Become an Entrepreneur. It's Less Risky.
Updated: Sep 21
When super qualified candidates are treated as disposable, the question isn't whether entrepreneurship is too risky—it's whether staying at the mercy of this broken hiring system is the bigger gamble.
“The job market is hell.” So declares a headline in this week’s Atlantic, echoing my own conclusion based on a not-so-random sample of labor market participants—my clients. The recent article goes on to tell the tale of a recent UC Davis grad’s 200 non-rejections (employers, it seems, no longer send rejection letters, but rather ghost you like a bad high school date), who still continues to scour the entire west coast for a job—any job—willing to at least offer him an in person interview.
It’s bad to be an entry level job searcher (“Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out", “ says The San Francisco Standard); it’s bad to be a Gen Z job searcher (“Sometimes called the "forgotten generation," Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) is struggling to secure employment while also being unable to afford to leave the workplace,” says Financebuzz.com); and it’s bad to be an older job searcher (“Finding a new job in your 50s comes with extra hurdles,” says the Financial Post).
So what’s a person intent on paying their rent to do?
Most of the advice out there empathizes with the plight of job seekers but concludes that “there are ways you can break through the gridlock.” From “don’t be afraid to cold call,” to “hire[ing] a professional resume writer,” “ditch[ing] the cover letter,” and not “get[ting] your heart set on working from home,” pros have lots of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps advice. And it all involves generally staying the job applying course, with minor tweaks to out-network and out-resume-tweak your fellow desperate peers.
An alternative? Start your own thing.
Starting your own business used to be viewed as the career equivalent of jumping off a cliff. You'd be abandoning the holy trinity of employment security: steady paychecks, employer-sponsored health insurance, and maybe—if you were really lucky—a pension waiting at the end of your decades of service. Entrepreneurship offered none of these safety nets, just the wild west of self-employment where every month brought the existential question of whether you'd make rent. As they said on Shark Tank, "Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours for someone else"—and most people have, historically, viewed that as masochism, not wisdom.
But in today's job market hellscape, starting your own thing might actually be the safer bet. When traditional employment offers neither security nor satisfaction—when you can send out 200 applications and receive zero responses,—suddenly investing in yourself starts looking less like a leap of faith and more like basic self-preservation. The infrastructure that once made entrepreneurship prohibitively risky has largely crumbled as a barrier. Healthcare exchanges mean you're not chained to an employer's insurance plan. Remote work capabilities mean you can launch your venture from your kitchen table in Kinderhook or a co-working space in Kittery. Digital platforms have democratized access to customers, mentorship, and funding in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
Most importantly, when you're building your own thing, you're pursuing something you actually care about—not just whatever job will have you after months of desperate applications. You're not just surviving the job market; you're opting out of it entirely, betting on the one person whose work ethic, vision, and dedication you can actually control: yourself.
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