Why joining an early-stage startup is the best thing you can do for your career
People often debate what the best course for your career is — take a stable job at a large company, or take a risk and join a promising young startup. Stability and prestige versus a high risk, high reward pipe dream.
There’s certainly no right answer — it depends what you value more, and what type of learning you want to engage in. If you want to weigh the pros and cons of the risk and reward, you can read more on that here.
I’m here to make the argument that if you want to optimize for learning, joining a small, early-stage startup is the single best thing you can do for your career.
Here’s why:
You become a mini CEO.
When you’re a small team, of say, less than 5 people, everyone is involved in every decision takes place. Even if it’s completely outside of your domain or background — marketers will have input on product, engineers will have input on design, design will have input on marketing, and so on.
The key difference between a small startup and a large company here, though, is that this input can become actionable right away, making an impact in a world where organizational structures are flat and hierarchies are mostly non-existent.
Learning can typically be categorized into two forms — sink, or be taught to swim. In an early-stage startup, you’re thrown to the wolves and you learn on the fly. You’ll make a ton of mistakes and fail multiple times, but they key is you’ll get back on your feet and learn from your errors. There’s no hand holding in early-stage startups; you’re on your own, and you’ve just got to figure stuff out.
You learn to be scrappy and resourceful, rather than relying on others to show you the way. Learning is thus experiential, rather than taught formally.
The speed at which this learning takes place is exponential; so much happens in a month at a startup, let alone a day, and almost every month you’ll look back and find yourself saying, “Wow, I can’t believe I was that naive before,” — a true measure of continuous learning.
Soon enough, you’ll feel confident to be calling the shots, be it on how to craft your sales strategy, what features to prioritize, or what marketing channels resonate best with your target audience.
It kind of feels like you’ve become a mini CEO — you begin to think like a visionary and can make strategic decisions, given the broad brush you’ve now painted with.
Learning is diffused, not specialized.
The learning that takes place at an early-stage startup is quite wide-spanning. Of course, the tradeoff here is that you may think your learning is not specialized. While this may be the case, I’d argue it’s better to become a generalist who is knowledgeable about all areas of a startup, and then go deep on one of them to become a specialist. That way, you get a sense of what you like and don’t like to do, and what sorts of problems you enjoy solving.
This is especially true if you someday want to start your own company — wouldn’t you rather have a broad understanding of sales, marketing, design, operations, and product — before you build — rather than just being an engineer?
This high degree of efficacy broadens your horizons immensely; someone who may have come into a startup thinking they were merely a marketing person now understands, at a deep and granular level, how products are developed, while an engineer who may have never formally communicated with customers now understands how they use their product and what doesn’t work for them.
By being able to speak the language of all these different facets of a startup, you can walk into any meeting at any startup and likely have at least a rudimentary understanding of what is being discussed — and be able to contribute to the discussion. That’s pretty amazing.
You can now tell a story about an entire business, with a bird’s eye view of its entirety, rather than being limited to domain-specific knowledge.
You get an inside look at everything.
When you’re part of a small team, all information is pretty much universally known by every team member. This varies from company to company of course, but for the most part, it’s true.
This, I argue, is due to the strong level of trust that is inherently built up with a small, lean team — everyone has to buy in to the larger subordinate goal and long-term vision. And you spend a heck of a lot of time together, so cohesion and camaraderie is built up organically.
As a result, you’ll often be leaned on for input or tasks that pertain to things that might even seem foreign to you. But that’s where the incredible learning opportunities come in.
Imagine being asked to contribute to a fundraising deck. Or make a video that’ll be presented to senior leadership from a massive corporate partner. Or put together a set of visual assets to be featured in the App Store. These are all real, viable things that anyone can do at a small startup — no matter their role or experience.
Moreover, because of the high degree of shared information, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at what starting — and scaling — a company really looks like.
This includes things you may never be involved with at a big company — fundraising, hiring, investor relations, financials, acquisition talks, you name it.
As a result, your strategic mindset will flourish over time, as your company grows — and you do, too.
While there are certainly advantages to joining larger companies and having more specialized roles, my view is that there’s no learning quite like that found in an early-stage startup.
It teaches you lessons that you can learn nowhere else, and more importantly, they’re ones that you can then take and apply to all walks of life.
