What Einstein teaches us about founding a startup

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The following is an edited excerpt from Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own by Bruce Judson. The excerpt is provided by HarperBusiness Publishing. You can buy a copy here.

In 2000, Time magazine named Albert Einstein “Person of the Century,” because “even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity.”

To Max Born, who was himself a well-known physicist, Einstein’s general theory of relativity was “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition, and mathematical skill.”

Einstein worked in the technical area of the Swiss patent office from 1902 to 1909. During this period – working alone, while maintaining his day job – he developed his initial theories and released his first great burst of papers. In 1908, he received an appointment to the University of Bern but kept his patent office job for another year for security.

Einstein has been described as many things. This, however, may be the first time that he is recognized as the model for a go-it-alone entrepreneur. As an individual working alone, he accomplished one of the greatest feats of human achievement while keeping his day job.

Don’t quit your day job till you have no time to sleep

Doing well at your day job while you build your entrepreneurial business is no easy feat. But with determination and hard work, you can do it.

The principal benefit of this approach is clear: You can focus on creating the business without the added pressure of racing against the clock to have the business support you. You never know what’s going to work and it may take two or three separate tries before you hit the right idea.

By keeping your day job, you retain the ability to test each of these ideas from the dispassionate viewpoint of someone who doesn’t need them to work.

David Drucker, who transitioned from a successful investment adviser to a writer and a speaker on practice management issues, worked at both careers for about 18 months.

“I was absolutely certain that my new career would be 400 percent more rewarding,” he says. “But I waited until I was 80 percent assured that I would generate enough income in the new career to meet my needs.”

It’s striking how many successful go-it-alone entrepreneurs initially established their businesses by working on them at night and on weekends. Of the many go-it-alone entrepreneurs I interviewed for this book, at least 60 percent followed this approach.

What do you tell your boss?

Tim Cutting spends his days as an employee at Sun Microsystems and his nights and weekends as the CEO of Niveus Media. He had already been building his go-it-alone business when he joined Sun, something that he discussed with Sun at the start of his employment.

Nonetheless, he said, “When I asked around [after joining Sun], I found that about 75 percent of the people had something going on the side.”