Founder here. Seen plenty of people who “want to start a startup” come through the doors over 10 years.
To my knowledge, only 1 ever took the plunge, the rest all moved on to different jobs when they finished up with us. In every case they told me that an advantage of the new place is that they’d learn some more things they need to know for when they start their own thing.
To be clear I don’t judge their choices at all. Just pointing out that this is a pretty common thing people tell themselves.
By contrast the former employees who have gone on to do their own startup expressed no interest in the topic until one day they were suddenly a founder.
This seems about right. Startup ideas are the white collar equivalent of day dreaming about how you would spend the money if you won the lottery. It's cheap to talk about, easy to fantasize about, and many people have a very distorted perception of what skills are necessary to be an effective tech founder so (in their minds) their technical proficiency makes it plausible.
I am in the same boat as an employee who left a cushy job at G to join a startup with the motivation to start my company, but I feel there's a limit to "preparation" and one needs to be honest and take the plunge. Else, I am bs-ing myself.
I would have been in this camp, except I would not have said the next role would be stepping-stone to founderdom.
The main thing I learned is that I never, ever, EVER, want to start my own company, and actually never want to work in a company with fewer than 30 people again. Maybe seeing the stress and the actual type of work that makes up the work of an early stage founder (or indeed employee) is quite off-putting for people. I don't see that as a bad thing either.
I think a lot of people are allured by the idea of starting a startup and it shows in your numbers.
Where as "natural" founders are allured by "an idea" and decide the best way to push forward on this idea will be through startup org(in terms of freedom, financing => obtaining more people, interfacing with users of the idea etc).
To my knowledge, only 1 ever took the plunge, the rest all moved on to different jobs when they finished up with us. In every case they told me that an advantage of the new place is that they’d learn some more things they need to know for when they start their own thing.
To be clear I don’t judge their choices at all. Just pointing out that this is a pretty common thing people tell themselves.
By contrast the former employees who have gone on to do their own startup expressed no interest in the topic until one day they were suddenly a founder.