Leaving a 100,000-pound job to pursue entrepreneurship

Hey there,

It has been 6 full years since I first started buildd-ing & bootstrapping businesses. So, I thought it would be good to share the experiences, mistakes & lessons I learnt along the way.

I will do this in a weekly mail to you. Each Thursday.

You see, we as humans like to listen to stories. We enjoy them and unconsciously imbibe pieces of them into our lives. So, that’s what I will do each week.

Today, I will tell you how my journey with Flexiple began. How did I know the time was right?

This is my story. Of chasing happiness and leaving a £100,000 job to pursue entrepreneurship.

At the end of this mail, I have shared exciting new updates on the buildd mobile app. I am really thrilled about how the buildd community is shaping up—do check out the updates!

The Backstory

I completed my engineering from BITS Pilani (a good school in India). And as any good engineering student does, I found a job that wasn’t remotely related to my education - an analyst at an Investment Bank.

I settled down into the role fairly quickly. Excel became second nature and I learnt to hate PowerPoint like everyone else. I picked up “valuation models”, and wrote research reports and pitch books on mergers & acquisitions and other topics like shareholder activism.

Yes, with zero experience, I now knew the worth of companies that had been around for more than my entire lifetime. Oh, numbers are dangerous; combine them with the weapon called Excel, and suddenly you can find answers to anything with 100% conviction. Rumour has it that God resides in Excel.

But I digress.

Trip to Neverland

Then one day, I was informed that I “deserved” a stint at the London office. Sure, we used to work late in the Indian office too, but this was another beast. Days were born at 9 am and then just refused to die. Staying till late in the night was the right thing to do. “Late” was redefined each day by my peers and me. 1 am/2 am/3 am/night-outs - we wore these things like badges of honour.

110-hour work weeks passed by. This became my life for a few months. I just started to find the entire experience stifling. I was doing work that I found no value in. With colleagues whom I didn’t relate to. In a city that didn’t seem welcoming. But I continued to pour myself into work till finally, I felt extremely empty.

The experience was an absolute eye-opener for me. It made me recognize the set of robotic motions my life had become and helped me identify the only priority in life - happiness. Now, as if to just test my resolve and my belief in this realization, I was presented with not 1, not 2, but 3 offers to join the London team. Any of these jobs would fetch me £100,000 a year - a lot for a then 23-year-old Indian.

The Test

I was clear - this was not something I wanted to be a part of, no matter the amount of money thrown at me. Don’t get me wrong, I come from a middle-class Indian family. So it isn’t like I had a bed of cash which I slept on that gave me the comfort to take this decision. It was just that I was brought up in a way where money was an enabler, never a want. As a result, I didn’t need much to live comfortably.

However, friends around me started singing caution tales. “Karthik, this is career suicide. In 4-5 years, your friends (read ‘us’) would have gone way past you in their careers. Then you’ll look back at this decision and regret it.” Written in quotes, but ya, sort of a paraphrased version of what a lot of friends told me.

For me, it didn’t matter where my friends were or would be in their careers. I knew one thing for sure - I wouldn’t be happy if I continued working in IB and that was all I needed to make the decision.

The Final Frontier

At around the same time I had given the CAT - an MBA entrance exam for Indian colleges - and got through. I thought that an MBA might give me the time to decide what move I wanted to make next.

But when I went to college, what I saw was an absolute circus. My classmates were already getting ready to battle it out for the internship placements. Everything else - learning, making friends, finding what you actually enjoy and want to do in your career - was secondary.

Here I was, once again, with people who were ready to commit their lives to something, without actually considering if it was right for them. I had lived that life and I didn’t want any part of it. I promptly opted out of the placements and decided that now was the time for me to actually start something of my own and define the kind of life I wanted to lead.

Entry into entrepreneurship

People tell tales of how their startup idea found them. How building startups was always the only thing they wanted to do in life. In all honesty, that wasn’t the case for me. It’s just that entrepreneurship is the only way of life that gives me happiness.

It is work that I have chosen, I love doing, with people I love to work with. No peer or social pressure. Just logical goals that make sense for my startup and are worth fighting for.

Could I have been richer if I had taken the job in London? Or through placements at the MBA college? Sure. Not to sound philosophical, but aren’t we doing all of this to be happy? So, it just didn’t make sense to chase something (money/career/ *insert any other materialistic things*) that could then maybe deliver happiness, rather than directly chasing happiness today.

Parting words

Overall, I decided to start up because I realized it makes me happy. Today. Not at a future mythological time. And I have made this promise to myself, that the day even entrepreneurship doesn’t bring happiness to me, it would be time to move on from it too.

If you are struggling with any decision, especially career-wise, maybe that’s the question to ask - what’s going to give you the maximum happiness today? It might sound like I am trivializing things, but frankly, I have found that more often than not, it leads to the best outcomes.

So my friend, does this story prompt some kind of change? At least a few thoughts? Do write to me and let me know :)

buildd: The only guilt-free social network

We’ve been working hard to revamp the buildd app over the last couple of weeks.

Here’s a quick glimpse of what’s new:

1. An engaging, new onboarding flow → Shows all the key buildd offerings in a single place.

2. ChatGPT but powered by your network → This is the newest feature we’ve been working on. It’s ChatGPT powered by the knowledge base & your network on buildd.

Finally, we’re launching new micro-learning paths next week. It’s unlike any learning experience you’ve seen before!

Stay tuned & download the buildd app :)

Best,
Karthik

P.S. Please consider forwarding this to a friend! It would really help my two startups.

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