There is nothing wrong with working for others if it fulfills you. I envy people who can have comfortable lives with happy families and a simple desk job that pays for what they need. Something in my brain is telling me I need more or I won't be happy, so I have many startups I'm working on and have exclusively begun working for myself. The grass is always greener on the other side, that much I can say. Enjoy your comfy engineering job and be careful what you wish for.
If you are a nerd who wants to break into entrepreneurship, prepare for a lot of fun, but also prepare to do work you think is stupid or never saw yourself doing, only for it to end up as a niche product. That's fine.
To each their own, obviously, but I look at this list and it's just... depressing. He seems like the kind of person who gets a lot of fulfillment from things like this, but for me I just see a whole lot of time wasted on bullshit.
That's the main reason why I work for others. You can't form a health system startup that includes dozens of hospitals and thousands of patients per day.
This! - I'm in a similar space myself. At once envious of those happy with a decent day job - corp or whatever (one of my good buddies is a "garbage man" and he seems pretty damn happy).
A year into struggling as an entrepreneur and no longer working at BigCo - I couldn't be happier despite having to live with a crazy amount of anxiety :)
And there is that middle-ground of being an independent consultant from where it is even harder to make a step, especially when taking in count your own hourly rate :)
Yes, when I hear of those who "made it" and talk that 99% of what they are doing now are meetings, PowerPoint slides, pitching to VCs, public speaking, marketing, etc... I'm thinking - but are they happy? I can't imagine myself being happy while having to do all those things... :)
If you are a nerd who wants to break into entrepreneurship, prepare for a lot of fun, but also prepare to do work you think is stupid or never saw yourself doing, only for it to end up as a niche product. That's fine.