I left my job last month. Typically, leaving a job might not seem significant – after all, more than four million Americans quit their jobs in both October and November of last year in what has commonly been labeled the Great Resignation. Among my circle of friends, many have already switched roles in the past year, and even more plan to do so in the near future. What makes my situation unique is that I actually don’t have another job lined up – at least not a traditional job. As of the 1st of the year, I am now full-time on a project I co-founded last year called Wove. Is this a smart move, or am I taking the plunge too early in the company’s existence? The honest answer is that I’m not sure, but I want to use this essay to share how I came to my decision and why it feels like the right decision at the right time.

A Golden Age for Startups

We are living in a golden age for startups. Prior to 2021, global startup funding had never reached $100 billion in a single quarter. Yet through Q3 of 2021, startup funding surpassed $100 billion in each quarter of the year. And funding increased across all stages of companies, with early-stage funding growing 104% YoY, late-stage funding growing 69% YoY, and seed-stage funding growing 47% YoY.

While some may claim that we are living through yet another bubble ignited by cheap capital, I am convinced that investors will continue to put money to work and fund the best ideas and the most talented founders. I also believe that the next cohort of generational companies is still in its infancy, and the growing bifurcation in the level of bullishness between companies on private markets and those on the public markets might confirm that (I’m writing this on a day the NASDAQ is down over 2.5%). In reflecting on his first year as a VC, Packy McCormick wrote that “I firmly believe that the market is a reflection of the massive opportunities still ahead, the huge number of insanely talented people starting companies, and the larger outcomes tech companies are achieving.” In other words, Packy thinks we are still early, and that capital will continue to flow to companies that can best put it to work.

DoNotPay founder and active angel investor Josh Browder recently tweeted that “We are living in the greatest time in human history for startups. If you are not currently working for a startup, investing in one, or founding a company, it is a missed opportunity.” And while the startup ecosystem is not for everybody, I do think Josh makes a strong point that given all of the opportunities currently available to participate in the potential upside of a startup – whether as a founder, investor or an employee – there is a real opportunity cost in avoiding involvement. In my prior role, I felt the opportunity cost of not participating had become too substantial to continue to ignore.

Ownership

We generally focus on our physical items and possessions when we think about ownership. I own my home, or I own my car. Sure, I may have a mortgage or a car payment, but the asset itself is mine, and I am pretty much free to do whatever I want with it. As a society, we pride ourselves on ownership – sometimes to our own detriment – and we often stigmatize not owning. Our obsession with ownership is embodied in the common fallacy that buying your home is always smarter than renting or that leasing your car is the worst financial mistake you can make. What we have not done until recently, though, is apply the same level of importance to owning the assets we cannot physically touch or see.

If you have spent any amount of time online over the past year, you may have stumbled into a Chris Dixon Twitter thread or Not Boring essay about digital ownership. Naturally, digital ownership is a more challenging concept to grasp than physical ownership (confirmed via my failed attempt to explain NFTs to my mom the other night). If I own a home, not only can I use my home as an investment vehicle to build wealth, but I can also use it for its primary purpose, which is a place to live. While some see digital ownership as a viable way to build wealth, I have yet to uncover a functional, utilitarian use case for most digital assets. As cool as a mansion or yacht in the metaverse might be, I do not believe we currently have the means for calling this mansion home or sailing around the world on our digital yacht. But maybe attempting to find a practical use case for anything we own reveals the issue with our perception of ownership.

If it’s not already obvious, I am no Web3 expert or evangelist of the technology – far from it. But it should not take an expert to see that a commonality across all the Web3 noise and buzzwords is the belief that we should own the work we create, that the companies we work for should not maintain a monopoly over the upside of that work. NFTs, DAOs, and tokens have become the most obvious and mainstream examples of digital ownership, but I would argue that their emergence into the mainstream this past year has accelerated a far more powerful phenomenon: the realization that equity is now accessible to the masses, and that being an owner is not something we need to spend the first twenty years of our careers trying to achieve. This realization profoundly impacts how we work, what we work on, and for whom we work.

You might be asking how this is all relevant to my decision to leave my job. I am not embarking on a journey within Web3, but I am dedicating my most valuable resource – my time – to a project that I do partially own. By being an owner, I am betting that I will push myself to work as hard as possible to make this project successful. I also view my ownership position as a way to diminish the personal risk I might be taking by forgoing a regular income in the project’s early days. In other words, committing full-time is my way of taking control over my time and positioning myself to eventually accrue upside commensurate with my effort. This is the value unlock of ownership.

We have traditionally viewed ownership as a dreamy end goal – a confirmation that we’ve reached the top and that the decades of hard work were worth something. This notion manifests in how we label owning a home as the American Dream or reaching partner status at a big firm as the crowning achievement in one’s career. Likewise, our understanding of ownership has long been primarily associated with our physical things, and that is exhibited in our general discourse around what it means and looks like to be an owner. But, we are now entering a new age where people earlier and less proven in their careers have realized that ownership – over their work, ideas, or, most importantly, their time – is achievable right now.

Risk

Startups are risky endeavors, and I certainly don’t need to remind anyone of that. Founders must be willing to endure years of pain and frustration, irregular paychecks, and constant self-doubt – all of which can do irreparable harm to our physical and mental health. Employees often take pay cuts to join early-stage companies because they believe in the mission and think their equity might one day be worth something. Investors write hundreds of checks out of a fund only to hope that one or two return the entire fund. But I also think there is an element of nuance to risk that frequently gets lost in our dialogue.

When we talk about risk – not just in terms of launching, joining, or investing in startups but in many aspects of life – we tend to think in zero-sum terms. Will I win, or will I fail? When weighing the risks of starting a company, we commonly consider that either the company becomes a unicorn and the founders, investors, and employees all become unfathomably wealthy, or the company totally flops, and the founders, investors, and employees lose everything. While many founders suffer considerable financial and emotional losses when forced to shut down their companies, I find it hard to believe that these founders (and employees) would describe the experience as an abject failure. By subscribing to the logic that a startup can only achieve two binary outcomes – either smashing success or crippling failure – we ignore the unquestionable benefits that come from just starting a company, even one that fails to return a fund to LPs or enrich its founders and employees. We also lose sight of the inexpressible satisfaction and fun that comes from building something from scratch and the experience’s impact on the rest of our career, even if we never start another company.

I would also argue that the bigger risk I faced was continuing to stagnate in a role with limited upward mobility at a company where I possessed no ownership. For my peers who work at larger companies, owning a piece of the pie might not be an essential factor if they believe that the time they are investing in their organizations will ultimately pay dividends in their careers. I did not feel that way in my prior role, and the effect of this feeling on my confidence made the choice to leave an easy one.

Am I fortunate to be in a position where I can assess risk from beyond just a financial lens? Without a doubt, and I recognize this privilege every day. I also acknowledge that the vast majority of people have no desire to be founders. But regardless of whether we’re starting a company or just looking for a small change, we should measure the potential risks of our decisions against the risks of not taking a leap of faith and continuing to suffer through a status quo that we know makes us unhappy and unfulfilled. Risk is personal, and we should treat it and talk about it as such.

Personal

I am committing full-time to my company for two primary reasons. First, I believe that startups are the best way to accelerate your career as a young person – especially for those who might still be unsure exactly where their interests lie. I believed that coming out of college in 2019, and I believe it even more as a founder in 2022. By committing full-time, I am giving myself an excuse to meet interesting and powerful people that I otherwise would not have been able to meet until far later in my career (if ever). Being a founder also forces me to wear many hats and experiment with several different responsibilities – something I could not do in a more rigid and structured role. I expect that the generalist skillset and unwavering tenacity honed by founders will only become more coveted to larger and more established companies in the years to come as incumbent firms face pressure to constantly reinvent themselves.

Secondly, I want to solve a problem that I’m passionate about with a team of people I enjoy working with. Wove is a bet that the future of work is more flexible and liberating than the past. While we are by no means the only company building in this space, I have confidence that our unique experience, domain knowledge, and vision set Wove apart from the dozens of other teams building a better future of work. What we are building at Wove matters because we know that the way we were working was broken long before the pandemic. In front of us now is a generational opportunity to correct course and rethink work’s role in our lives.

Closing Thoughts

Leaving a job is not a decision that should be made lightly – especially without a viable backup plan. While I write that my decision to leave was an easy one, I should note that this only became true after months of thinking about, reading about, and talking to people about entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and opportunity cost. The message I received from those I spoke to and experts I read was consistent, though: risk is not as binary as we often make it seem, and if you’re unhappy and unfulfilled in the status quo, the bigger risk is not making a change. For me, the risk of going full-time on Wove was lessened by my ownership in the project and my passion for what we are building and the problems we are solving.

I can’t predict the future and say with certainty that Wove will become a billion-dollar company, and I don’t even know if that is the goal. What I can say with all the confidence in the world, though, is that I am doing what I should be doing, and if nothing else, I will have a fun story to tell.

Thanks for reading.

Jay Edlin is a co-founder of Wove.