Insanity check on leaving 2Cr at 26
I have a remote job with 250k USD/2CR base salary and get to travel for free internationally 6 times a year to beautiful places in Europe. My manager is a saint and I don’t think I will ever find someone as good as him. I am considering leaving this job to startup. I would love to hear everyone’s unfiltered thoughts on this please 🙏🏼
Firstly, this is not a fake post - Luckily I have been one of the few people who were early in AI to train very large LMs, so I have an edge and get paid crazy money for it.
Why am I leaving? Over the last one month I had time off from work to build a new AI capability for coding assistants. It’s a technological breakthrough and my AI is 10X cheaper and has 100% codebase coverage for automatic feature development, bug fixing and automating 3rd party integrations into your very large codebases. Others are working on it as well, but I have achieved higher results on public coding assistants benchmarks(SWE-bench). I believe in this breakthrough and technology, and this is the absolute right time to build it, not 6 months ago, not 6 months later - too early and too late. This could potentially be my next moonshot or I could also fail, but learn a lot in the process and not have regrets 5 years down the line in not pursuing a breakthrough in AI that someone down the line is going to monopolise.
My financial situation is good and bad - I have NW of 3.2 Cr, but they are tied in 2 real estate properties - I am aware that this is stupid to not have anything liquid. I have a running home loan of 1Cr to the bank and 30 lakhs to be paid to my Dad, these two are my biggest mental blockers.
My wife(married early this year) earns really well as well and I have some ~20L liquid, so day to day runway is of easily 1 year.
Finally, I don’t believe that it I leave my current job, I will ever get another international offer that pays this well in cash and has remote work given how to market has changed recently. I am trying to disassociate from a greed mindset and looking into a potentially very high exponential growth/learnings.
Please provide your suggestions frens, I am planning to speaking to my manager on Monday 🌻🌻
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
Basic things to note
- What do you want?
Is it money, fame, challenge or calm life with your family. - Always plan for worst case. If you startup don't go well and if you can't get a good job after that. Do you have a plan B and more importantly your wife's support and her thoughts are more important.
My 2 cent You are in a very good state now and the startup which you are planning is very competitive one and all the big players are already into it. By the time you launch your product there can be other good product already in the market and you can't compete with giants and you haven't started a startup before. I would suggest you to continue your remote job and try to start your startup parallelly and once you have reached a certain point(it can certain amount in revenue or user base) resign from the remote job.
My 2 cents:
I have been in the startup ecosystem for the last 4 years, since the inception of my career. I took this path because somebody told me you get 3X of experience in a startup compared to any big companies. I would very bluntly say that - All this is crap and it is only true if your startup becomes a big brand which are very few in number, all others are struggling with their career. And it is too huge a risk.
I would suggest you to stick to your current job/ switch to a big brand only and gain a massive experience and create wealth for the financial freedom.
If you have 8 to 10 years of experience in a big brand, it opens the following paths for you:
- You can start something of your own, since you will be financially free, you can take risks at that time
- You can switch to a startup for a CTO/VP position.
Since 95% of startups are going to fail, there is a very high probability that the one you are going into is also going to fail. And once it happens, the value of your resume will also go down, and you will only regret later.
Tldr: don't switch
I was thinking of working on coding templates and assistants myself, still plenty of gaps in the AI products market and everything is getting better exponentially within 6-8 months.
Was working on a product doc for something similar launched by gumroad founder few days ago.
I hate seeing ideas i have had early on getting built by others simply because I couldn't GTM faster (I'm a non coder).
I already have 2 businesses I'm working on, otherwise I'd have jumped into AI head first already. It's the most revolutionary opportunity hands down in our lifetime. I would highly suggest going for it all in. You'll still be able to find jobs later but getting to market with a superior product is a rare opportunity.
I'd say try your luck at starting up. Even if it doesn't work as expected, with the network you've it won't be a problem for you to find even a 500k job at openai or somewhere, albeit not remote.
Bet on yourself, don't restrict yourself with scarcity mindset.
Unsolicited advice : don't give any F to internet strangers labelling you "stupid" for leaving the job.
Thank you for taking the time and providing your thoughts and insights, I appreciate you all.
I spoke to my manager and he is such an awesome guy that I have managed to buy one more month off, which is the best I could have asked for to really develop and tangibly test my AI’s quality.
Again, thanks all for your thoughts.
Runway is good. Plan for your failures. Make it time bound and request your manager if you can join back after 18-24 months.
Dimaagi Khujli aur Keeda - inka koi ilaaj nahi hai.
Don’t leave the lucrative job. Double down on your start up idea during your off hours / weekend. Slog your ass off for the next few years and see where it goes. Keep either foot in each boat until you know which one will be a better option long term.
This will
- take away the pressure of “have to make it big” since you had to let go of something big.
- Keep the cash flow situation healthy while you chase your dreams.
I say don't leave the job till your liabilities are settled. Tech could be deceiving. It may look like it is 'the' right time in tech, it could very well be the right time in tech, but don't give away the certainty of current job you really like for a mirage of better one till your ship is safer (maybe 10Cr). There will always be opportunities.
From my own experience, it is always when we're riding high, that we are likely to make rash decisions. They may cost us 5-10 years to correct.