Escaping the Corporate Trap

This episode is a conversation with Behzod Sirjani, who left a strong job at Slack to build a consulting practice on his own terms. We get into the actual math he ran before he quit, the two traps that swallow most people the moment they step outside a company, and why the old scoreboard stops working once nobody's handing you a promotion anymore. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾

Most people who leave corporate think the hard part is the decision. It isn't. The decision takes an afternoon. What takes years is unlearning the scoreboard that told you whether you were doing okay in the first place: the raises, the promotions, the manager who says you're "operating at the next level" and then passes you over anyway. Behzod Sirjani spent a decade building a research career at Slack and Facebook before he walked away to work for himself. What he built afterward wasn't a new job, it was a new way of knowing his own worth without a company confirming it for him.

Run the math before you run the story

Behzod's exit from Slack didn't start with a leap of faith. It started with a spreadsheet. He tracked what he actually spent in a month, added fifty percent as a buffer, and set aside six months of that number in a separate account. The rule was simple: if he burned through two-thirds of it with no clients and nothing on the horizon, that was his signal to go find a job again. He never got close.

Most people skip this step entirely. The math is not the hard part, staying vague about the number is what lets you stay vague about the decision, and corporate life is good training for exactly that kind of vagueness. The check lands, the auto-payments go out, and you never have to look directly at what you actually spend to live. Naming the real number, then building a floor under it, is what turns "I'm thinking about leaving" into a decision you can act on instead of just talk about.

The two traps waiting on the other side

Once you're out, there are two ways to get it wrong. The first is treating your new business like a fixed idea you already decided on, then waiting for the market to agree with you. The second is doing the exact job you just left, just now for yourself, which usually means you never separated your actual skills from the specific shape a company forced them into. Behzod's word for the second one is contortion: the years of shaping yourself to fit seven boxes out of the ten things you're actually good at, until the shape starts to feel like the whole truth about who you are.

Getting free of that shape takes experimentation most corporate careers never allow. Behzod took his first several clients on purpose, choosing very different kinds of projects so he could feel out where the work aligned and where it didn't. That reflection, project by project, is what let his offer get sharper over time even as the language he used to describe it got less tidy. The vision clarified. The elevator pitch didn't.

Abundance isn't the problem. Not knowing what you want is.

Ninety percent of Behzod's clients come through referral, which means he's regularly choosing between two or three good options with people he'd genuinely like to work with. He credits a friend, Brian Dell, with the question that cuts through the paralysis: what would it look like if you took this seriously? Say the sentence out loud about one option and the fog usually clears. You can see the actual time commitment, the actual stress, the actual tradeoff, instead of the flattering photo-op version of the opportunity (the Everest summit picture without the weeks of climbing to get there).

Vivianne pushed back on one piece of this. Too many opportunities isn't the real problem, she'd argue. The chaos shows up when you haven't done the internal work to know your own priorities yet, so every option feels like it's pulling you somewhere different. Decide what you're building first, and the same pile of options that felt like pressure starts to feel like a gift instead.

What you're worth depends on where you're standing

Behzod's clearest metaphor for value is a bottle of water. A dollar at the corner store, three dollars at a hotel, twenty dollars at a concert where you've been dancing for two hours and would pay almost anything. Same bottle. What changes is the room. When a client balks at a price, Behzod doesn't take it as proof he's overvalued himself. He treats it as a gap in translation, a signal to find out what the client is actually comparing him to, and to close the distance between what he offers and what they understand they're buying.

"I try not to take it super personally as, oh, I'm not worth it. I think about it as I failed to communicate something well." -Behzod

Vivianne carried the same idea into a harder room. At Salesforce, she once built an entire role from scratch (wrote the responsibilities, pitched it, refined it with a team that wanted to hire for it) and then didn't get hired for the position she'd created herself. For years, her answer to being overlooked was to produce more, prove more, become more. It came from a childhood where her needs weren't the priority in the house she grew up in, and it followed her straight into her career, where over-delivering became the only language she trusted to be seen in.

"I stopped over-giving in hopes of being chosen. That's in work. That's in relationships." -Vivianne

What finally broke the pattern had nothing to do with a promotion. It came down to recognizing she was more than what she produced, somewhere along the way, and that the belonging she'd been performing for was supposed to be inherent from the start.

Build your own carrots

Leave a company and you lose its whole reward system along with it. No review cycle, no bonus, no manager telling you that you crushed the quarter. Behzod's version of replacing it is almost absurdly literal: he buys himself an actual carrot at the grocery store some days, sets it on the desk, and treats it like the reward it is. His postcard project works the same way underneath the joke, a weekly note, an image and five hundred words, sent to a small list of friends because he wanted a place to think out loud that wasn't sized for an Instagram caption. The reward isn't the reply he sometimes gets back. It's that he made the thing and it's his.

The harder question underneath all of it: is what you're proud of actually yours, or is it what someone else wanted for you? A lot of people build careers, marriages, and whole lives around an answer they never chose for themselves, and only notice the mismatch once they've already arrived. Getting honest about that difference earlier is cheaper than a decade of therapy bills later, though the therapy still helps.

Behzod mentioned a research associates program he built at Facebook almost as an aside, the kind of contribution that came from doing his job well rather than performing extra credit. That thread, what it looks like to add value from alignment instead of anxiety, is worth its own conversation.

If you've got the pull toward something and the only thing missing is the nerve to act on it, From Stuck to Starting was built for exactly that gap. Grab it here.

Originally aired as Episode 10 on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.