I dont know how much excess money you make, but its probably enough to hire someone from vietnam/india/the philipines on an either full-time or contract basis t

I dont know how much excess money you make, but its probably enough to hire someone from vietnam/india/the philipines on an either full-time or contract basis to work for you. Use that person as a bona-fide employee for one of your projects. This is probably not the highest impact hire you will ever make, but mentally, you will shift from worrying about your day job to viewing your dayjob as a means to an end to get one of your projects off the ground. That is how you could align your job more with your real goals. I dont really know how you would be vesting anything at Goog within just one year, but apparently you do. Once "time is up", you take your talents to the freelancing world and make twice an hour what you made at big company as an employee. You are now the CEO of your company and you will make craploads of money, if you play your cards right. You should have no trouble joining Gigster, which is a way to do consulting without the very heavy lifting parts of running your own consulting shop. There, you will feel a lot more like being a decision-maker. Out of your vastly increased income, you take some money to bootstrap whatever you want, you could even just do a couple mini experiments and use the remaining money to funnel into savings/living. Fulltime employment in the US is a trap. Its at-will, anyway. Working fulltime comes with less job security than contracting (no "hiring manager" will ever question my rate. It is simply my rate and doesnt get measured against "market value". when a hiring manager hires a contractor, they buy a serivce, not add to payroll). In other parts of the world, fulltimers take a salary cut in exchange for superior job security. In the US, fulltimers take a salary cut to be someones bitch, mostly. Additionally, as a contractor, I dont get black marks on my resume. I worked a contract with a client. Even if they unceremoniously fired me, all I got to say is "contract ended". Since it was never assumed to be forever anyway, nobody is going to bother. I solved their problem, they didn't need me anymore, mission accomplished. Funny: I was going to reply that you shouldn't call out your employer and it took me a minute to understand the acronym. facepalm of the day.