Employee to Entrepreneur

Chapter 4Embracing your what

‘This action will advance me toward my goal, this one will lead me nowhere.’

Aristotle

When I began my entrepreneurial journey with Hotdesk, I identified what I thought was a gap in the market as more and more people transitioned from employee to freelancer. According to some sources, 40 per cent of the white collar workforce will freelance by 2020, and employees were taking advantage of growing opportunities to work flexibly and remotely.

When I wasn’t straightening up my Windsor knot for my gig at Macquarie Bank, I was devouring books such as Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup and Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week. Inspired by these books, I embarked on my quest to build a minimum viable product (MVP) before quitting my day job. We’ll get into specifics on the MVP later, but for now all you need to know is that most of this early effort was spent playing email ping pong with my India-based web developer. Over a few months my initial investment of $3000 in expenses led to a $150 000 capital injection, at which point I left the corporate world to work full time on building my startup.

Find your character, build a startup

In the 1987 film Wall Street, Lou Mannheim tells a young Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, ‘Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him; at that moment, man finds his character and that’s what keeps him out of the abyss’.

Entrepreneurship is a lot like this.

• You need to be thick skinned in order to survive.
• You need ...