I used to be an engineering director in charge of microprocessor design.

A pretty demanding job here in the Silicon Valley.

And my wife was, she worked as a financial analyst in a Fortune 500 company.

And pretty much where we live in the Silicon Valley, you pretty much need two incomes

in order to get a good house and a good school district.

So when she became pregnant with our first child,

she was like, I want to quit. And I was like, I'm cool with that because I didn't get a chance

to see my parents as much as I would have liked growing up. The only problem is I actually flipped

out when she told me that too. I was on board, but I flipped out. Quietly flipping out inside.

Because I was like, well, how are we going to make up her six figure salary?

And what ended up happening is we launched an online store selling handkerchiefs online.

And the quick backstory behind that was when we got married, my wife cries.

I mean, tears of joy in this case.

And she knew she was going to cry at the wedding.

And we spent a lot of money on photography. And she didn't want to be seen in the photos drying her tears with these ratty

tissues. So we looked all over the place for handkerchiefs, couldn't find them anyone in the US.

Finally, we found this factory in China, but we had to buy a bunch. So we bought a couple hundred,

used maybe a handful of them,

and then sold the rest on eBay, and they sold like hotcakes. So that's why, you know,

fast forward, we decided to launch that store. Then my friends who are engineers started going,

hey, Steve, I want to quit. How did you guys do it? And so I just started documenting the entire journey on a blog over

on my wife, quitterjob.com. None of my friends read it, but random people started reading it.

...