Run Two Companies At Once!

Starting a business is hard enough. So why are some entrepreneurs launching two companies at the same time? Because it can be a great way to test ideas.

- Amy Wilkinson

Jaclyn Johnson didn’t set out to run two startups simultaneously. In fact, she never planned to launch one. The first came from necessity. At 23, after an unexpected layoff, Johnson took on freelance marketing projects to pay her bills.

When her workload got big enough, she formed No Subject marketing agency, counting L’Oréal and Microsoft as clients. And there it was: company #1.

That created another necessity. As a first-time founder, Johnson craved connection with other young women entrepreneurs, so she started organizing small gatherings in Los Angeles where female founders could talk frankly about their businesses and share and seek advice. She called the meetings Create & Cultivate, and the demand grew rapidly. “Brands were emailing me asking when the next one was and when tickets were going on sale,” she says. So she created company #2: Create & Cultivate became official, and today it attracts big-name speakers, from Chrissy Teigen to Gloria Steinem. “I was working 120 hours a week,” Johnson says. “I was a full-blown masochist. But I was genuinely excited about both companies.”

Masochistic as she may be, she was also joining what appears to be an increasingly common path. It’s called “parallel entrepreneurship,” or running multiple companies at once, and although no studies track exactly how many people are doing this, business culture is full of examples—Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, and others), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), Richard Branson (all things Virgin), Naveen Jain (Moon Express, Viome), and more. Across industries, it’s also easy to find small-business owners juggling two or even more companies, sometimes in very different arenas.