Leaving a 10+ Year Corporate Career to Join the Startup World

About a year ago, I started down a path to transition my career into the entrepreneurial ecosystem — focusing on investing, supporting, and growing early-stage startups. A few months ago, I left a job I’d had for over a decade. I had spent most of my career at AbbVie working across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, and risk management. It was a stable, interesting, and meaningful role — but I started to feel like I wanted to do something different.

Since then, I’ve been navigating a much more uncertain (but energizing) path: getting my MBA at Chicago Booth, joining a corporate VC team, leading a university spinout in biotech, and supporting a few early-stage companies along the way.

I’ve had to figure out a lot on the fly. Here are a few things that have stuck with me:

1. Startups move fast — and mostly without a roadmap.
   You have to make decisions with limited information, figure out what matters most right now, and keep things moving. The planning mindset I brought from corporate life is still useful — but only if it stays flexible. In early-stage work, clarity often comes after momentum.

2. The best tool is a solid framework, not a perfect answer.
   There’s no instruction manual for “should we out-license this therapeutic platform” or “is this use case compelling enough to anchor a pre-seed raise?” But using things like the Market Opportunity Navigator, a simple Target Product Profile, or even just a shared doc with first principles helps teams get aligned and move forward.

3. People who stay focused on the problem tend to build better companies.
   It’s easy to get caught up in the tech, especially in biotech or deep tech. But the teams that spend time listening — really listening — to end users, partners, or regulators usually make more progress than those who fall in love with their solution too early. Successful teams I’ve worked with have met with hundreds of various stakeholders, advisors, potential customers, and subject matter experts. There is no substitute for good customer discovery.

4. You don’t have to be a founder to build something meaningful.
   At first, I wasn’t sure where I fit in. But I’ve found real ways to contribute — as an operator, researcher, and sounding board — just by being useful and showing up. You don’t need to have it all figured out to be valuable to a team.

5. It’s a different kind of challenge — and I’ve learned a ton already.
   The switch hasn’t always been easy. But I’ve grown more in the past year than I did in several years prior. Every day looks a little different, and that’s part of what makes it worthwhile.