Why you should work at a StartUp: Clarifying Reasons
The number of people looking for jobs at StartUps has been growing year after year in the last decade, a modest number of students are already planning to work in this type of company since the early years of the University. In addition to the increasing share of these companies in the market, they are also more widespread in the media and pop culture(take HBO's Silicon Valley for instance). Nevertheless, talking to friends some friends or university freshmen I still realize a great deal of resistance to working at a StartUp, sometimes because their families raised them exposing the benefits of working at a large (multinational or not) stable company, sometimes from what they heard at university or even in the media. Regarding the source, the root of this resistance is almost always the uncertainty surrounding a StartUp.
My favorite definition is that for a company to be considered a StartUp, its business model must be disruptive, something that has not yet reached the product market fit and could scale exponentially. There is a lot of uncertainty within these companies: how to build new tech, which product functionality should be developed, how to operationalize the business model, monetize it and so on. If the company can’t deal with all this it can die quickly — around 90% of StartUps die in the early years and this only increases prejudice and resistance against this type of company.
A very common assumption is that in a large company you will have a larger compensation package, which is not always true, you can have a much larger long-term return on a startup if you have a stock options plan. Some people think these companies are a big mess, not having clarity even in the way of promotions/growth and this is indeed true, but this can be very good as you have the opportunity to create your own promotions path on your own pace, being it faster or slower.
Despite all of this, we cannot usually say that there is a better type of company to work at, the fact is that the characteristics of a startup are very different from the ones of a large company, and along with those characteristics, your employees must be different too. In this article, we aim to provide insight into these distinction, bringing clarity on what to expect from a Startup environment and decide if it's a match for your profile — despite of my bias by being a StartUp Founder ;-)
Autonomy: A laboratory for Professional Life
The word that best describes a StartUp is autonomy, you have autonomy to explore, experiment, test, propose, discuss, create and change practically anything. This characteristic is what really sets this type of company apart from the giants — given that there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding product, technology, processes, and so on, it is not practicable for managers to impose things and apply micromanagement, as they often lack clear answers themselves about this subjects. The chances of finding extraordinary ideas is much greater when we have the minds of all employees combined and most of startup managers and entrepreneurs knows that.
Autonomy and lack of processes is great for personal growth, often these companies offer enough space to absorb all the expansiveness of their best employees — if you are a star you will definitely be promoted quickly, since you'll take more responsibilities for yourself growing at your own pace. On the other hand, employees must be much more proactive in their daily lives, as they often do not have a clear path to follow and need to create their own.
Work environment: Hyper-productivity amid Chaos
The work environment in a StartUp is often extremely flexible, you don’t have to work with fixed working hours, and in addition to making your own time, you can work from home often if you wish. These features are amazing for people like me who are unable to get up early and also for those who produce more in the early morning. The only point of attention here is that you need to manage your time very well to attend all face-to-face appointments and ensure that you have a sufficient intersection of office time with your team.
During work it is common to observe various moments of conversation, jokes and relaxation moments in general. This helps create a very comfortable environment (assuming that it is respectful) where it feels that you're amongst a group of friends. The advantages of this environment are numerous, one of the main ones being that people (even the shy) feel more free to open more, to participate more, making the overall result of the company even richer. Empathy is very common and work becomes much more productive with an excessive collaboration. Another advantage is that this friendly environment makes people enjoy staying there, and they are engaged delivering results with very high productivity.
Despite of all this you need to pay more attention to focus: people can interrupt you for help or just to chat more often, you must learn to say no — creating rules of coexistence like “Do not disturb when on the phone” or finding places off your desk to work focused eventually are also great mechanisms. There's also constant changes in processes, positions, spaces, meetings, anything. You must learn to live among this changes, you must adapt so that you can go along with this flow taking the advantages that comes within. Focus is key!
Career Plan: You can be the Rocketship
You will rarely have a clear career path, often this term is not even mentioned in a StartUp and it can be a huge advantage if you look at it through another point of view. It means you have the freedom to explore a lot more and build your own path. For example: a designer may decide to start developing product skills and become a product manager, a developer who has become interested in statistics may want to act as a data scientist, an operations assistant who has a strong empathy for users can become a user researcher and so on — this movements are much more common in Startups.
Another great benefit is that you do not have fixed windows to make career changes, either sudden role changes like the examples above or promotions for higher management positions. Everything happens in a more organic time and the chance of the company having space to give you these new roles or responsibilities are much higher — is really much more open to you, your will to grow and take more and more space inside the company.
A personal example illustrates both cases well: In a 2 years interval working at GetNinjas, an online services marketplace StartUp, I went from Data Scientist to Product Manager and just a while later to Head of Product. The key here beyond proactivity is self-motivation and ongoing study: given that you will not have well-defined mentoring such as in large companies the continuous quest for self-development is necessary — Read, go to meetups, talk to people, listen to podcasts, use the internet in your favor consuming the type of media that works for you!
Money: Little risk for a much Greater Return
It is very important to be careful not to fall into some pitfalls regarding compensation: Large companies will likely offer a higher monthly salary with more benefits and a clear promotion path — often with predetermined salary increases. Nonetheless, if you are not in a context / moment where you need a lot of capital in the short to medium term — if you have the flexibility to live on a salary below the current market ceiling — it might be better to try building a career in a StartUp. This can be a very profitable long term investment.
In this context you will probably have a lower salary compared to the market average and annual bonuses are also rare, but nonetheless a StartUp often offers equity plans. For the employee is simply offered a small percentage of the company, which in the future may be sold for a much higher value if the company succeeds in its mission (values in millions of dollars are very common in these cases if you had joined the startup from the early stages). The risk of this money is greater, but the return over the time invested in the end can easily be of some orders of magnitude larger than a large company will provide you.
Legacy: The biggest of all Rewards
The bigger the company, the harder it is to identify the impact of your work: it starts to get more segmented into smaller parts with greater expertise and this makes it harder and harder to see the needle moving in the big picture. In a StartUp on the other hand, you can usually see and measure the direct impact of your work on the company’s key performance indicators (KPIs), which makes the work much more rewarding (one of the biggest reward motivation factors along with greater proximity to the end user of the company constantly).
In addition these companies grow in much larger revenue ratios, users and even employees compared to large companies, and if you are in that same boat you will definitely grow together (we often see growths greater than 10x year-over-year in early stages). The story you will have to tell if you were part of this trajectory is usually much richer than working in an established company, your contribution is much more clear.
The most beautiful of all this is that the combination of the higher growth rate with this story makes your profile extremely attractive not only to other StartUps, but also to larger companies in far higher positions. Most of the times you'll be more attractive than other people that spent the same time working in large companies, even for the larger companies itself.
A final suggestion…
First get to know yourself, see what profile is expected to work in this type of company and understand its context, its timing, if you think it makes sense to you, look for a StartUp position right await and try it! The challenges are constant and the pace is intense, but the outcome in the end is sure to be very rewarding. I can say with certainty that my experience in a StartUp was what built the main pillars that will accompany me for the rest of my life, that’s where I had the snap of: “Wow, I can get anywhere from my current point, it’s just up to me now“. So a last reflection to you:
"Why not give it a chance?" I ensure you, one way or another, the experience will be rewarding!
