The Path to Parallel Entrepreneurship

Ryan Buckley

Founder of Toofr, eNPS, Thinbox. Fmr CEO/cofounder of Scripted. Believer in bootstrapping. Resident of Contra Costa County. I do @emailpatterns.

Walnut Creek, CA

Parallel entrepreneurship has a negative stigma, but there are a lot of people in this room that do it successfully.

There are also several public examples of superhuman parallel entrepreneurs:

• Jack Dorsey (Twitter and Square)
• Marcia Kilgore (Bliss, Soap & Glory, FitFlop, Soaper Duper, Beauty Pie)
• Elon Musk (freakin' everything)

Reasons to be a parallel entrepreneur (from surveys)

• Pursuing a passion
• diversifying and de-risking
• developing a new skill
• being more productive
• exploring a new career

Most parallel entrepreneurs have backgrounds in writing or finance, not programming. They're able to switch between different projects by being very regimented and being creative about their resources.

Fun fact: most parallel entrepreneurs structure their businesses as LLCs.

Entrepreneurs surveyed

• Max Altschuler: Sales Hacker, SUTRA
• Josh Pigford: Baremetrics, Cedar & Sail
• Ryan Buckley: Scripted, Toofr, Inlistio, Voxloca (tip: stick with a single tech stack, like Rails/Postgres/Heroku)