New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Have any of you quit your job to explore startup ideas?

Ask HN: Have any of you quit your job to explore startup ideas?
6 by quantum_mind | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I have been at Apple for 5+ years doing AI. Recently, I’ve found a potential co-founder and we explored a few ideas, while I was on family leave. We enjoy working with each other, but we have not identified a promising problem/opportunity yet where we have a unique insight. Now, I am considering leaving my daytime job to join my co-founder on this exploration journey full time, because I realized moonlighting is not working well for me with a demanding daytime job and a family. I’ve saved up enough to be comfortable for 1.5 years with no salary without cutting too deep into the savings. My main concern is that we don’t yet have a validated idea or a unique insight AND we are both first-time founders. What are the odds that we even exit the idea maze successfully? Here, I loosely define “success” as having a clear value proposition, developing a unique insight, and raising, say, 2M+ seed round. Would appreciate your thoughts. Have any of you quit your job to explore startup ideas? If so, how well did it work for you?

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