Is it better to be a founder, freelancer or employee? (Personally for you)
I'll be honest – I've never liked the feeling that someone "owns" me.
So being employed was very distant to me. [As if I had no power over my income.]
And being a founder gave me a greater sense of "ownership", but also responsibility. And, when things are not going well, and business is going poorly, you don't really want to be a founder in bad times. :D
Freelancing probably worked out best for me – delivering a service, while also protecting your income and time... although the time part is probably the most exhausting (sometimes the tasks are beyond my strength, and I have to make things up, no social & health insurance, chasing people with paying invoices, etc.). But despite that, it's still my choice.
What suits you the most, and what advantages/disadvantages have you noticed for your preferred choice?
Replies
@pranay19 I agree, it is about personal preferences and bandwidth we are able to carry.
For me it depends on the different stages of life, and what I am looking for at the time. For example, having perks and consistent income as an employee worked well when I wanted to focus on family time. Freelancing worked well when I had less responsibilities and concerns. Founder brought on longer hours and shifted responsibility to growing the business and managing people resources.
@mrdavidtiong I rather think it is a lifestyle. Like yes, some roles are more suitable at the different stages but even employment can become unstable on the labour market (and when you have a family), it will become even harder .
@busmark_w_nika guess it's good to be flexible and see what works. I've found that these different roles have shaped who I am, allowed me to learn a wide range of skills, and given me the experience to pivot as needed during my working life
@busmark_w_nika Freelancing, but nobody warns you that freedom comes with chasing invoices and being your own safety net. Autonomy is worth it; exhaustion is just part of the deal.
@vishal7017 I just need to make better management of it. Indeed.
Employee and then founder seems standard.
@zanc_zhao As a Freelancer, I am a rare pokemon then :D
There is a fourth path worth naming because it does not get talked about much: full-time employee in a specialist field plus a low-friction product or service on the side. I work in structured finance at Ørsted day to day, and the side track is a set of Excel financial model templates I publish on Eloquens. The economics aren't life-changing on their own, but the structure is. The day job gives me the deal context that makes the side product worth buying, and the side product forces me to stay sharp on things I would otherwise let drift after a deal closes.
The trade-off I see with the three you listed: employee gives stable income and the fastest learning curve in specialist fields, but the ceiling is set by your employer's appetite for promoting people. Freelancer hits the best income-per-hour at peak, but income volatility is real and the time tax on selling yourself and chasing invoices is invisible until you do it. Founder has the highest theoretical ceiling, but the downside is asymmetric — in the bad year the salary, the equity, and the self-image all hit the floor at once.
The hybrid takes the income floor off the table while still letting you build product muscle. It is slower than full-time founding, but you make different mistakes and they are cheaper to fix. What it does not give you is the founder identity — if owning what you build is core to your sense of self, the hybrid will always feel like a half-step. That is the part that is hard to price in advance.
@samir_asadov Hybrid can work also like employee + starting founder, but time is limited and when things go well for the startup, you have to leave one thing sooner or later :)
BOTH!! --> Anyone with only one source of income has a different relationship with his superiors than the one who has another way of supporting himself. Maybe, other founders are more successful than I have been, but I still need the stability that comes from my work place. Plus, I enjoy spending my day with high school students. I feel that I have been given so much, and it's an opportunity to give back. I'm thankful that I don't have one of those super-stressful teacher jobs that many of my peers have. I have a lot of responsibilities, and work hard to give my students a quality education.
@dstr88 For people who can handle both – employment and freelancing, it is a good win, because you can have some secure space + something on the top. The worst thing is that when you are starting to be short of time.
@busmark_w_nika Valid. Kids that are grown and an active wife are definitely in my advantage.
Cool topic :)
In my case, here is my experience:
Employee from age 24 to 30 (Worked with some great people)
Founder from age 30 to 32 (Few successes and failure lessons)
Employee from age 32 to 46 (More field, less theory, led interesting projects and people)
Now Founder again at age 47/48 (Ideas and project still sparkling in my mind)
So in my case, it looks like I am more happy being a founder, in reality, I always had a founder mindset while being an employee, which had its pros and cons.
@amine_el_kabiri Being a founder is not easy. And especially when the gov comes up with some redundant legislative rules.
I think each path comes with a different balance between freedom, stability, and responsibility. Freelancing gives control over time, employment gives predictability, and building something gives long-term ownership but also a lot more pressure. None of them feels objectively better, just different trade-offs.
Spent my career as an employee in structured finance — and a side-project founder selling project-finance templates on Eloquens. That combination tells you something the binary framing here misses.
The "owns me" feeling Nika describes is real, but for specialist roles it cuts both ways. Inside a large structured-finance team you sit across deals you could never put together as a founder or freelancer: nine-figure renewables transactions, regulated-utility refinancings, multi-counterparty PPP structures. The institution buys you access to scale that a one-person shop simply cannot replicate. That access has a price, and the price is your weekday hours and a chunk of the upside.
What the side project does is invert the trade quietly. The templates I sell are built from problems already solved at the desk — DSCR sculpting, debt circularity switches, DSRA sizing — packaged so practitioners running their own deals don't have to reinvent them. Cost of creation: near-zero (the IP exists in your head already). Income asymmetry: high (each template can sell repeatedly, asynchronously, while you sleep). And critically the buyers tell you nothing about who they are or how they used the work until months later when a story surfaces — much closer to academic publishing than to a founder's product launch curve.
That model — employed in the day for the institutional dealflow, founder-adjacent on the side for the optionality and the IP residual — is, I think, the underrated third option in this thread. It isn't freelancing (the buyer of a template isn't a client), it isn't full founding (no fundraising, no team), and it isn't pure employment (you keep the IP and the residual). For specialist B2B knowledge work the economics are surprisingly forgiving and the downside is bounded.