What are the steps to quit your job and start a company?
I offer you the step by step process that worked for me:
1. Save $1000 in cash for protecting you against distracting accidents like dead car battery.
2. Pay off all debt from smallest to largest and destroy all credit cards. If someone tells you that's a bad idea, remove them from your inner circle.
3. Have a budget. Benchmark your monthly expenses, write down what you're going to spend each month before you spend it, and become a minimalist. Ideally spend less than half of your take-home income.
4. Have six months of expenses in a savings account labelled "emergency funds".
Join a startup (or two) as an early employee close to market salary, just to get educated in how it's done, where somebody else is paying for the tuition of failure.
5. Join a large company who is excited by your startup experience, negotiating a large salary. Use the salary to save up for an additional two-year personal runway without a job. With focused effort, this won't take much longer than a year to accomplish.
6. Spend the last six months networking, meditating, self-reflecting, and understanding how very different you are from the typical person you'd be without this choice. Get excited about a concept for your business. Remember, plans are worthless but planning is everything.
Unfortunately there is no step 7. Most of us spend the rest of our lives looking for it. Step 7 is to quit your job and start a company.
In addition, I've made the following mistakes that I'd encourage you to avoid:
Don't sacrifice the present moment for an ideal future. Pace yourself. Mastery takes time, unlike what you see in the news.
Don't invest more than ingenuity. If it requires both time and treasure, it's too much risk to take on in your first attempt.
Don't let "good" ideas woo you. Ideas are like illusions of water in a desert. Look for customer activity. If your idea doesn't have it, find someone else who has found it but needs you critically.
Don't let money scare you. Forget about the happiness myth of owning a house, etc. You will feel invincible as long as you have your emergency funds.
Don't give yourself an unrealistic timeline. You won't be done in 3 months to a year. You'll be done when you quit trying. So brace for a long journey and learning survival skills along the way.
Don't believe that your business plan will work. Likely by the time you've finished building the company, you've paid off the tuition on your first school of failure. Expect failure. It's the rocky mountains on the journey to the west coast. If you don't run into it, you're going the wrong way.
Don't believe the myth that there's a right way that only others know. In fact, most success stories are about the proverbial Wizards of Oz. Ignore the men behind the curtain, but also ignore their successes and opportunities. In reality, there's only you and your road.
Learn to love yourself for more than the pride of who you've been and what you've accomplished in the past. Love yourself for the potential of who you're becoming.
Once you've accomplished all of the above financial and spiritual preparations, you will realize that a few years have gone by; being older makes you more afraid of taking risks. So in fact, even though you're more prepared, you're less willing to jump.
Then, you should know you're on step 8. There's a certain and rare type of person who will walk through the concrete wall of personal limitations. I'm convinced of it, because I see this type of person everyday around me.
Source: Quora
A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
- Grace Hopper, Female US Navy Admiral and Computer Scientist