Someone once told me that whatever you are drawn to keep doing in your spare time - without pay, without anyone asking, and without an evaluation - is your true purpose.

I spent 15 years testing that theory across three dream corporate jobs.

At Procter & Gamble, I tried building an app called PhotoPrime to pick your 20 best vacation pictures out of hundreds. We never launched it.

At Coty in New York, I pitched an internal men's line featuring an aftershave balm with built-in sunscreen and a deodorant-stick moisturizer bar. It went nowhere.

At Google, while handling enterprise sales for Google Ads, I pitched Area 120 twice - first for preference-driven search for robot vacuums, then for an AI ad generator long before ChatGPT existed. Google killed the incubator right as we made it far into the selection rounds.

Living in the Bay Area with two kids, leaving Google sounded crazy.

Instead, I teamed up with Navam - a friend of 15 years and an early Chegg engineer. We tried launching an AI-native ad agency. That failed because we couldn't scale agency talent on a self-service budget.

So we pivoted to enterprise automation, landed GNC as a client for predictive e-commerce intelligence, and launched a Shopify app that hit 200 installs in eight weeks.

The failure mode here is obvious: side projects are exhausting. Most die in Google Docs, burn your nights, and yield zero revenue while a day job pays you reliably. Staying inside corporate boundaries is almost always the rational choice.

If you want to know what business you should actually start, look at what you are already building when nobody is paying you to do it.