You like building things. Okay, I'll run with that, understanding that I don't know you well and will get the specifics wrong. Just trying to kick start your th

You like building things. Okay, I'll run with that, understanding that I don't know you well and will get the specifics wrong. Just trying to kick start your thinking. First, there is product design. That is not just 'make this font look pretty', it is doing things like figuring out sane workflows for your user, watching them use the product and figuring out elegant solutions to the points where they get stuck or frustrated. It's conversations with the engineers - your design might eat batteries, or render poorly on device X, or.... There is coming up with the product idea, presenting it to investors (who could just be the VP in the company you work for, there is plenty of chances for creativity w/o starting your own company). There is product management, project management. There is the whole personnel side of things. It's not just 'fill out this form for the yearly review' - a good manager has a mental model of their employees, and guides them through constant improvement. She also makes it possible for that employee to do their job by removing everything extraneous to that job. I'm just saying HN can give you a skewed perspective. I have solely invented a few different products while working for large companies and had my companies decide to adopt them. The only two things missing was the payoff at the end, and the stress filled nights (am I going to make payroll? John just bought a new house). For me that is a great tradeoff. For others, I can't say. And I'll say this. People like Jony Ive didn't become great by running off and doing their own things alone. It's a path to do that, to be sure. But he spent years grinding at a growing company. His story is different than yours, I'm not trying to say there is an equivalence. But you have to work really, really hard, for years, for your ideas and designs to be worthy of the world, to be better than the competition. He became great by years of grinding, and his work was made sellable by daily, relentless meetings where every decision was torn apart by other brilliant people (say what you want about Jobs, he knew how to get great work out of designers).