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. While I thought these were strong things to offer, what I didn’t know was they may not apply directly to my role, so, I had to tweak them a bit.

Using Customer Empathy#

For most people who have not done customer-facing roles (majority of engineers working in big companies), it is very hard to relate to a customer. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not their fault. They rarely get that opportunity - maybe because of the way orgs are run or just because they were always taught that code is their superpower. Now, imagine what happens when an engineer shows up in product meetings & starts their conversation by talking about the customer or when they are discussing an important feature to be built with their reportees & the first thing they start with is the business problem it solves. The kind of discussions that are sparked are just magical. Teams start thinking from the first principles. Slowly, it becomes a habit & every other engineer in the room starts focussing on solving customer problems rather than just building a schema for the solution. This, I think created a big impact & established me as a leader. Remember, I was not the one with the best engineering solution or the most amount of context of the systems but doing this one small thing meant I could create a large impact immediately.

In my roles for the past 3 years, I have worked in different industries every time. At Postman, I was working on a security product. In my current role, I work on a financial exchange. I had zero idea about any of these industries when I joined. The entrepreneur in me felt uncomfortable, so, I started spending time, trying to understand the market. For example, to build API Security, I tried every product known to man that can do endpoint security. I read papers to understand how hackers think & what the industry expects from a product that protects them from these hackers. Attended every security webinar I could find, just to make sure I understood the ins & outs of this market. The result was that in the first few months of joining, I was sitting in the room where product strategy was being discussed & I could make meaningful contributions there. Similarly, when I joined my current company, which is a crypto exchange, apart from doing a few trades a few years back, I had no idea about the industry. What did I do? Started trading with my money. Used any exchange I could find (centralized or decentralized) & started doing different types of trades. To be fair, my boss here is fantastic & he helped me a lot with understanding the market. But the point is that I could understand the market fairly quickly & try to predict where it can go which helps me even today!

Fundamentals-Focussed Team#

While I have not been a “people leader” in any of my roles, a big part of my job has been to help my team perform at their potential by providing technical leadership. My entrepreneurial journey had taught me a lot about people’s motivations & I had built instincts to figure out what makes people tick. I used it to my advantage in each of my roles. As I mentioned earlier, whenever I spoke with a team member—whether a direct report, a peer, or even someone outside my immediate project, I started the conversation by clarifying the problem we were trying to solve. It sounds simple, but I’ve found that when everyone clearly understands the “why,” they naturally become more invested and engaged. By consistently returning to questions like “What’s the core problem?”, “Is there a simpler solution at the core?”, I helped create a team culture that values deep thinking over quick fixes. That’s a trait I carried over directly from my startup days. When you’re a founder, you often can’t afford to overlook the basics. This allowed me and my teammates to connect the dots between the problem at hand and the broader business context, making our work feel more meaningful and strategic. Additionally, I applied the same principles while writing code or giving feedback to other engineers on their code - which helped us get to more elegant solutions that we would not have built otherwise.

Closing Thoughts#

Looking back on my journey from founder to employee, one thing is clear: my entrepreneurial superpowers - customer empathy, market awareness, and a fundamentals-focused approach didn’t need to be shelved the moment I joined a larger org. Instead, with a few tweaks, they became some of my biggest assets, helping me stand out and add value in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated. Lastly, if you are an entrepreneur looking to make a similar change or have made this change in the past, I would love to talk to you & get your thoughts. This is not something a lot of people have talked & I want to change that. Please reach out to me at @mrdhat and I’d love to buy you a coffee.