Ever wondered whether to join a startup? You absolutely should at some point in your life! I find Startups to be very exciting, they get tremendous press coverage even if they have no sales or no concrete shipping product and are great conversation starters if you are at a party. If you are reading this blog, you may not be the party type 🙂
Having worked at 3 startups and been involved in many more, I would like to share my experience with you. You may want to think about Laz Buhrmann’s Wear Sunscreen theme while you read the rest of the article.
If you are a fresh grad and your first experience at a job is going to be at a startup, then you may not realize some of the advantages. You typically don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. If you have worked or are currently working at a large established company, then you might appreciate some of the stark differences even more.
1. Learning new things all the time
I find this to be the biggest advantage of a startup regardless of whether the company is financially successful or not. The startup culture is to question everything and not accept anything as impossible to achieve or set in stone. Typically, “this is how we do it here” type of culture is rejected at startups. There is no history to set as precedence.
This means that startups are free to create new processes, new rules and regulations, new approaches to everything from product ideas, approval and resource allocation to go-to-marketing, sales and compensation. And being in a small company with few people will expose you to all of this. Large companies have rigid structures with calcified culture and siloed work groups that are hard to change.
Once you join a group, you will rarely get the chance to rotate and learn other aspects of the company. In a startup you might be the engineer, the engineering manager, QA leader, sales engineer, strategy person, marketer and booth babe (is that politically correct?) all in one week. Just imagine how many disciplines you would be exposed to. That is impossible in a large and established company.
Startups provide you the opportunity to be everything all in one. Startups are on the job MBA training.
2. Financial success
Yes, I’m talking about money here. Now, just a heads up here… this will only happen if the company makes it. What does “makes it” mean. It means the startup IPOs and your shares are worth something (hopefully you negotiated for shares rather than more salary). Alternatively and most likely, it will be acquired by a large company. Not as good as an IPO, but can still be wildly profitable that you may end up shopping for that brand new Lamborghini with your friends! By the way, 90% of the startups fail. Still, never give up, never surrender!
3. Professional Growth
Startup founders are generally very sharp people with amazing skills (can be jerks too). And amazing people attract other amazing people. This means that you will be in close contact with extremely talented people. Cherish that, because that bundle of high IQ and can-do-anything attitude is something you will miss in a large corporation.
As the startup grows you will gain more responsibility and be exposed to interactions that very few in large corporations can grasp. If you were to leave the startup, everything you learned will be an impressive list on your resume. The other aspect is that you will learn on the job from people who are much better than you (unless you are rockstar or a 10X engineer). You will learn to code, manage, finance, market, strategize or whatever it is that you are doing from people who are probably better than you and that type of mentorship, without calling it an official mentorship program, will undoubtedly make you a much better professional.
Regardless of whether the startup turns into the next Facebook or Google and you stay there forever or fails in two years, the core, high-caliber people that you met will move on to other companies small or large and that network will be very useful in your career. Trust me.
4. High-level Job Opportunities
Did I just mention that you will be exposed to almost all job functions (probably not to HR and Finance if you are an engineer)? Because startups typically grow quickly, they have to hire more people with very little thought put into who will manage them and how. If you do your job well, you could fast track into a management position a lot quicker than you would if you were in an established company with a pre-defined hierarchy. It’s important to note, however, that at startups managers still have to also be individual contributors.
When my company was acquired by a large one that has 100,000 employees, I realized that you may end up being a manager where all you do is manage other people. That is not the case in startups. You may spend 20%-30% of your time managing, but the rest will be spent on doing real stuff. Oh crap… I’m sure someone is going to read this and get offended that I didn’t count managing people as real work.
5. Be Influential and make a difference
While what is a startup is debatable, most startups still have less than 100 employees. That means there are fewer layers between you and the CEO and therefore more of a chance for your opinions to be heard and matter. You can easily talk to the CEO, COO, Founder, tech lead, VP of Marketing, or anyone really and share your opinion. And if you have a good one, the leaders would have no problem taking your suggestions seriously and crediting you if the outcome is positive.
The work you do at a startup makes a real difference and can have a significant impact on the success of the business.
What was your reason for joining a startup? Or if you haven’t joined one yet, but are interested, what is the attraction for you? Would love to hear from you.
Nice article. Good insight.