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by Micah Elliott.
Original Post: Corporate-to-Startup Transition Checklist
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So you're finally ready to leave corporate life. Before you walk out the door, here are some things you should make sure to consider during your last couple months of employment.
I've tried to put these into something of an order. IOW, you can start planning your business right now, but don't wipe your laptop until your last day. There are various things you might not be able to do while still corporately employed due to NDAs or other legal agreements you've signed. Be careful!
It's a bit daunting to be taking the plunge, but I'm actually feeling really good about it. I'm most of the way through the checklist now. Here it is...
Have a good plan. This may seem obvious, but you really need to have a solid business idea with high potential for profit. Others should like your project idea and confirm it's something they'd be interested in using themselves. You might want to have some backup ideas, too. Do a feasibility study, form a focus group, make sure you can implement it, etc. Read some books about this.
Make sure your family understands your plans and supports your decision, and is willing to make necessary life changes. Maybe they can even get a job, or start working for you.
Make sure this is the right time in your life to take the plunge. With three kids I was worried I'd missed my window. But I actually think now is pretty good timing. I've had enough time to become a confident developer, sysadmin, and project manager, and even understand some of the business aspects. My kids (ages 7, 5, and 5) are young enough to not get into serious trouble, but old enough to be in school most of the day. I figure I've got about a five year window to go nose-down.
Find a committed and capable business partner. You need an accountability partner, a consort, a sounding board, a motivator, a critic, an inspector, a friend, a sanity check, and much more. Establish a timeline for when you will both be fully committed to the startup.
Make sure you've got money in the bank to support you (and your family) for a while. Maybe you've been saving, or maybe you can take a home equity loan. I just did the latter. Now might even be a good time to just sell your house and move into a monthly-pay apartment.
Have a backup plan. If things fall apart and your runway cash is gone, then what will be your next career? I find web development exciting in many capacities, so contracting will be fine when necessary.
Get your next office set up and operational. Start doing some invisible startup early work. I built a home-detached "work shed" in the back yard.
Minimize your recurring expenses. Now would be a good time to transition to VoIP, sell a vehicle, reduce insurance, upgrade to cost-efficient appliances, fix problems with your house, buy some chickens, plant a garden... be sustainable.
Use up your vacation, sick leave, conference/travel allocation, etc. Or lose it.
Fine-tune your resume. Just make sure your LinkedIn profile is somewhat comprehensive. This will help you when the time comes to do contract work on the side when you're running out of cash.
Get references/recommendations. You're still talking regularly to a lot of corporate folks. Some of them will have nice things to say about you. Tell them to join LinkedIn and recommend you.
Cash out your stock. After 8 years at Intel all of my stock is worth next to nothing. But maybe yours will have done better. You need to do something with it before you leave.
Establish a personal web presence. The will probably be a blog, but might even be the website for your startup. You'll need as many channels as possible to start evangelizing your startup.
Do as much work as possible on your startup in the off-hours. Make sure nothing about your startup overlaps with your corporate work, so they can't claim any sort of future ownership. But you can do things like account setup, LLC/S-Corp registration, business plan, focus group, experimental development, tools setup/experience, team setup, name establishment, etc.
Be ready to hit the ground running. Have a personal laptop ready to go meeting all your development needs.
Make sure you're using all open source productivity tools. You won't be purchasing commercial tools for your startup, will you?
Make use of your existing fancy health care while you've still got it. Go to the doctor, get those moles removed, get a physical, get the kids checked up. You might not get to the dentist for a while, so schedule that now. :-) It might even be a good time to set an exercise regiment.
Set up a new health care plan. Don't do COBRA (current plan extension). I believe your current plan will last till the end of your last month. With COBRA my monthly payment was going to jump from $0/mo up to $700/mo. The independent plan I'm choosing is only $159/mo for my family of five. I found it via eHealthInsurance.
Copy all your projects, scripts, cron jobs, repositories, profiles, documents, wiki pages, GPG, etc., from your servers and personal work machines, onto your home machine. You may need some of this stuff in the future. And some of your private (and never-even-read) documents might make good future blog posts.
Have a backup system in place at home. It's your new data center, so it better be robust. Just replicate and have UPSs. You also probably want to get a hosting service (e.g., slicehost, linode, webfaction) set up to aid this.
Get as much paid time extension as possible. This might not be an option, but in some situations you can work this out. I'm hoping for three extra months after severence.
Get connected (LinkedIn, Twitter, blog subscriptions) with your present peers. Copy all the addresses you can think of out of the corporate address book into your own personal system.
Try not to burn any bridges. Bad blood will haunt you later.
Stop using your work email for anything. Make sure no one else is using it
Build up connections around your community. This will get you leads to future employees, partners, and contract jobs.
Talk to management about plans for your existing corporate tools. Is now a good time to open source them?
Get those expense reports submitted.
Commit to finishing nothing. Simply agree to tie up loose ends. You've got too many other things to worry about at this point.
Think about getting unemployment compensation. I'm not actually planning to do this, but it might be applicable in some situations.
Send a nice email to those you've worked with. Include some details about your future plans. You may find that some are interested in joining you.
Put in your two weeks notice.
Don't steal. It is tempting to take stacks of stickies and handfuls of pens, and all sorts of dumpster-diving. But most of the things you'd take home are cheap to buy yourself, so don't take any risks. Besides, most of the dumpster stuff is there for a good reason.
Commit any code you've got sitting around in your sandboxes. Try to add useful commit messages.
Explain and hand off your projects to a colleague who actually understands them. Just dumping status on your boss is pretty useless when she doesn't really understand what you do anyway.
Make sure others know your admin passwords. You might even give your home number to your favorite sysadmin.
Wipe everything off your laptop. Don't want any accidental personal info/work to be discoverable. Don't forget clearing browser history/cache.
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