My 9-to-5 Job Helped Me Incubate My Start-Up

Eric Bahn, founder of the social network Beat the GMAT, worked his day job until he was ready to take his business full-time. By the end of his fourth year, he was making twice as much from his start-up.

I’ve never considered myself an entrepreneur at heart — I’m far too risk averse to put everything on the line and jump headfirst into a venture from scratch. But during my six years as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned that entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It is possible to incrementally build your business — while holding down a 9-to-5 job — until your side business is cash-flow positive. Then you can leave your day job to become a full-time entrepreneur in a proven business.

In fact, that’s exactly how I built Beat The GMAT, a social network for MBA applicants. By the time I left my job to become a full-time entrepreneur, I had a proven business model and sustainable revenue. Today the site serves 2 million business school applicants each year and is fully profitable without any external funding.

I founded the company in 2005 from my Stanford dorm room. I love the education space and I am energized by the idea of solving education needs through online communities and social media. When I launched Beat The GMAT, I had a dream of working on this venture full time. But I was 23, and funding was a major challenge. I also had more questions than answers about how to run a business and my college degree in Sociology certainly didn’t provide me many relevant or transferable skills.
(Read about Groupon filing a $750 million IPO)

So I decided to hedge my risk. I accepted a full-time job as a product manager at a respectable Silicon Valley company. With my day job bankrolling me, I was free to be highly experimental with my side venture and didn’t fear failure. At the end of the day, I would still get my salary and benefits even if my social network collapsed. I was optimistic and thought that I would only work at my day job for one year before I could move onto my start-up full-time.

One year turned into four. During those years, I spent about 40 to 50 hours a week at my job and another 40 to 50 hours a week (nights and weekends) working on my side venture. The lifestyle was extremely taxing and had precious little time to spend with family, friends, or working on hobbies.

Still, I was having so much fun. At my ‘real’ job, I was fortunate to work with managers who were great mentors. I was able to select projects that were relevant to my own small-business interests. It was also during this time as an employee that I met the person who would become my business partner, who also coached me on how to think strategically.

I spent three years experimenting with my side venture while working full-time. And while I made plenty of mistakes along the way, I also enjoyed many successes. By my third year, my site traffic began to grow exponentially, and I was able to begin monetizing my site. By the end of the fourth year, I was earning almost twice as much from my personal venture as I was from my day job.
(Read NewsFeed's post about Tyra Banks enrolling at Harvard Business School)

I was now ready to make a go at being a full-time entrepreneur, and I left my day job in January 2009. I’ve been fully focused on Beat The GMAT for two-and-a-half years now, and I wouldn’t change a thing about how I got to where I am.

Entrepreneurs should do some serious soul-searching and not be pressured to go full-time into their ventures immediately. There’s no stigma attached to being an entrepreneur with a 9-to-5 job. Instead, think of your full-time job as an opportunity to incubate your business.

Founded by Scott Gerber, the Young Entrepreneur Council (Y.E.C.) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The Y.E.C promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business’s development and growth.

Book Review: What America’s Banana King Teaches Us About Capitalism

Americans puzzling over the role of today’s powerful corporations — Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs, Google — may profit from considering the example of the United Fruit Company.

It seems almost quaint to think that a company specializing in bananas might have once been considered a capitalist giant on the level of today’s firms, but so it was — at its height in the first half of the last century, United Fruit owned one of the largest private navies in the world. It owned 50 percent of the private land in Honduras and 70 percent of all private land and every mile of railroad in Guatemala.

Why Companies Can No Longer Afford to Ignore Their Social Responsibilities

In 1970, the economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman published an article in The New York Times Magazine titled, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” In the article, he referred to corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs as “hypocritical window-dressing,” and said that businesspeople inclined toward such programs “reveal a suicidal impulse.” Even four decades ago, at a time of growing public concern for the environment, his views represented the general skepticism and contempt with which many in Corporate America viewed CSR.