I think what most of us want is to be free of the tyranny of employment. And I don’t think founding a company is best way to mitigate that if you aren’t completely into it, you could just go become a freelancer or start a small services Center in your locality.
If that's the case, definitely don't start a company. Instead of being beholden to one manager, you're all of a sudden beholden to dozens... employees, investors, board, customers, etc. Being a founder is just a job.
This seems like a rather naive view to me (and one that I also used to have). As a business owner you are far more accountable to a far greater number of people than you ever will be as an employee. You have the authority to make more decisions, but it’s hardly a “whatever you like” sort of situation. Nearly all of the decisions you make will just be about balancing all the responsibilities you have to other people. As a business owner you might have more authority, but there are many areas where an employee would typically have more freedom. An employee has the freedom to leave all their work problems at the office and go home at the end of the day, or take a vacation. An employee has the freedom to leave the moment a better opportunity comes along. An employee has the freedom to only worry about the problems they’re specifically employed to solve. A business owner would not be expected to have any of that. If your primary concern is a greater level of autonomy at work, then you’d typically be better off seeking and employer who will give you more autonomy than you would be owning a business.
> An employee is beholden to his/her manager, but cannot "call the shots" but simply takes orders.
This is true only insofar as the value you bring to the company cannot be outweighed by the shots you want to call.
If you are, for lack of a better term, that good (and while I have a dim view of VC-silly startups, the successful ones I know really are that good), that can be a very wide remit. It very well might be "wide enough," even, and it's worth considering.
I don’t get “the tyranny of employment”. I’ve had bad jobs before, but within a couple of months I got a new one- in my case always within the same company. My peers in tech have had incredibly dynamic careers as W2 employees.
I’ve toyed with starting a company a few times, but it’s primarily been because there is problem I want to solve that no existing organization I know of is likely to solve it own their own.
I suspect what I really want is a professorship and tenure, but I’d probably be more likely to succeed at creating and exiting a startup successfully at this point.
For the first 16 years of my working life I went through a number of jobs, only one of which I really liked. This probably says more about me than the employers. I think some of us just aren't suited to working in corporations.
