The Boss of You

I stum­bled across a great blog today while fol­low­ing up on Boss of You men­tions around the blo­gos­phere: Sweet Sas­safras. (Great name, no?) And okay, it feels a lit­tle self-serving to link there, given that the most recent post at the moment rec­om­mends our book (thanks, Sarai!) — but let’s skip right past that and revel in the awe­some­ness of Sarai’s leaving-the-cubicle-farm-behind story. Sarai is the cre­ative mind behind Colette Pat­terns, which you sim­ply must look at if you’re a fan of beau­ti­ful, vintage-inspired dresses.

(Actu­ally, let me just repeat that, because although I was tempted to grab a photo off her site to link over to her, I’m increas­ingly stressed out by the copy­right impli­ca­tions of doing that — so instead I’ll try and con­vince you with words. HER DRESSES ARE STUNNING. And they’re amaz­ing pat­terns — you could def­i­nitely make a dress in two dif­fer­ent fab­rics and end up with a day­time, head-to-the-farmer’s-market-with-a-basket-on-your-arm look, and an evening, everybody-drop-dead-with-envy-and-awe look. Check ‘em out.)

OK, now mov­ing on to why I am post­ing this here on our all-things-entrepreneurial blog (besides the fact that we love to pro­mote the work of other women run­ning cool busi­nesses): Sarai’s story about start­ing her busi­ness inspired me on sev­eral lev­els. She talks frankly about the fac­tors that moti­vated her to become an entre­pre­neur, as well as the stuff that has helped her along the way.

But one thing stood out for me as an “Aha!” moment: She talks about work­ing for a big com­pany and expe­ri­enc­ing the oppo­site of the job secu­rity she expected to feel:

Back when I was in grad school at Berke­ley, I took an intern­ship at a Big Global Tech Com­pany. It was my first time work­ing in a large cor­po­ra­tion and I learned a lot, though per­haps not the things I expected to learn. Towards the end of my allot­ted time there, the com­pany announced that there would be a reor­ga­ni­za­tion of some depart­ments. Jobs were cut, peo­ple shuf­fled around, the depart­ment I was in would have a new boss, the usual reorg chaos.

This didn’t affect my intern­ship; but it was at this point I real­ized that, despite the fact that a steady pay­check makes you feel secure, work­ing for a big com­pany is pretty risky. You can be laid off at any moment. You are basi­cally a cog in a very large machine, and can be sac­ri­ficed at any time. You don’t have much control.

Yes! This is pretty much what Emira and I say every time some­one tells us in hushed tones that they could never start their own busi­ness, because it’s so… risky. We felt on a gut level that au con­traire, it would actu­ally give us more con­trol, not less. I don’t mean to down­play the risk fac­tors, because they do exist, but they exist every­where. Work­ing for some­one else is a mas­sive act of trust. Work­ing for your­self can actu­ally feel pretty sta­ble and pre­dictable by com­par­i­son. When we started our busi­ness, it was dur­ing the big tech bub­ble of 1999–2000, and we opened our doors right before the first dot-com bust.

You couldn’t ask for more affir­ma­tion from the uni­verse that in fact, we weren’t tak­ing crazy risks — we were pro­tect­ing our­selves from suf­fer­ing the fall­out of other people’s risk-taking.

We’ve heard vari­a­tions on this story many times since we started work on our book; a lot of entre­pre­neurs seem to start their busi­nesses to exer­cise more con­trol over their work lives. If you’ve got a sim­i­lar story, share it in the comments.