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"How did you decide to quit your job and make a startup?" - 9/13/2022

If you're interested in starting your own startup, check out our curated playlist for it here: [Taro Top 10] Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups

  • Alex has wanted to start his own thing for a while - Ever since his side projects started getting serious traction in 2015-2016 (25,000+ users each).
  • The initial goal with Tech Career Growth Community wasn't to make a business out of it. The pandemic was happening and people were suffering - We just wanted to help people.
    • Tech Career Growth then grew beyond Rahul's and Alex's wildest imaginations.
    • This made them start thinking what they could accomplish if they worked on it full-time instead of part-time.
  • For Alex, there are the core reasons why he decided to make the jump back in early 2022:
    • Diminishing returns on "preparing" to make a startup - He had the 0 to 1 experience from doing side projects and building Course Hero's Android apps from scratch. Meta was great helping him build soft skills.
    • Tech Career Growth taking off - Alex had more fun working on this community than working his full-time job at Robinhood (which is saying something as he really enjoyed working at Robinhood!).
    • Getting into an incubator - In late 2021, Alex and Rahul got into OnDeck, which gives the old YC deal of 125k for 7%.
    • Life timing - Alex is 30 as of the publishing date of this video, and creating a startup only gets harder as you age due to increasing responsibilities outside of work.

If you're interested in how Alex published ~30 apps that got ~3 million users combined, check these out:

Lastly, here's a great discussion on how hard startups are compared to leveling up at a "traditional" job: "Career advancement or building a startup? Which one is harder?"