I gave the following talk exactly one year ago right when I decided to quit my academic job to focus on my "startup dream" (now https://cocalc.com https://cocal

I gave the following talk exactly one year ago right when I decided to quit my academic job to focus on my "startup dream" (now https://cocalc.com https://cocalc.com): http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/ http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/. It's a year later, and the quick summary is that I feel basically really, really happy to be working on this company. It's exciting to be successfully hiring and building a team of people who work very well together and can focus 100% on a specific problem, unlike how things worked for me in my part of academia (pure math research). Though stressful at times, doing what I'm doing now is much less painful than trying to build a company while doing another fulltime job (namely teaching at the University fulltime) -- that really sucked. I'm extremely glad that customers are paying us and investors funded us enough that I can do this. Having the luxury to focus on one thing, rather than juggling several, is much like having an office that is neat, tidy, and uncluttered. It feels good in the same way. At least by quitting a job and focusing on a startup, you have the option to focus 100% on it. Actually focusing 100% on one thing is a difficult skill in itself, even with the right circumstances; however, it's completely impossible (at least for me) with two fulltime jobs at once, especially jobs like teaching (which involve lots of public speaking at scheduled times) or running a website with paying customers (which demands, e.g., responding to DDOS attacks).