How They Did It | Leo’s Story
I had the chance to interview one of my friends who successfully made a switch to a different industry early in his career. Leo has an interesting background: in high school he did the pre-med track because Med school starts in college in Singapore. Despite seeing the rest of his classmates go on to become doctors, he broke off, came to a liberal arts college in the US, and chose to major in Economics and Government with “an almost minor” in Philosophy.
Upon graduation he landed his first job in management consulting where he spent 2.5 years working on various projects for Fortune 100 clients: from finding $100M of cost savings for a Telco, to evaluating a fish vaccine manufacturer as a potential acquisition target, to presenting the Private Wealth Strategy (ie. Banking products for high net worth individuals) to the CEO of the largest bank in Singapore. Over that short time period he worked in Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and San Francisco.
Yet — in the midst of the hustle, deep down in his heart he had always been a big tech fan: he had played games all his life, worked in his college’s tech support office, and always kept up to date with the latest and greatest Apple gadgets (He’s very proud of buying the first iPhone on day 1!). Although he had never had formal education in computer science, tech had always been in the back of his mind throughout his entire life and the idea of starting a company formed a few years after he started working.
He had many ideas that he thought had the potential to turn into profitable businesses, one of which was a service that helps users discover friends, or friends of friends that have similar interests. The website had an apt name: Heyawanna — as in, “Hey! You wanna do something together?” He pitched it to his friends for feedback and one of them thought it’s a great idea and joined him on his venture.
Once they decided to work together, Leo started classes online and taught himself how to code the website to get started. The rest were discovered and picked up along the way: how to register a company, how to hire people, how to give employees equity, etc. His experience in management consulting helped with having the confidence and ability to tackle unstructured problems during this period.
After two months of coding and building a business on weeknights and weekends, Leo completed his initial prototype which got really positive feedback from friends he’d shared it with. Armed with the courage and his unwillingness to half-commit, he quit his full time job. With some money saved up from the previous years, he moved to a much cheaper place and cut down on spending aggressively. For the next year he put all his time and energy into the website: he hired two more people, gave them equity, and eventually parted ways with the business co-founder a few months into starting the business.
…the hardest part wasn’t the switch but the internal struggles over starting a business
When asked about what was the hardest part of this experience, he said the hardest part wasn’t the switch but the internal struggles over starting a business: doubts about whether his website would take off, a strong sense of “what am I doing with my life” while watching friends get promotions and move into new (and higher paying) job opportunities and objections from the parents.
Here are some useful resources for those who are trying to start a business for the first time:
