Every day I get emails from people working on new startups. I’m continually amazed at how many of them come from their existing corporate email address.
There are lots of quick reasons I can think of why this is a bad idea.
- Your company owns your email. Theoretically, everything you write in email is owned by your company.
- Your boss reads your email. Especially if you suddenly quit to start a new company.
- You use Microsoft Office and don’t know how to turn off auto-complete. C’mon – you’ve accidentally sent an email to someone you didn’t mean to because of auto-complete.
- It’s weird for me to get an email from joe@bigco saying "starting a new company" – it makes me think that you aren’t that serious.
I could come up with lots more. It’s so simple to get a free gmail (or yahoo, or hotmail) email account. Be bold – take the plunge.