The freedom is indeed one of the biggest draws but I've found that with any degree of success there is also an automatic reduction in freedom because your responsibilities go up. Hard to balance that.
This is a pretty insightful statement. I would modify that a little bit from 'success' to advancement. In academia you non-academic duties increase as you advance. I've seen a handful of people pull things off such that they have a small lab and don't put in for promotion (they stay associate or instructor). They trade pay for less management duties.
The freedom is indeed one of the biggest draws but I've found that with any degree of success there is also an automatic reduction in freedom because your responsibilities go up. Hard to balance that.
That is SO true. Just to illustrate in a bit more depth... as a developer / founder, here are some things I have to do as a founder that I never had to do as a developer:
1. do market research. Browse US census data, find SIC/NAIC codes, look up demographic information on businesses that we want to target.
2. Scour LinkedIn, Hoovers, etc. for contacts at companies we want to sell to.
3. Compile lists of contacts, cold email / cold call those contacts and try to get meetings.
4. Read sales books, try to develop a sales process for our company.
5. Go out and meet customers, try to identify their problems, then either sell them something and/or plug that feedback back into our product roadmap.
6. Go take sales training.
7. Read marketing books and blogs and articles, put together a marketing plan.
8. Write content specific to out "content marketing" strategy, post on our website, blog, etc.
9. recruit co-founder(s), intern(s), etc.
10. Go to startup related events to get to know the local VCs and angels, just in case we decide to raise a round of funding at some point.
11. Recruit members to our advisory board. Meet advisors, take their advice and figure out how to try and incorporate it
12. Write marketing collateral, white-papers, brochures, etc.
13. Write press releases
14. Distribute press releases.
15. Monitor press to see if we get any mentions. Follow up on those as appropriate.
16. Join industry associations relevant to our target market, attend those meetings to try and meet potential customers, partners, etc.
17. Scour for potential partners, investors, customers, etc.
18. Develop pricing model(s), deal with financial projections.
19. Manage corporate paperwork: File to incorporate, file periodic updates with the secretary of state, tax returns, etc.
20. Manage the product roadmap. Research potential new features and technologies, and prioritize that stuff.
21. Go to "leads group" meetings to exchange leads
22. Go to general networking events (Chamber of Commerce events, etc.) to network and seek customer leads, etc.
23. Respond to inbound leads that come in as a result of our marketing efforts.
And all of that is on top of actually writing code and building the product. So yeah, while being a founder can lead to more freedom in some regards, there is definitely a tradeoff in terms of added responsibility. And once you have co-founder(s) or other people on your team, you feel more pressure because their futures are at stake as well.
> with any degree of success there is also an automatic reduction in freedom because your responsibilities go up.
It's not automatic. It's up to you to choose to what extent you want to exploit that success. If you want more freedom and less responsibility, hire less people than you can afford to, and take less contracts than are open to you. Stay small and be free, or grow big and be rich.
Your thought reminded me of a Ian Langworth's recent quote: "Today, as CTO and co-founder of Artillery, I’m split between infinite freedom and infinite responsibility."[1]