What is the difference? It comes down to looking closely at how society or the market reacts to individuals.

When you work as a startup founder, the distance between you and the market or society is very close. However, if you get a job as a chemical engineer, for example, there is a middleman involved. That middleman is a company pursuing financial profit.

Looking at these two scenarios, if you become an employee, your contribution to society is largely determined by the evaluations of the people within that company. Based on your degree, the fact that you graduated, and your extracurricular records, the people at the company evaluate you. That evaluation becomes your recognized contribution. While on a micro level it is a contribution to the company, on a macro level it is a contribution to society, because the company is a part of the market.

The first issue is that this evaluation is based on human judgment. When you get a job, humans are the ones evaluating your societal contribution. This raises the question of how accurate human judgment can really be, especially since their criteria don’t update immediately with the market.

There is stability, though. Even when the market fluctuates, your evaluation and the recognition of your contribution remain constant, as long as your salary isn’t cut. It is an artificial judgment based on past data, which offers stability but can significantly lack accuracy.

Furthermore, on this employee route, your recognized contribution is “predictive” rather than “practical.” A practical approach means actually contributing and seeing how the market reacts. The predictive approach means people in the company simply look at you and predict, “This person should be paid this much a month.”

Your value is also “blocked” or rigid. It doesn’t scale up and down freely. The downside is that even if your actual contribution is very high, your reward might be capped. On the flip side, even if your contribution is low, you are still evaluated stably, meaning there is a safety net.

On the other hand, if you actually become a startup founder, there is no company in the middle—you are the company. In this case, the factor judging your contribution is not a human, but the market itself.

If you have a good understanding of the market, or even if you don’t but your contribution still generates a positive reaction from the market, it directly returns to you in the form of financial rewards or fame. I think this is the main difference.