea, spending three months on it, finding out it does not work, and stopping is a completely different experience depending on whether you are eating into savings. With a salary the outcome is “that didn’t work, on to the next one.” Without one it becomes “I lost three months.” The second person experiments less and makes a bad decision sooner.
The second advantage is about time. The hard part of starting something is not finding an idea, it is learning whether the idea works. That learning does not respect a schedule; sometimes it takes six months. On the slow path you can afford to wait out those six months.
The third is that some of what you learn inside a large organisation is genuinely valuable and hard to acquire anywhere else. Where else do you watch what breaks at real scale, how a decision behaves when it reaches five hundred people instead of ten, and how a system gets shaped by the organisation around it? Slamming the door means leaving that school early.
What it costs
To be honest about it, this path has real costs and I do not want to minimise them. The biggest is attention. You are not doing two things at once; you are doing one fully and the other with what is left over, and what is left over is usually the tired end of the evening. Work done in those hours is not the same as work done with a rested head.
The second cost is the absence of a deadline. The rupture story has one genuine benefit: with no way back, you are forced forward. The slow path has no such forcing function, and the work can quietly become an indefinite hobby. I know this about myself, and the only rule I hold to is that every quarter something has to become visible from the outside. I do not set revenue targets, but if “what shipped in the last three months” comes back empty, that quarter counts as lost.
The third is about patience. This road is long, and because it is long it is hard to explain to the people around you. There is no clean answer to what you are doing; you have neither left nor fully stayed. After a while I stopped explaining and just kept going.
Where I am for now
I did not write this as advice, because I have not gone far enough to give any. There is no outcome in hand yet. What exists is a method, and the fact that so far it has kept me going without burning me out. When I know how it turns out I will write that here, including if it does not work. That is what this site is for: keeping the unfinished parts in the open too.