Skip to Content
The Agile Startup: Quick and Dirty Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know
book

The Agile Startup: Quick and Dirty Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know

by Jeff Scheinrock, Matt Richter-Sand
September 2013
Beginner
368 pages
5h 56m
English
Wiley
Content preview from The Agile Startup: Quick and Dirty Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know

The Part-Time Entrepreneur

image

It’s always debatable whether you should start out as a full-time entrepreneur or keep your job and work on your startup on the side. Starting a company in your spare time significantly reduces your risk and opportunity cost. But, if the deck weren’t already stacked against you, succeeding on a part-time basis is a lot more difficult than doing so full time. When your company is a part-time project, your business will be hard to prioritize consistently, your competition will run circles around you, you’ll miss opportunities, and—most importantly—your back won’t be against the wall. If you have the stability of a full-time job, it’s much harder to get out of your comfort zone and do what it takes to get the job done.

It only makes sense to work on an idea part-time when you want to study its feasibility. When it becomes apparent that you have a winner on your hands, your best bet is to dive in headfirst. There’s just no way around it—you have to dedicate everything you’ve got to your startup. This is especially true for investors. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to be serious about your business. And that means quitting your job and building this business full-time.

icon

Previous | Chapter Contents | Next

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur: Financial Planning, Decision Making and Negotiating from Incubation to Exit, + Website

Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur: Financial Planning, Decision Making and Negotiating from Incubation to Exit, + Website

David Shelters
What Successful Project Managers Do

What Successful Project Managers Do

W. Scott Cameron, Jeffrey S. Russell, Edward J. Hoffman, Alexander Laufer

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781118744482Purchase book