The joke goes, everybody who joins
’s team ends up leaving and starting their own business.When I joined, I believed it. I watched the urban legends exit before me. They were characters that I’d first encountered through late-night YouTube binges, now suddenly real humans in my WhatsApp chats.
, , , … names you might recognise if you follow Ali closely. I’m lucky enough to call of them friends now.The myth lingered: if you were here, you were destined to hatch something of your own. Ali even asked me casually during one of our first meals: “So, what kind of business are you going to start?”
It’s as if I had stepped into a room where every egg seems to be cracking open, while I was still cold and unready.
My first hatch
My only brush with business came when I was fifteen through chips. My dad commuted weekly between Bandung and Tangerang, and one day he mentioned a distributor near his office who sold a spicy cassava chips brand called Karuhun. At the time, Indonesia was just waking up to the Maicih craze. Dad asked if I wanted to try selling some.
I did. For three years I became a small-time snack dealer. I’d place my orders with Dad: 5 bags, then 50, then whole stacks of the “super spicy” and “green chilli” flavours. I stored them in my bedroom, a makeshift storeroom that had red-and-silver bags filled with oil and chilli powder.
It was raking in coins for a year until I realised that chips, because they were perishable, consumable goods, have an expiring date. In a flurry of panic, I checked the expiry dates at the bottom of the chip bags. I needed to get rid of the stock, even if at a loss, to recoup my capital. I ran a “buy 3 get 1 free” promo, and even advertised it in the blog that I ran that I knew was widely read by my classmates because they contained study notes.
(I kinda sponsored my own newsletter).
The school banned selling, so I handed teachers free samples instead. One afternoon, when they had unexpected guests - usually a priest - they come over to my classroom sheepishly: “Becky… you still got some of those chips?” Of course I did, hidden in my locker like contraband. Just like that, I was back in business.
It paid for gold savings (my mom’s recommendation) and an SMTOWN concert ticket (my dream come true). What more could a teenage girl want?
But I also learned the stress of inventory, the juggling of spreadsheets, the dread of unsold stock. My first business was messy and stressful. So when I graduated high school, I shut it down.
Entering the big leagues
In 2025, when I entered the Ali Cinematic Universe, the idea that I was supposed to launch a business right away felt absurd. What do you mean I need a product? What do you mean I can get clients? I didn’t even know how to sell anything beyond chips.
Still, I tried. Ali was releasing a course about making your first $1,000 online. It felt responsible to take it. Not for me, but to do my job well. The same way I revived my YouTube channel this March just before joining the team - I created a video just to feel the friction of scripting, filming, editing, uploading.
I wouldn’t start a business for myself. But I sure as heck would to be a good employee.
So I created an experimental offer, step by step, like following a recipe in making the perfect blueberry cheesecake. I copied what the “graduates” did: Tintin once suggested adding a Calendly link in a newsletter, so I did too. When someone actually booked a call, I froze. Saf rescued me with a Loom video on how to lead a discovery call.
Next came the proposal. I scrappily pulled a Notion page together based on the call and bugged Ines and Bhav for pricing feedback. Each step felt like cracking an egg and spilling yolk all over my hands.
And so the cycle begins. I do something, get stuck, ask a bunch of questions, then iterate.
The first discovery call was awkward af. It was with someone whom I already known from another media company. He asked, “What is your process like?” and I fumbled for an answer.
I didn’t get that gig. But no matter. I could keep trying.
Three calls in and I wasn’t getting any form of business off the ground. And I felt like I was failing.
Through Substack Notes,
saw my efforts of grinding online. He jokingly told me a few days ago over dumplings: “You started like 10 side gigs since you join Ali’s team.”He was right. I don’t think my teammates started their businesses on day one of joining the team. Or day 90. They’d incubated ideas for a year or two, fumbling, making mistakes, learning under the heat lamp of their day jobs.
I’d been comparing my day 1 yolk to their year 2 hatchling. Of course it looked completely different.
Incubator mode
That’s when I named it: incubator mode. Not launch mode. Not scale mode. Incubator.
In the tech world, startup incubators like Y Combinator exist to give fragile ideas a safe environment before they hit the market. In biology, incubators provide steady warmth so premature infants or fragile cultures can grow. Marie Curie needed her cramped Paris shed: a fragile incubator where the elements of radioactivity first flickered into our view. Hedy Lamarr sketched the backbone of Wi-Fi at her piano, incubating brilliance outside any formal lab. Even the greats needed safe, strange spaces to let ideas grow.
So why was I demanding myself to sprint?
Incubator mode is about keeping the eggs warm. Feeding the chicks before they’re strong enough to leave. Having a janky Notion page, a failed call, and a rejected price quote is all part of the incubation process, not proof of failure.
In fact, failing fast and getting back up probably gets me further along the road to hatching.
So over the next year or two, I will be treating my time Ali’s team as a controlled environment. Learn. Absorb. Experiment. Iterate. Fumble. Fall. Get up. Adjust.
The pressure to have a successful business something immediately has lifted. I’m in incubator mode. And this time, unlike my high-school bedroom filled with expiring chip bags, I have resources, mentors, and friends to keep the temperature steady.
(Big shoutout to my current mastermind group: , , Gio Vescovi, , and 🎉)
Maybe one day I’ll join said urban legends and hatch something of my own. But right now, my job isn’t to hatch. It’s to stay warm, absorb the light, and grow strong enough to crack the shell when the time is right.
This essay was edited with the help of ’s Essay Architecture software. Congrats on the launch, Dean!
Update log:
🤑 Quite aptly,
and I talk about how our first make-money efforts are going in our latest episode here.🌴 Currently in Bali for a team offsite with team Ali. It’s my first work travel and it’s so fun to hang with the folks I talk to daily on Slack.
🛋️ Got a new sofabed! It’s my first couch and I feel some typa way about owning this big girl furniture for the first time. Like, I could actually have people over now. Wow.
📸 Took some post-Ragasa shots on film. I haven’t developed them just yet. But people were hard at work to clear up the typhoon damage.
📙 Met
and last weekend in Hong Kong for the launch of The Pathless Path in Traditional Chinese.📝 Looked back at my old blog (archived) and found some gems. I forgot I had been writing online for so long!
Book a call: https://calendly.com/beckyisj
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I liked how this post gave me a contrarian take. Tbh incubator mode in the startup world is always a sprint. The whole “break things and fail fast” mindset so you can get your product market fit.
But sometimes rushing into things brings misalignment. I’ve been watching you start side hustles and I just know that one day something will click and it’s going to take off!
For now I’m cheering you on from the sidelines!
"Ali Cinematic Universe" 😂 tbf, I thought you were progressing way faster than normal in the entrepreneurship world - it took me like a year to start a tutoring business, and I was already literally tutoring throughout college.
Incubator mode is such a great way to describe your current phase. I'm stealing that for myself, but for things beyond starting a business!