I recently joined a new team & my onboarding task was to optimize storage in one of our Elasticsearch clusters which held 100s of terabytes of data. One of the first things we needed to figure out was whether the system could survive a massive deletion during peak traffic. We expected indexing to clog up and search latencies to spike. What actually happened was more interesting: the cluster remained stable, but there was clearly a lot happening behind the scenes.

In my last post, I described the transition from entrepreneurship to employment and how I felt during it. Today, I want to discuss how I view that transition from a practical point of view. As an ex-entrepreneur, I knew what my superpowers were. I had learned to empathize with customers naturally, read market trends & build a strong fundamentals-focused team. As I started looking for a role, I had a strong gut feeling that these were the traits that could help me stand out & I projected them as “core features” for the product I was offering - myself.

Around 3 years back, after spending seven years as an entrepreneur—I found myself at crossroads. Having built startups, one of which was acquired, I decided to step away from the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship to explore what being an employee is like. This transition wasn’t just about changing roles; it was about navigating a shift in mindset, skillset, and priorities. Why I Made the Transition The decision to move from entrepreneurship to employment was driven by two key factors.