Christina's VC-to-Coding Journey

A story about how Christina left her prestigious VC job at USV to teach herself how to code, despite facing skepticism from others.

"I saved my bonus from the prior year - it was a finance bonus - and decided I was going to live off that as long as I could. No job, but a bunch of structure to learn to code and make products. I didn't pitch it as 'I'm going to start a startup.' I pitched it as 'I'm going to teach myself to code.'

At USV, I'd seen so many people start startups just to start them, then get into them and realize 'I don't want to work on this' but they had people and investors so they couldn't stop. People took my conservatism as a sign I shouldn't be doing this.

There was a lot of pushback: 'Why would you leave USV when no one leaves who has the option of staying?' 'Why not work at another venture firm?' 'Why not go to Stanford's graduate program in computer science?' One person in particular who I was close to said 'The right side of your email address (usv.com) is way more powerful than the left side (christina@), and now you're giving that up.'

I started by building a book website - like Goodreads but worse because I didn't know what I was doing. This confused everyone because they'd ask 'Are you going to compete with Amazon?' and I'd say 'No, I'm mostly just battling JavaScript errors and spending time on Stack Overflow.' It wasn't a business - best case I'd make $50 a month in Amazon referral fees - but I built it because I wanted it for myself."