Orange County Register

Editor’s note: This is part of an ongoing series chronicling the triumphs, challenges,  failures and questions facing one Orange County startup, the 532 Development Group, written by the founders themselves with as much openness as competition allows.  If you’re new to the series, start here and come back.

If you had asked me the day I decided to leave my job what my top reasons were for leaving a comfortable salary in exchange for no money and the responsibilities that come with being an entrepreneur, three things would have come immediately to mind:

1. I’ve had a lifelong ambition to build a successful business from scratch
2. My employer offered me the ability to return to the company
3. My girlfriend (now fiancée) wants me to do it, believes in me, and probably wouldn’t make me sleep in a box if it came to that

Fortunately (or unfortunately – I guess it’s still too early to tell), the conclusion of my consulting program with McKinsey brought the decision to a head. With those considerations in mind, I opted to start a company. Strange as it may sound, at the time I really had no idea what my theoretical company would do.

Apparently the factors mitigating my risks loomed large enough to make me comfortable in making the decision to go for it, even with such a high level of ambiguity and uncertainty on the road ahead.

Reflecting on my three months as an entrepreneur, I look back at those considerations and see them from an entirely different point of view. As one deeply entrenched in the employed world, the safety nets that helped me discount the massive risk I was contemplating undertaking loomed large in my mind. They would cushion the blow of a business flop to my finances, reputation, and perhaps most importantly, my own ego. While perhaps still true, now I feel guilty thinking about them like that. After transitioning to the entrepreneur world, these safety nets now feel like liabilities that could threaten my persistence.

With these things in mind, I’d like to invite others out there in the business community to help me think about this conundrum and provide perspective on a few questions.

Are we crazy?

Can accepting failure as an option be the actual cause of a startup failure?

How do I force myself to focus on and create accountability for my positive reasons for becoming an entrepreneur?

How do I reduce the prominence in my own mind of those things that make this less risky for me?

Ideas welcome…

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