When is it time to leave the full time job?

2012-03-21 2 min read

    A common question I get when telling my friends that I’m leaving my full time job to work on Glossi is “Why now? Why not continue working on it nights and weekends?” It’s a fair question - we’ve been working on Glossi for 6 months of nights and weekends and made significant progress. Why not keep doing that and have the best of both worlds?

    Everyone has their own reasons but for me it was more of a gut feeling that it was the right time. I had the following thoughts in mind but I didn’t sit down to make a list of pros and cons:

    • We’re at the stage where the next steps cannot be done on nights and weekends. The coding is no longer the highest priority work and we now have to worry about business development and trying to raise funding. Neither of those can be done easily or efficiently on nights and weekends.
    • <li>We’re close to finding our product-market fit and we want to get there as quickly as we can.</li>
      
      <li>We felt as if the market is getting more competitive and we need to focus or be left behind. This may be especially true in the tech space where everything moves so quickly.</li>
      
      <li>We realized that our todo list is growing much quicker than our progress through it. I don’t expect this to change but we want to make as much progress as we can.</li>
      
      <li>I was spending more and more time thinking about Glossi that I was not as committed or focused at work. This was both a disservice to me and the company and I wanted to get out of the way as soon as I stopped being as productive as I should have been.</li>
      

    Please share your thoughts  - I’d love to hear other reasons.