The rise of the side startup

Yup! Doing this too. My commute to work was 2 hours, so that's 10 hours pw I've saved, not to mention the time wasted in pointless meetings and irrelevant chit-chat. 1-2 hours pd. So, more like 15-20 hours pw. That all goes on my startup now. When you value your family time and mental health, founding your own business is something that you just can't fit in if you're working 50-hour weeks already. So, this has only been possible since I've been working from home. There's no clause in my contract to say I can't do it, and as long as I'm still doing my job then I don't see what the problem is.

Remote is the only way to create a side hustle besides your main job.
Like @PavatiDasani said, the time you save without commuting and useless chit-chats it's huge. If you spend your time wisely now, you can build something sustainable for your future.

Great read.

I believe any employer who expects there employee to stay with them forever without equity doesn't have their best interest in mind.

I think a company that really has your back will be for this. It means you want to build, you want to serve, and you want to create.

I have worked with a few people that double dip, working two remote jobs at the same time. That feels much shadier than having a side project.

My employer knows about mine and was actually impressed with the effort and the connections I've made. It's adjacent to the work - consulting in the field where I have my product so a real cross-over in knowledge without being competitive.

Personally, I've had a massive boost to my career based on my side project, with connections all over and now consulting with faang clients (or is it maang?)

That would not be the case with a second job - the secrecy kills all those benefits.

Feel good about your side project people.

Caveat: Choose wisely whether you share it, be prepared for idiot self-obsessed bosses to feel like you are cheating on them.

I also communicated very clearly that I'm doing startups on the side when recruiting to my current job. I wouldn't want to work in a place in which I would have to stay hush about what I'm doing after work.

I think a great employer will recognize the value of someone getting skills outside of work on their own. I get why someone might be worried. But realistically only 1% of businesses turn successful so the risk is low 😂 Actually the more I do startups the more I actually appreciate some of the benefits of working in a healthy company. Given the right terms of course.

Good one. Thank you for sharing.

In my experience, if you're really serious about your startup (and talking to people about it / trying to be taken seriously as a company), you end up needing to put it on your LinkedIn profile. So (again, in my experience), you end up needing to be open with your employer at some point. I think I probably ended up working HARDER for my employers after I told them about my startups to prove that my attention wasn't fractured and that I could, in fact, juggle it all.

I've done this twice now - basically just collected a paycheck to build up a personal runway while working on my startup. Now I'm freelancing while working on my startup. I like it better, being my own boss and getting to better distribute my time the way I want to, though I do miss that steady paycheck a little...

Today's shift to remote work and the rise of no-code platforms just make it even more compelling for engineers and others alike to launch side projects.

I can also see quite a number of our Volunteers at https://skilledup.life will end up setting up their own tech startups once they got a taste of it, by helping early stage tech startups.

We have already seen the first AI tech startup emerge, where the founder was a Volunteer before.

We now have 11,210 volunteers from 92 countries and aim to add 100,000 in year 3 which we just started.

I prefer to get my bosses onboard early and to choose your work according to who will work with you on that.

Their job and your job is to make sure that you're more than earning your keep.
And then, if you are, what's to complain about?

In reality, none of us went to engineering/computer science to do boring work. If we don't have conviction, we would left and do something else. Then, reality kicks in, we needed money, went get a job, some of us lucky to get in large corp, we work on minor things that's as distant as to our dream as possible. I mean who would want to write map reduce code? Who would just want to debug and write device drivers?

So you get like 2 groups of people who got into tech because of necessity and the other go because of purpose. None of the ones went for purpose would want to work on those boring stuff.

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How do these folks decide which job to put on their Linkedin?

Yup. As a software dev I think one other dimension to this, is that most average software work is pretty boring. If you're 10+ years experience and you don't want to transition to management, then you end up in a plateau of breezing through the same tasks over and over. The business doesn't need you to learn anything new at that point (unless you're at a FAANG doing something really smart), they just want you to maintain the legacy stuff and sometimes change the color of the buttons.

If I didn't have a side hustle then I would really go insane. And at the main job I can easily run circles around my junior colleagues in less than 4 hrs a day. Side hustles just make sense.

Cool

This is really good article and I personally like the remote working more than going to office. But nowadays a question always come to my mind, will there be any law in future which allow employer to claim or object remote employee side hustle projects in anyway?

The title of the article sounds so negative. Having employees that develop leadership and entrepreneurial skills is a sign that you as the employer are a leader yourself and not a bitchy boss.

I had the opportunity to hire a few folks myself at the company I ran and I made it a rule to only hire people that are smarter than me. Of course, they are going to branch off and do great things on their own. I applaud them!

What I don't like about this is the secrecy. If you're not doing anything wrong then why hide it?