I regularly get emails from young people, usually those with an interest in programming, who are trying to make decisions about school and/or their professional futures. This post is for those young people.
Everyone’s path is different, and your choices are your own. That said, you aren’t making your choices in a vacuum. Here are some things to consider that, in my experience, you’re less likely to hear about working in startups.
A friend commented, "What I want from a job now is interesting technology and nice coworkers; those are available in companies of many sizes."
Indeed - interesting problems and good coworkers are a plus in any size company. In a larger company, though, your particular effect on the customer is often not immediately visible, if it ever is.
While I understand his point that startups eventually accrue a real organization, it does take a while... and in the meantime, you do have the opportunity to be involved in much more than a single area of the business, and see your work have a direct and timely impact on your customers.
For me, that's wonderful. That's why I've pretty much been a startup employee for the last two decades. The same things that make the job interesting for me would drive some other people absolutely batty. Vive la différence.
As for the "hip and happening" startup culture? Meh. I live in Pittsburgh, boyo. I value experienced leadership who see bringing up a company as a marathon instead of a sprint. The aforementioned interesting problems and nice coworkers are essential. After that comes good compensation, a decent equity position, and the chance to go home at the end of the day and spend time with my family.
Pull all that together, and while your company may fail for other reasons, it won't be because you're having trouble attracting decent talent.
If you're a young'un interested in working for a startup, ask yourself if that's the profile for the sort of job you want. Anything related to climbing walls, free energy drinks and other "startup culture" detritus should be way, way down on your list of essentials.
4 comments:
It's noteworthy that the guy he was giving advice to was a Business major. The key piece of advice I'd have given him would be "by the time people like you are running a company, it's not a startup anymore".
If you want a beer keg in the break room...well, I work for a multibillion-dollar global conglomerate, the largest firm in its market segment in the world...and we've got a beer keg in the break room. There are lots of B-school graduates on the payroll, but those of us who have worked at and been happy at startups rarely interact with them, except through a few "product managers" who have the special talent of speaking both languages.
Startups are not interchangeable, for the kind of people who are good at running them. You need a passion for the product. Not a passion for "some startup product", but for the specific one _your_ company is building. Usually because it was all your idea and mostly your own work, in the early stages at least.
Wanting to "run my own company" seems to me kind of like wanting to "be married". Marriage is a great thing, no doubt, and there are lots of would-be spouses who'd be happy to oblige (if nothing else, look overseas for folks who want to immigrate)...but the results are a lot better if you pick out the partner first, and _then_ decide to marry them.
Excellent points, especially your last. I have met a couple of individuals who are capable of taking something and making it their passion, but they are few, far between, and almost always happily employed elsewhere.
Something else that seemed to be an unstated assumption was that he was talking about technology startups. There are roughly half a million new companies started in the US each year, and only a fraction of them are tech companies. I'm willing to bet that a good number of "i want to run my own company" types have never given thought to the possibility of starting a business in some other field. The cynic in me suspects that's because they're not really interested in running a company.
Well...when one uses the word "startup", the implicit standard of comparison is a business founded specifically to:
1. Turn an idea into a product, and then
2. Bring that product to the market.
(A lot of people build in extra assumptions from particular industry segments as well, not to mention the assumptions built entirely out of historical accidents, but I think this is a reasonable minimum, and it does draw a meaningful distinction between what people actually mean by "startup" and what is entailed in the majority of businesses that are merely new and/or small.)
I was using "technology" in the Silicon Valley VC sense: computer hardware or software (and, more lately, biotech and energy as well). Some of the points in the article seemed to reference these types of companies specifically. There are plenty of startups that produce new products and services each year that don't fall into those relatively narrow categories.
Just from personal experience, in the last year I've come across new companies marketing knives, multitools, wallets, holsters, after-market automobile parts, solar lights, mechanical well pumps, gardening supplies, pre-fab housing components, cooking utensils, hunting stands, clothing, and more. They all fit the definition of a startup, but I suspect that the work environment has little in common with a SV-style tech startup.
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