Balancing Career Growth and Startup Dreams
I’m looking for some guidance on a career decision I’m wrestling with.
I joined LinkedIn about 4 months ago, and I have 8 years of experience overall.
Last week, I had a discussion with my manager about the promotion cycle. We agreed on a goal: to achieve a Staff Engineer promotion by December 2026. He’s supportive and gave me some suggestions — mostly around participating more actively in meetings, increasing visibility among directors and above, and focusing on both tech depth and influence.
I’m committed and confident that if I focus for the next 1.5 years, I can achieve this.
Here’s my dilemma:
I've always wanted to start a startup. Over the years, I’ve saved about ₹90L (this includes ESOPs from a soon-to-IPO company) that I’ve earmarked for future startup investment.
I'm starting to get a few ideas now, but I’m relatively weak at networking and need to build that skill.
The challenge is:
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If I focus fully on the promotion, I might lose momentum on the startup front.
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If I dive into the startup, it’ll impact my chances for promotion.
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Should I quit job? but my startup idea itself not validated.
I'm feeling torn between two dreams — climbing the tech leadership ladder or building my own thing.
What would you do in this situation?
Any advice on how to balance both, or on deciding which path to prioritize?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 0
9 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroHere's the unfortunate truth: There is not much overlap between getting to Staff at Big Tech and making yourself more ready to become a founder.
I generally recommend that engineers get to senior or at least high mid-level before pursuing a switch into entrepreneurship to have a core bedrock of skills to rely on during the founder journey (technical skills, social skills, fundamental skills, etc). You are already there. You'll definitely grow a lot going from LinkedIn senior -> staff, but it's going to be more about navigating the politics behind a massive organization, not how to build your own thing from 0 to 1.
Every year you don't go down the founder path, it gets harder (there is a reason most tech founders are in their early to mid-20s). And every year you stay at Big Tech, it gets harder to leave as you get silver/gold handcuffs, especially as a high-performer. If you know in your soul that you want to become a founder someday and you have a decent financial cushion, you should go down the founder route ASAP.
December 2026 is almost 2 years away. That's a long time.
Here's a good playlist to go through: [Taro Top 10] Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups
Best of luck!
- 18 days agoSenior Software Engineer [L4] [OP]LinkedIn
Thank you Alex. Instead of suggesting me to chase both, you gave raw advice from your experience. It totally makes sense, even after 2 years there is no gurrenty that i will be staff engineer. why to delay things just by chasing promotions? Even if my startup fails, i can get back to corporate with different role itself.
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