Risk, entrepreneurship and a post after a year

 

The last post I made on this blog was on February 2018 which is almost a year ago. The longest stretch of time without a single post on this blog. I wish I could say that I was too busy to write, but honestly speaking that is a pretty weak excuse. Therefore, the official answer is that I took a break.

2018 was a very important year for me and brought major changes. The seeds of this change were actually planted in mid 2017 when I had decided to quit my job and pursue entrepreneurship. From January 2018, my relationship with my former employer was fullyover and I could concentrate on own business. When I look back there wasn’t a single reason to quit my job but rather a combination of many factors.

Firstly, I was perhaps a bit bored and felt that I wasn’t learning as much as before. Although my businesses (I will talk about them in later posts) are very related to investing, as a business owner you get to put on many hats as a salesperson (selling your product to clients), human resource manager (hiring and motivating staff), IT guy (dealing with software and hardware). To keep your business alive you are forced to learn these new things and develop yourself.

The second thing was the optionality of a big payoff. Starting a new business is risky. There is also a big opportunity cost in terms of the lost monthly salaries. Yet, if the business clicks the financial payoff could be extremely large. This kind of risk can be taken only when a person has enough savings to fall back on if the venture fails. Fortunately, by saving since my college days and living frugally I had that comfort. Worse case, I could always come back to job life.

The third and perhaps the biggest reason for starting the business was my co-founders. Most of my career I had worked alone in Bangladesh, working for companies based in New York or London. I missed working in a team environment. I am lucky to have two exceptional people as my partners. In my 10 years of career, I have the highest degree of job satisfaction at the moment.

I will end the post here. In later posts I would describe the two businesses we have started, what some of the big learning has been in the last one year and finally how my reading list has evolved ever since I have started the two companies.