I left Amazon to buy a printing company. It was the best career move I ever made

After joining Amazon as a product leader in 2022, I saw a series of layoffs and return-to-office mandates over the following three years that made any semblance of presence in home life impossible. The tech industry layoffs disproportionately impacted women, and the workers that remained struggled in a workplace with lowered morale and increased expectations. 

Then I stumbled upon the entrepreneurship through acquisition space. The ETA premise is simple: Rather than founding a company from scratch or climbing someone else’s ladder, you buy an existing, profitable business.

I spent the last year of my Amazon tenure searching for my first business to purchase, with a vision for a holding company that included incubated and acquired companies. In June 2025, with the help of a Small Business Administration (SBA) acquisition loan, I bought DiggyPOD, a $10 million book printing business founded in 1988. This May, I added Long Overdue Books, a vibrant book publisher with several notable titles, to my acquisition portfolio. I’m expanding these businesses into a global media organization supporting content creators. 

I have dedicated the last year to empowering other tech industry veterans to purchase businesses. Here are my three reasons why this is a compelling option for this demographic:

1. Uniquely favorable financing and odds

The SBA offers acquisition financing on terms unmatched by the open market. This mechanism put my $10 million DiggyPOD acquisition within reach on a structure built around a monthly payment I could live with. Potential acquirers should know that this financing comes with a personal guarantee, but the due diligence process required by the lenders and the SBA gives these deals a better chance than bootstrapped or venture-backed businesses. Acquisitions are dramatically safer than startups. A Yale School of Management study found that between 2019 and 2023, SBA business-acquisition loans defaulted at just 1.22%, versus the 50% of tech businesses that fail in their first five years.

2. Your corporate skills are the asset

The week after I purchased DiggyPOD, our million-dollar inkjet color printer, the crown jewel of the shop, broke down. I had no idea how to fix it, but I didn’t need to. Fortunately, I inherited a team with a combined 100-plus years of print experience who run production. My years of hiring technical talent enabled me to ask enough questions to ask the right ones, and understand the manufacturer service agreements. I brought the skills that a career in tech trains us for relentlessly: customer discovery, team leadership, and AI fluency. That operator muscle that feels generic inside a startup or in big tech is the core competency for running an acquired business. After running DiggyPOD for a year, I have revamped the tech stack completely for growth; installed a tech-forward executive team, including a Head of AI); and continuously, programmatically ensured customer success.

3. The honest case for your life

I will not pretend the transition was easy. In the early months, with a complex manufacturing operation to learn, and a team in Michigan to win over, I saw my kids less, not more. But buying into established cash flow is a fundamentally different proposition than chasing it. A startup founder spends years racing the runway, hoping revenue arrives before the money runs out. I bought into a profitable business, which means the question is no longer, “Will this survive?” but, “How do I want to grow it?” 

When I joined Amazon, I set three nonnegotiables as a parent: I would be there when my kids woke up, there when they got home from school, and there to put them to bed. The tech industry made those impossible to honor. Ownership is the only structure I found that lets me build that life on my own terms. The path is not without risk, and it demands real work before the freedom arrives. But for tech veterans staring at another layoff cycle or return-to-office mandate, I want to be the voice that says there is another option. 

I took it, and you can too.