How to start a business: Don’t quit your day job, says Tacklebox CEO

You’ll learn how to learn
— and how to walk away. Tejas Konduru, founder of Via, and Monica
Lee, founder of Game One, watch Brian Scordato’s presentation at
a Tacklebox Accelerator workshop.
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

• Many people wonder how to start a business
  successfully. According to Brian Scordato, the founder of
  Tacklebox Accelerator, the first thing to do is keep your day
  job.
• Tacklebox is a six-week program geared toward founders
  with full-time jobs. Scordato helps those founders bring their
  business concepts to fruition, slowly and steadily.
• Tacklebox doesn’t take equity; instead it charges
  founders $2,500.
• Scordato and Tacklebox alums and mentors say even if
  you go through the program and realize you don’t want to pursue
  your business idea any longer, that’s still a positive
  outcome.
• Tacklebox has a broad definition of success, and
  Scordato thinks it’s OK that not every company will be a
  billion-dollar business.

The first thing to know as a founder in Tacklebox Accelerator
is that you will not “move fast and break things.”

That mantra,
once touted by Facebook and other tech companies, is
antithetical to the Tacklebox approach to entrepreneurship. At
the first of each session’s six workshops, Tacklebox founder
Brian Scordato says as much to the founders seated before him.

Instead, Tacklebox is about making slow and steady progress. Case
in point: Scordato advises the founders not to quit their day job
until they’re (almost) certain their business is viable.

Launched in 2015, Tacklebox is a six-week program during
which Scordato guides about eight founders, many of
whom still have full-time jobs, in bringing their business ideas
to fruition. Tacklebox isn’t an accelerator in the
traditional sense: Founders don’t give up equity in their
companies; instead, they pay $2,500 to attend what can seem like
“startup school.”

The goal, Scordato said, is to show founders that successful
entrepreneurship is, above all, “practice-able and teachable and
learnable.”

Entrepreneurs who keep their day jobs may be more successful in
the long run

Admittedly, the slow-and-steady strategy isn’t the sexiest. A
story about an entrepreneur who up and quit her day job to pursue
her startup dreams is generally much more compelling than an
entrepreneur who waited it out until the time was just right.

But Scordato makes a persuasive case for caution. “You’re always
proving that this is worth your time,” he told me.

“A lot of our founders have really, really good jobs and they’ve
busted their asses to create a little bit of savings,” he said.
“Most of our founders don’t come in and say, ‘I hate my job; I
want to leave.’ It’s more like, ‘I really, really like my job.
It’s helped me gain this certain insight and I want to start a
company based on that. But I want to make sure that it’s worth
leaving this awesome job for it.'”

What’s more, he said, having a full-time job means you
necessarily have limited time to work on your business. So you
have to prioritize, and do only the tasks that are most
important. “It’s interesting how it works when you force yourself
into the confines to really focus on the 80/20 stuff,” Scordato
said, referring to the
idea that 20% of your efforts often produce
80% of your results.

Scordato’s observations are backed by some research and anecdotal
evidence.

In his 2016 book, “Originals,” Wharton
professor Adam Grant wrote that, contrary to popular belief, the
most successful entrepreneurs don’t
quit their day job to start a company. One University
of Wisconsin study found that entrepreneurs who kept
their day jobs were 33% less likely to fail than those who don’t.

Grant cites the example of Bill Gates, who was testing his idea
for Microsoft on the side before he took a leave of absence from
Harvard to go all in.

Similarly, Kathryn Minshew, cofounder and CEO of The Muse,

didn’t quit her job at McKinsey until she was confident in
the strength of her business. And the founders of jewelry company
Aurate told Business Insider that starting a business on the
side, while they were employed at Marc Jacobs and Goldman
Sachs, made
them better entrepreneurs.

“Some people think about founders and think about startups as
23-year-olds starting something, and it’s actually a good idea
for them to do it even if it fails. It’s a cool life experience,”
Scordato said. “That’s for the most part not my founders. My
founders have enormous opportunity cost for starting these
things.”

Scordato also looks specifically for founders who have developed
domain expertise over the course of their career. “You should
have been subconsciously preparing to build this company for a
long time, in a way such that your skill sets and knowledge bases
have already distanced you from any competition,” he said.

Indeed, an MIT
study found the average
age of a successful startup founder is 45. The study
authors found that work experience explains much of the age
advantage. They write in the Harvard
Business Review,”Relative to founders with no relevant
experience, those with at least three years of prior work
experience in the same narrow industry as their startup were 85%
more likely to launch a highly successful startup.”

If a founder goes through Tacklebox and decides not to pursue
their business idea, that’s still considered a success

Tacklebox founder Brian
Scordato.
Hollis Johnson/Business
Insider

The most recent cohort of Tacklebox businesses included a dating
app, a startup to make travel more comfortable, and a
career-management platform.

I sat in on two of the workshops and listened to a recording of a
third. At the first workshop, Scordato told the founders that
sometimes, people get to the end of the program and realize they
don’t want to launch their startup. “That’s OK, too,” he said.

I was skeptical: Who spends six weeks and $2,500, only to realize
that, oops, their business idea stinks? But the Tacklebox alums I
spoke to said they’d rather spend some time and money to realize
their business idea isn’t workable than quit their jobs and blow
a huge amount of cash, only to reach the same conclusion a year
down the line.

Shawn Cheng, a partner at the venture production studio ConsenSys Labs, has been a
mentor to Scordato and to Tacklebox founders; he told me that the
biggest value of the program is learning “how to learn,” or
learning “how to walk away.”

Most startup accelerators take an “all or nothing” approach,
Cheng said, in that you either build a company or waste
everyone’s time; Tacklebox is geared toward founders thinking
that “they have an idea and they want to be testing it, and they
want to be talking to more people about it, but they’re not quite
sure how they should validate it in order to put everything else
in their lives on hold to pursue it.”

Sam Alston, the founder of Big
Lives, which identifies up-and-coming fashion designers, was
in the eighth cohort of Tacklebox, in 2017. She credits the
program with giving her the confidence to leave her job, as a
client development director at Louis Vuitton.

Alston said she frequently recommends Tacklebox to aspiring
entrepreneurs, noting that Scordato is transparent about the fact
that “the skills that you gain should allow you to then test any
business idea” — not just the one you’re currently working on.
“It’s really selling a framework rather than consulting on a
specific business.”

Scordato also told me that a handful of founders have gone
through Tacklebox with one business idea, realized they didn’t
like it, and waited another year or so before going through
Tacklebox again with a better one.

It’s a program Scordato might have benefited from earlier in his
career. In the past 11 years, he’s launched three startups, aside
from Tacklebox: a recruiting platform for college basketball, a
dating app, and a social-networking app. None of them are still
in operation.

Scordato’s real talent seems to be spotting other entrepreneurs
with potential, and giving them the guidance and mentorship they
need to develop their nascent businesses. He also brings in a
series of outside experts, including successful founders and
investors like Cheng. Each cohort of founders gets a chance to
pitch their businesses to a group of investors, less to convince
them to sign on and more to get feedback about how well they
articulate their business’ mission and goals.

Unicorns aren’t the only startups welcome at Tacklebox

Lauren Elliot, founder of
Candlelit, discusses her business ideas at a Tacklebox
workshop.
Hollis Johnson/Business
Insider

Tacklebox has fed a few startups into Y Combinator, such as
The Lobby, which gives job
candidates a chance to chat with employees at top finance firms.
While its founder Deepak Chhugani was in Tacklebox, he and
Scordato devised a plan to get him into Y Combinator. Tacklebox
also introduced Chuugani to Angela Lee, founder of the venture
capital firm 37Angels and
chief innovation officer at Columbia Business School, who wound
up investing in The Lobby later on.

Chuugani is glad he went through Tacklebox before Y Combinator.
He told me that, in Y Combinator, after three months, if you
don’t think your idea is viable, it’s a much more high-stakes
situation. “You’re forced to find any idea that might work,” he
said, “because now you’ve raised money from the accelerator.” He
added, “YC changed my life,” but “you should be a little bit
prepared to know what you’re getting yourself into if you’re
going to raise money.”

Despite Chhugani’s success, Scordato said that the majority of
Tacklebox startups aren’t suited to Y Combinator. The Lobby “has
the potential to be a very high-growth, very huge exit sort of
company,” but it’s an exception.

Some founders go onto more niche accelerators, like New York
Fashion Tech Lab — but for about half of Tacklebox startups,
Scordato said, “maybe they need a little bit of money to build
the initial tech platform, or they need to hire someone to do
that, but it’s not going to be a big challenge. They can start
operating and become profitable quickly.”

Lee, the 37Angels founder, said Scordato and Tacklebox are more
open-minded about success than most other startup accelerators.
That is to say, getting into the uber-selective Y Combinator
isn’t the only measure of success.

Lee mentioned the concept of “lifestyle startups,” a term that’s
emerged in the last decade to describe a business that doesn’t
need venture capital and won’t necessarily be worth $1 billion,
ever. Lee said the term is often perceived negatively; but
lifestyle startups, she said, are welcomed at Tacklebox. A
lifestyle startup can still bring in $10 million a year, she said
— and “since when did making $10 million a year become a
failure?”

“We LOVE those,” Scordato wrote in an email, referring to
lifestyle startups. “What we really stress is that companies that
could be great lifestyle businesses and probably won’t be
unicorns shouldn’t try to become unicorns. They should build
sound, revenue-generating businesses that can build great
products at a high margin for a (relatively) small group of
customers.”

In an irony that’s not lost on its founder, Tacklebox itself is
one such startup. “I love that Tacklebox is practicing what it’s
preaching,” Cheng said. He mentioned that Tacklebox has already
gone through several iterations, holding workshops on weekends,
mornings, and evenings, and offering higher and lower price
points.

“It’s got to be scary for Brian,” Cheng added, “but I commend him
for that and for not being afraid of trying new things and
experimenting.”