Question: I am interested in starting my own venture and have been doing the groundwork for it. I currently work for a company, but would like to do the pilot run while still holding my day job and as the venture stabilizes, take the plunge fulltime. What would you suggest?

Dear X,

There are a couple of ways to do this and a few things to keep in mind.

1. Usually all job offers have this clause that you have to solely focused on the job you are hired for at your primary workplace. Hence usually taking up another offer or even a consultancy (even if the employer may never find out) is done by getting a letter of permission allowing the employee to be involved with other things.

a) Though this is not required, it gets you a lot of brownie points with your employer, just for the sheer honesty. As much as Proto.in does not interfere with any of the activities of what I do here in the incubation centre – but only enhances it – I still wrote a mail asking for permission and to let folks know that i am involved in something. They go easy on me whenever proto.in is around the corner.

The point: Keep everyone informed so that they can give their support in whatever manner that they could.

2. If you are going to do this as a proprietary thing, then even step 1 wont help, cause its assumed that you are fulltime with the venture – when you are the 100% shareholder and the guy running operations. So what some folks do is register the company in the name of the spouse – if she is not employed, or if her employment contract is not so stringent.

3. One thing to keep in mind is something called the corporate veil. When a company becomes a ‘corporation’ it becomes an entity by itself, that even the founder is nothing more than an employee in it. Because of that structure, if the company goes down under, it still doesnt take the founders along with it – nor their assets, since they were just employees. But there are cases when they consider the corporate veil to be broken, which would be when the personal assets of the founder are mixed up with the assets of the company and in such cases, the founder can be sued – if in the future the venture gets funded and things go awry.

I don’t mean to scare you, but just giving you a heads up on all the things involved.

I would suggest:

1. Go ahead and register the company – if you are sure you want to do this venture.
2. This would be the time to bring onboard some advisors and get them involved in the venture – since there has to be a minimum of two directors to incorporate the firm
3. Get the permission from your current job to be involved.
4. Keep going with that setup, till you are comfortable making the flip – hopefully which wont be too far away.
5. During the process of step 4, at some point your venture will possibly take enough time out of you as your day job. Do talk to the management to perhaps transition into a part-time role if possible. Its good to stay clear with your conscience.

I hope that helps.

Vijay