# Nothing Was Wrong. That Was the Problem. > Why I left a good engineering job to co-found Santara AI. Not a bad boss or low pay, but one question about the next ten years of my life. - Author: Tai Pham Phu - Published: 8 Oct 2026 - Tags: Personal, Startups, Santara, Career, Entrepreneurship - URL: https://phamphutai.com/2026/10/08/why-i-left-a-good-job-to-build-santara/ When you leave a good job, people assume something went wrong. A bad manager. A layoff. A fight about money. A project that burned you out. None of that happened to me. And honestly, that made the decision harder, not easier. It's easy to leave a job you hate. It's much harder to leave one that's *fine*. This summer I left my position as a software engineer and team leader at Hitachi Digital Services to co-found [Santara AI](https://phamphutai.com/projects/santara/) with a former colleague. This post is my attempt to explain why, to the people who asked, and to myself in a few years, when things get hard and I need to remember. --- ## First, a thank-you I want to be clear about this: my years in software engineering were good years. I started as an engineer, writing code and fixing bugs like everyone else. Over time I learned to design larger systems, to review other people's work, and eventually to lead a team. At Hitachi I learned what it means to be responsible not only for your own code, but for the people around you: their questions, their deadlines, their bad days. I learned how real software is built inside a large company. How decisions get made. How to explain a technical problem to someone who doesn't care about the technical details, only whether it will be ready on time. I would not be able to build Santara without those years. Leaving was not a rejection of that work. It was the next step that work made possible. --- ## The 10-year question So why leave? Because of one question I couldn't stop asking myself: > **If nothing changes, what will my life look like in ten years?** When I answered honestly, the picture was comfortable. A senior title. A better salary. More meetings, bigger projects, a nicer apartment. Nothing bad at all. And that was exactly what scared me. Not because comfort is wrong. Many people build happy lives on a stable career, and I respect that deeply. But when I imagined myself in that picture, I didn't feel excited. I felt like I was watching someone else's life. Someone who had done everything right and still wondered what else was possible. I realized I was more afraid of that feeling than I was of failing. --- ## Salary is not a reason to wake up I don't want to pretend money doesn't matter. It does. Rent is real. Family is real. But a salary pays for your life. It doesn't tell you what your life is *for*. When I look back at the moments in my career that made me proudest, they were never about pay. They were the moments when something I built made someone's day easier. A tool a teammate actually used. A fix that saved someone an evening of manual work. A small feature a user thanked us for. I wanted more of that feeling. Not once in a while, buried inside a big project, but as the main reason for the work. I wanted to build something where I could point to a real person and say: *their day is a little lighter because of what we made.* I believe that kind of work will make me feel better about my life — not richer, necessarily, but better. --- ## Why Santara [Santara](https://santara.ai) helps short-term rental hosts. If you've never run a rental, here's what their mornings often look like: bookings on Airbnb, more bookings on Booking.com, guest messages on WhatsApp, a cleaning schedule in someone's head or on a piece of paper. Every day, the same work of copying information from one place to another, hoping nothing gets missed. Santara brings all of that together and gives the host **one simple briefing every morning**: who's checking in, what needs cleaning, which messages need a reply. It's not a flashy idea. It won't change the world overnight. But I've written before that [people don't pay for features, they pay to do less](https://phamphutai.com/2026/10/06/people-pay-to-do-less/), and that [boring problems often make the best businesses](https://phamphutai.com/2026/10/07/boring-businesses-make-the-best-businesses/). Santara is me putting my own life behind those ideas. If a host starts the day calmer because of Santara, that is the feeling I left my job for. --- ## Building with someone I trust I didn't start Santara alone. I co-founded it with a former colleague. That mattered a lot. Starting a company with a stranger is a gamble. Starting with someone you've already worked with is different: you've seen how they handle pressure, how they react when a release goes wrong at the worst moment, how they treat the people around them. You already know you can disagree and still work together the next morning. A startup will test any partnership. I wanted to begin with one that had already been tested a little. We also don't have to figure everything out by ourselves. Our adviser, William Skelley, was [my first real business teacher](https://phamphutai.com/2026/10/05/my-first-business-teacher-william-christopher-skelley/), and he helps us think through the business side that engineers like us tend to underestimate. --- ## Eyes open about the dark side I want to be honest about this part, because many "I quit my job" stories skip it. Startups have a dark side, and I'm walking into it on purpose. - **No guaranteed salary.** Some months will be tight. Maybe many months. - **Uncertainty every day.** No one tells you if you're doing it right. Sometimes the market just says no. - **Long hours.** I'm already a workaholic. A startup will happily take every hour I give it, and I'll need to learn when to stop. - **Pressure and hard choices.** If we take investors' money one day, we'll [work for them too](https://phamphutai.com/2026/10/07/read-every-word-you-sign-term-sheets-for-first-time-founders/). I've read enough stories — Adam Neumann, Travis Kalanick, even Steve Jobs — to know founders can lose control of what they build. I'm not romantic about any of this. Most startups fail. Ours might too. But I'd rather take a risk I chose, with my eyes open, than drift into a future I never really chose at all. --- ## What I'm actually betting on I'm not betting on becoming rich. I'm not betting on a big exit or a headline. I'm betting on three smaller things: 1. **That useful, honest work is worth doing**, even if it starts small. 2. **That I'll learn faster here than anywhere else.** Even if Santara fails, I'll come out knowing far more about customers, products and myself than staying would have taught me. 3. **That in ten years, I'll be proud of the choice**, whatever the outcome. The third one is the most important. I can't control whether Santara succeeds. I can control whether I tried. --- ## To anyone thinking about the same thing I'm not going to tell you to quit your job. For many people, staying is the right choice, and a good, stable career is something to be proud of. But if you have a quiet feeling that the comfortable path isn't *your* path, don't ignore it. Ask yourself the 10-year question. Answer it honestly. Then decide with your eyes open, knowing both the light side and the dark side of what you're choosing. I asked it. I answered it. And here I am, at the very beginning, building something small that I believe in. I'm not sure this will work. I'm sure I'd regret not trying.