Hack#6: Found a startup
High impact on wealth, skills, network, wisdom & personal branding for high efforts
Found a startup
High Impact, High Effort
Overview:
Founding startup is the fastest & the most lucrative way to accelerate growth in skills, network, wisdom and personal brand. If it succeeds, it can generate the disproportionate income that no other career option can. But if it fails, it can negatively impact your wealth. For every success story in startup, there are at least 10 other failure stories. This path demands a lot from an individual in terms of skills, time and resources which leads to the accelerated learning but at the cost of work-life balance in most cases. The fate of a startup depends not just on an individual but a tonnes of external factors which we may for the simplicity here call "the market". If you want to startup, usually starting with "side project" is a great idea. Once you build better understanding and feel confident, you can move on to working on startup full-time. In the end, the decision is mainly influenced by your financial constraints and your conviction on pulling off the business plan.
Inspiration:
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a startup in 1998 when they were Ph.D. students. I don't remember it's name though, I might need to Google it.
Get started:
There is no proven recipe for this
Note: Covering this specific topic is out of scope of this article, because
There is no reliable right/wrong way to do this
This requires significant expertise in skills other than software engineering(e.g. business, industry specific skills, etc.)