After working for yourself, going back is harder than it looks
Control over one's own time is hard to give up once tasted. That does not make returning to a salary a failure, and for many it is the right move.
I doubt I’ll ever go back to corporate work. Once you see the light, there is no turning back.
WooThemes started in 2008 as a partnership between three people in different countries, selling premium themes for WordPress sites. Magnus Jepson, working from Norway, was one of them. The business needed no office, no investors and no permission from anyone to change direction. Within two years it had grown into one of the better-known theme shops, and its founders were setting their own hours, choosing their own projects and answering to customers rather than managers.
Seen from inside a business like that, a return to salaried work looks like a step backward. The things that make corporate life tolerable, such as a steady paycheck, a defined role and a manager who absorbs some of the risk, stop looking like benefits and start looking like constraints. Many people who have run something of their own describe the same shift, and it is real. Autonomy is one of the more reliable predictors of job satisfaction, and a founder has a lot of it.
The line reads differently for people whose businesses did not work. Most small companies close within a few years, and many of their founders go back to employment, often gladly. Some are hired by the company that bought them. Some return because a family, a mortgage or health insurance in a country where it comes with a job makes the salary worth more than the freedom. That is not a failure to see the light. It is a different set of constraints.
There is also some selection in who says this kind of thing. The founders who talk about never going back are usually the ones for whom independence worked, in a market that happened to be growing. WordPress themes in 2008 and 2009 were such a market. A founder who started the same business five years later, against dozens of competitors, might tell a different story.
The practical point is about the door, not the light. Someone leaving a job to build a business does well to keep the option of returning cheap: stay on good terms, keep skills current, and hold enough savings that a return can be chosen rather than forced. Most who try independence do find it hard to give up. Knowing the way back makes it easier to stay out for the right reasons.