I used to work at a nice firm in London. Nice in the sense they paid well. I quit in May 2009. Since then I’ve been trying to chart my own course with www.akosha.com.

I want to make money, but entrepreneurship, when risk-adjusted, is not a great way to make money. So there must be some other reason.

One was that as a corporate lawyer you are never in the thick of the action. The entrepreneur/CEO and to some extent the investment bankers are really the ones who call the shots. But then, no matter what you do, there’ll be someone else who’ll call the shots – your VC, your customers/clients, your wife, your children (and the same reasoning goes for joys of being your own boss – “Gotta serve somebody“).

The other thing was that work has to be satisfying – intellectually stimulating, as they say. Entrepreneurship wouldn’t rate much higher than corporate law in terms of the actual work – a lot of the stuff you have to do is repetitive. Though there is extreme joy in figuring out the solutions to different kinds of problems, once you have found the solution, the execution is usually not that “intellectually stimulating”.

And yet I’m here and I love it so much. It has its highs and lows (and today is in fact a bit of a low because something outside my control happened).

Here is the article which probably explains it the best. ARE YOU A PIRATE? – written by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch who was also a former corporate lawyer before he chose to become an entrepreneur.

Read it. If you are a corporate lawyer, read it twice.