1 year anniversary of me quitting Facebook!

How I retired from 'corporate' life at 27 to get back to building & investing full-time.

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me quitting Facebook! It was a fun-filled, exciting ride to say the least, and my biggest gift from the experience was the people I got to work with & learn from (and call my friends & mentors today :)). But this post is about how I dealt with the uncertainty that followed because I feel we always celebrate the ‘outcomes’ and not ‘the process’ - and we should change that!

I remember waking up on 1st Dec 2019 & being full of excitement but also awfully unsure of what was to come.

This past year couldn't have been further away from what I had envisioned. According to that plan, I was ready to start building again, had seed/angel investors who were ready to back me pre-product & pre-revenue; even had my Vipassana retreat booked to spend 10 days in complete silence to 'dig deep & find my inner calling'.

While I didn't get direct answers to 'what should I do with my life', I had a few self-realizations that guided my journey this year:

- I enjoy ownership & building - I never acted as an employee, no matter what the role, only as an ‘entrepreneur’. During my 3 year-long ‘corporate sabbatical’, I realized that within most big companies, 80% of your time & energy goes into internal marketing, politics, and bureaucracy - and those were the exact ‘turnoffs’ that put me off the corporate ladder, for GOOD.

- I value independence & freedom - While the idea of having the 'perfect startup roadmap' was exciting, I made a conscious decision to turn down funding because I wanted to enjoy the process of discovery & really figure out what I wanted to dedicate the next 5-10 years of my life to. Taking OPM (other people's money) before I knew for sure, felt unethical but most importantly rid me of the pressure of having to conform to how life 'should be'. PS: I had raised from angels in my first startup & worked hard to make sure they got their returns, so I've always viewed 'taking money' as a huge responsibility.

- While most entrepreneurs dream of building a VC-backed startup, I am currently bootstrapping and plan to be 'customer-funded' for as long as possible. For me, building businesses is about building long-term, sustainable institutions NOT a rat-race of raising capital. I may not build the next unicorn, but I'll 100% build enduring & profitable businesses.

- Building a profitable venture gives you the flexibility to allocate capital how you want. In my case, through HHV I was able to add 6 angel investments to my portfolio (4 have already raised follow-on rounds from marquee VCs), buy some more crypto and double-down on the 15-20 public stocks in my portfolio and now can patiently wait for the power of compounding to work its magic.

- Everybody has their own definition of success & everybody is a result of their conditioning. Don’t compare, envy, or judge anyone else’s journey. My personal goals & ambitions don’t have to make sense to anyone else but me, and the same goes for everyone else. 

Overall, even after a year of extreme highs & lows, I’m thrilled that I decided to move on when I did and opened myself to opportunities that I would’ve missed otherwise. While it didn’t pan out how I’d imagined, it turned out many notches better than I could’ve wished for, and for that, I’m eternally grateful. And for the uncertainty that looms ahead for all of us, just remember that you don’t have to have life all figured out - because ‘figuring out is what life is’!

And for anyone questioning whether they should make the jump or not, I’ll leave you with one final thought:

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” William Faulkner