If you still feel the same after this time then take the plunge.

Reference: Worked with a lot of startups.

I've gathered few questions and important points which I would ask/tell myself before starting up again. Here are they:

1) Do you have a co-founder which can leverage your skills?

2) Have you zero down on an idea and did your market research?

3) How confident are you about the target market?

4) Do you have a execution plan or Goto market strategy?

* Market first, product later

* Ideas are worthless unless they're executed really well.

Thanks,

This reminds me of my days teaching test prep classes for Kaplan. At some point in every Kaplan teachers career, there came a point when you'd do the math and realize that Kaplan was charging students $100/hour but only paying you $20. Inevitably a few of the best teachers would try to go out on their own. They soon realized that getting students took a lot of work - putting flyers up on campus, working your network looking for referrals, building a word of mouth reputation. Most ended up failing and coming back or moving on to something else. There were a few that made it big (e.g. Robin from TestMasters) and it turns out that these were not necessarily the best teachers, but they were definitely excellent marketers.

Kick ass on the code for a couple years (you might find that you enjoy it if you can get out of Java Hell and start doing functional programing) but, from the sounds of it, you'd be happier as a PM. PMs get a bad reputation because 80% (or more) of them are idiots, but the other ~20% can be invaluable for their ability to market technical work, internally and externally.

1.) Stay for the equity and for the experience of watching a truly growing startup grow - most startups never grow in any significant way, they just die

2.) If you're burned out now after 8 hour days, wait until you're doing 14 hour days to survive with your startup... if you can't find the energy to do it at night (or your social life is more important to you), you're possibly not cut out for running your own startup

3.) Startups are much much more than coding (unfortunately)

With all of that said I wish you the best of luck as I also left my first job out of college (Edit: realized this is not necessarily your first job out of college (or that you went to college) but leaving this here none the less) after less than a year to pursue other things (in my case a masters program) and I understand how the first job is not necessarily the right job.

Doesn't sound like the OP has a particular dream or vision.

Sounds like they are starting to see the reality of a successful startup; it's a lot of hard work.

1) Make an investor pitch deck for your idea. What questions will investors ask? Where is your idea strong? Where is it weak? What's the market size? Who are your competitors? What are they doing wrong?

2) Make a business plan. What do you need to succeed and why? Who pays you and why? What are the risks involved? What are your exits and pivots?

3) Make a one-page sales cutsheet. How can you convince someone to part with their money by handing them a single page of paper? What will they like? What won't they like?

I'm also of the opinion that it's good to spend some time in the trenches at a big tech company to better appreciate the differences between small startups and mega-corps (and if you can something in between). It's one thing to read about it and get an idea, it's another thing to experience it and understand better what the pros/cons of each environment are. If you end up at another growing startup, this experience will better help you understand what's happening to the organization as it grows. Too many founders end up with growing organization and don't understand what a big shop looks like or how it functions and end up dragging the potential of the company down around them.

Both of those experiences can become very valuable to any future career direction you choose: small startup, on your own, big software house. If you're missing one or two of those, it's hard to say you have a complete picture.

Alternately, 6 months is really not a lot of time to learn and observe. Startups always go through lots of rapid changes, but seeing some of those through to completion (or stagnation) can be very informative. You're young enough that another year or so there won't kill you and won't prevent you from pursuing anything you want after that. Only you'll have more perspective and experience to work off of.

Did he say he was in the Bay Area?

"Problems arise when selecting a personal pronoun to refer to someone of unspecified or unknown gender (see also Mixed and indeterminate gender above). Traditionally the masculine has been used as the "default" gender in English."

It's just proper English by traditional standards to use he when you don't know the gender of the person. People take it as some kind of an affront, but those of us with English training were just taught that way in college. Source: Minor in English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Everything gets easier when you can point to a win on your resume. From finding a great co-founder, getting yourself into the accelerator du-jour, or luring early investors. More importantly you'll actually have a good jumping off point for your future.

There is a big gulf between building a product and building a viable business. If your goal is the latter you need to embrace the opportunity you have to learn. It's an invaluable experience.

You have a lifetime in front of you. The opportunity to make an unusually high salary might not always be there. But a stack of cash might help in a lot of ways later on.

Disregard this advice if you have groundbreaking idea and the capabilities to carry it out. (Not to be nasty, but rather realistic), you probably don't. Sit down and have a good honest heart to heart with yourself about this.

Don't go away from something. Go towards something.

If you don't try, you'll never have the possibility for success. But stack the odds in your favour first.

If your startup is indeed rapidly growing, I think it is invaluable to see the growth first hand. Only a fraction of startups really see true rapid growth. Having that first hand experience will give you some perspective when hopefully, one day, your startup experiences that growth. Additionally, when interviewing at the "big hot startups", I think it's a major plus to have seen that growth somewhere else. But be honest with yourself if it's real, rapid growth, and not just some vanity metrics.

Secondly, I share some concerns that if you're burned out after your workday now, that quitting to do your own thing is going to be better. However, I can certainly empathize and understand that it is possible, but harder, to build a product part time at night. To hedge your risk, you should find that idea that you're really excited about, commit to getting an MVP and some traction to prove to yourself that you have an idea, and then quit.

While doing so, keep your responsibilities and cost of living structure low. Don't sign a new bigger apartment while you're getting a salary. Also, I'm not sure if you've thought about how long you can live without a salary. Do you need to supplement your ramen profitable startup with any extra income (contracting or otherwise?) If that's necessary, you'll need to spend time getting work and doing the work. I personally dislike contract/consulting work. I could never mental hack my way into feeling ownership of it. I've learned I'd rather work at a product company and work on something on the side, than do a startup "full time" while part time consulting to cover bills. Your preferences may be different.

Remember that startups are really hard. I've been through it to an acquihire, and I've had friends that were acquired for tens of million of dollars. And when I talk to them, I'm reminded that even though they're doing well, it's really hard. I absolutely think it's worth it if you're willing to bet on yourself.

Feeling like you've hit a ceiling at work and that you're only learning from yourself, sometimes can be fixed. Talk to your manager. Let them know. Maybe there's more responsibility for you. If you strike out on your own, guess who you'll have to learn from. Just you again. While joining a large community of people working on their own startup is fun, it's also lonely. No one cares about your startup more than you.

So hiring someone to develop the MVP is an option you might consider.

So attend some meetups and ask around. If anyone is interested get work samples and vet by giving him/her a short paid relevant assignment.

You can also find great remote developers, but vet them with short communication and coding assignments. Github/Linkedin/Dribbble are good resources to find someone remote.

Good luck and I hope you find someone well rounded with excellent communication skills.

Good luck!

I'm actively looking for good ideas and people to start up with. While I'm not very experienced developer, I'm indeed capable of working on an MVP for testing out an idea, and taking things from there, if it all works out fine.

I would love to hear from you and see if we can make something out of this. You can support me a bit while MVP development, and if it looks promising, you can quit your job and we can completely concentrate on this thing.

The reality is that the default of any state of any startup is failure. You probably won't understand the magnitude of the problems you'll face until you see them directly. At this point, your ideas are just ideas and you should work on validating them.

There's a lot of ways to go about doing this and it'll really depend on the market you're chasing. It's likely that a combination of customer interviews and sales will let you gauge which of your ideas have promise and which won't. Something that really helped me was thinking about questions VCs ask when they're evaluating a startup. What's your unfair advantage? Why hasn't this worked before and why will it work now? These questions are incredibly important even if you're not interested in raising venture. There's a lot of books and literature on the web so I won't get into this deeply.

You probably noticed that I didn't say writing code. Sometimes writing code is how you should be validating your idea but most of the time it isn't. You should get in that mindset. However, when you need to write code there's a few ways to get over that commute drain:

1.) Wake up earlier and put some time in before you start your day.

2.) Live closer to your job. It'll alleviate a lot of the problems of coming home and not wanting to do more more work.

3.) Write code on the weekends instead.

Also, whatever you do, don't do it alone. I did it alone for the first time and it's awful. Your job is a great place to find future cofounders or employees. Do hackathons with them on the weekends. Tell them your ideas. See what they excited about.

A year later, I'm doing some consulting on the side to pay the bills and getting into a pivot that's finally moving the needle. Even though most of this year was a total failure, I couldn't be happier and I'm glad I did what I did. Feel free to shoot me an email at jr.sunny at gmail dot com if you have any questions or need any help.

Unless right now one of your apps has like 400 followers/likes and not even an alpha to test, don't do it. But once you do, go nuts!

My recommendation would be to keep daydreaming about doing your own startup, but don't quit until:

- you have the killer idea

- you keep obsessing about your idea

- you have talked to 10 people about your idea face to face

- three of those 10 people told you to quit unequivocally

Also, start networking. It can take 6-18months (or more) to find your confounders.

While getting paid its a good time to ramp up CustDev and Lean skill sets

If it doesn't work out, you can get another job, save up some more and try another idea?

Everyday I feel like I want to leave to start something of my own.

This is a normal impulse, but until you're getting a solid signal that you can start something of your own, and without taking onerous financial risk, don't take it too seriously. It's "freshman wants to drop out and write a novel" syndrome. Everyone goes through it, and we survive. You'd be weird if you didn't have this impulse on occasion.

Size up your current situation for whether you're getting the mentorship and resources and connections that'll make you be able to be a founder for real, and preferably without severe financial risk. If you are, great. (I'm guessing that you're not there yet, but a good startup will put you on the path.) If you're not, find a way to change your job as it currently is, in order to make it so. This may mean befriending people in upper management (a skill worth learning) or furtively re-focusing your efforts toward networking and career growth (also a skill worth learning) or something else.

If you're considered to be a valued contributor, then see if the founders will introduce you to investors on a casual, social basis. Yes, it's a political risk to ask, but this kind of political risk is insignificant in comparison to the risk involved in starting your own project.

I am always so exhausted after writing code for 8-9 hours a day that I definitely don't want to come home after commuting for 45 minutes (plus I like having somewhat of a social life).

If that 8-9 hours of work is advancing your career, it's not wasted. If it's not, then start slacking a bit (once you've established a solid reputation based on your first months, you can) and direct your focus toward building contacts and advancing your technical knowledge-- that is, work hard on the parts of the job (as you define it) that advance your career and slack on the stupid shit that doesn't.

I feel like I will enjoy it more.

That's "grass is greener" syndrome. If you're a natural entrepreneur (and it's OK if you're not; they're only ~1% of the population, and people who are not that can still be great entrepreneurs) then you'd enjoy bootstrapping, even though you'd have no money most of the time and most people (including almost all of the VC-funded entrepreneurs) would find it exhausting and miserable, and would rather give up some autonomy for a stable income. (The trait of the natural entrepreneur is an outlier stance on the rich-versus-king spectrum.) It's completely OK if you're not a natural entrepreneur; I'm certainly not. That just means that you're going to want to work for someone else and learn on their risk and dime, for at least 5-10 years, before you're confident enough to go out on your own.

If you're not a natural entrepreneur, though, you're not going to start a business unless you have funding already delivered (and, by the way, that's probably the right strategy for most). If you're going to try to raise a seed round with no connections, forget "enjoyment". The odds are against you, and fundraising if you're not part of the in-crowd (and it sounds like you're not, because that's 0.1% of the Valley, and it sounds like you're under 25, and you're in an employee role at a startup) is fucking miserable. People have been driven to suicide by the fundraising process. It is that fucking bad. Of course, if you run into a business co-founder who comes with the resources in-hand... that problem goes away. Then again, you're also likely to be #2 at best. It depends on you whether that's OK.

Plus, I feel I'm really only learning from myself at the startup.

You're ~22. Unless it's a shit-house, you're not the best and most experienced programmer there. Find someone you can learn from and start asking for his or her time, preferably in small amounts. See if he'll talk about his favorite subject over lunch. Internal networking is as important a skill as external networking. Take this opportunity to learn it. Mentors aren't "assigned" from the top, and finding "a mentor" or "a rabbi" is really rare. It's more sustainable and practical to learn a little bit from a larger number of people.

This is a great opportunity to learn things (such as internal networking, and how startups work) on someone else's risk and dime. But it's not going to be handed to you on a silver platter.

I should stay for 6 more months and get my small amount of equity to see what it will be worth. Even at an absurd outcome >1B the payout won't affect my life all that much.

Employee equity is, except for executives, usually a fucking joke. It's good that you learned that early on. Don't get bent out of shape about the fact. It's just worth recognizing the equity is almost never worth making career sacrifices over. If you have 20% of a business, you might favor the needs of the business over your own career goals and reputation. At 0.05%? Pfft. Think of it as a lottery ticket, and keep an eye on your own career objectives because, unless you're lucky and become the protege of someone important, no one else will.

That said... even if the equity isn't a reason to stay, your reputation is. Six-month stints look like absolute shit on your CV, and if you leave a "rapidly growing startup" to go out on your own but can't raise, it'll look like you were fired. The job-hopper stigma is fucking shitty, but it's real. Tech is more forgiving of job-hopping than, say, Wall Street or government, but leaving at 6 months just looks really bad. I'd say that, unless the job is horrible, that alone is a reason to tough it out for another year.

If it becomes clear that the startup is going to do nothing for your career, then drop the focus on your assigned stuff and put time into building the skills you want for your next gig ("powerslacking"). It's easier to act productive and engaged when powerslacking (another skill you might as well learn early on) then when just fucking around.

Any other things to consider? Any advice? I feel like other people have had similar thoughts or even experience leaving.

Yes. The time to ditch a startup is when you're no longer growing with the company. If you keep getting better projects and promotions, stick with it. (It's too early to tell, because you've only been there for 6 months.) It's when the company starts growing above you that you should bounce. Good startups promote internally, but most startups are crappy and pull their leadership from the outside (a social-climbing mentality) and when it gets into the state that you know you'll never be promoted because externals are going to get the best projects and roles, that's when you should jump. You're not going to have a good sense of whether your startup is in that state, yet; it'll be clearer in 6 months to a year, and that would be a good time to reevaluate. Even at that point, I'd say that you'd do better to get another job (external promotion) than try to wing it on your own... unless you can co-found with someone who can deliver Sequoia and Y Combinator on an idea.

Good luck!