This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 41-year-old Srikanth Narayan, the CEO and founder of Cache, from the San Francisco Bay Area. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
My career began in San Francisco. I’ve been in Silicon Valley ever since, working at both startups and Big Tech companies.
In 2021, after roughly eight years working at Uber and then Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary, I decided it was the right time to take a leap and become an entrepreneur.
I had built a healthy financial cushion and was ready to take a risk and create a new company.
I noticed a problem around Big Tech compensation — concentration risk. I saw an opportunity to help build a solution and educate employees on this risk.
Entrepreneurship has been a lot harder than working in Big Tech, but I’ve found it far more fulfilling.
While working in Big Tech, I spotted a massive business opportunity
Prior to founding Cache, I spent most of my career focusing on data visualization. In 2014, Uber recruited me to lead a data visualization application suite.
I stayed at Uber for six years and eventually became a staff engineer.
If you work at a company like Uber for a long time, a lot of your compensation is in the form of stock, sometimes outsizing your cash compensation. As the company grows and does well, your net worth grows in line with the stock.
This creates wealth for the people who hold that stock, but having way too much of your net worth in a few stocks means you’re taking undue risk. Take Tesla. In recent months, some people who worked at Tesla may have seen their net worth fluctuate due to the changing value of the company’s stock.
People tend to hold on to these massive stock positions due to inertia and because the taxes for reallocating stock can be very expensive.
I joined Uber at a good time. The company mostly did well and went public in 2019. All of the wealth I had accumulated in stock became real money on the open market that I could sell or trade. However, I had a lot of low-basis stocks that would trigger a high capital gains bill if I sold them.
When I joined Waymo in 2020, my Alphabet colleagues talked about similar problems.
I found this issue unsettling. A steep drop in stock price at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic affected my portfolio.
I hired a wealth manager to help me find solutions for concentration risk. They showed me products that help people of high net worth manage concentration risk. One option is depositing concentrated stock into an exchange fund where others have done the same, and receiving fund units in return. This method can diversify your portfolio while deferring capital gains taxes.
It sounded like a great product, but none of my peers had heard of it. It seemed to only be available at private banks, and only for people of a certain net worth.
From what I saw, the exchange funds required a lot of human operational coordination. There seemed to be little innovation in this area to improve efficiency.
I saw a massive business opportunity. I wanted to make products like this more efficient and available more broadly.
My Big Tech experience proved helpful for building my business
I resigned from Waymo in late 2021 to start my business, Cache, which I formally launched in March 2024. We’re a specialized brokerage for people holding large stock positions. Our flagship product is an exchange fund that helps people diversify their portfolios.
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My experience at Uber gave me an understanding of how to turn an idea into a full-blown vision as a founder. I designed products at Uber that became widely adopted within the company. This took engineering work and entrepreneurial spirit.
However, moving from corporate life to building a company myself involved a lot of learning on the job.
There wasn’t really a manual I could follow for building an exchange fund, so we had to do a lot of R&D. There were many steps involved, including working with the SEC and FINRA to get the right registrations, since the industry is highly regulated, and building the technical infrastructure for a brokerage system.
I was one of the first users of my own product, and I invested a lot of my Uber stock in our exchange funds.
I find entrepreneurship more fulfilling than Big Tech, but the journey is hard
Running a startup is very different from working at a Big Tech company. I’m probably working triple the time I was before.
Being employed in Big Tech was a very comfortable life. You worked on challenging problems and got paid well to do it. While I enjoyed this, I also wanted to figure out my own path. The entrepreneurial journey has been more fulfilling.
I’ve had to go through personal trials, such as not paying myself for the first year after leaving Waymo. Because of my financial cushion from working in Silicon Valley, the stress of this didn’t really bear on me. I’d made sure I had several years of living expenses in reserve before taking the leap.
Becoming an entrepreneur requires drive and conviction. It’s a very hard journey, and often, market forces will be against you until they start working with you.
The glamour of being a startup founder or of an exit is the wrong reason for forming a company. It should be about self-fulfillment and a passion for building something from scratch and making a change in the world.
Do you have a story to share about leaving Big Tech? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com.
