As a former startup founder and an employee or early contractor of five other startups, there are costs an benefits to joining a startup. But first, what is a startup? Investopedia says:
The term “startup” refers to a company in the early stages of its operations. Startups are founded by one or more entrepreneurs who want to develop a product or service for which they believe there is demand.
Startups can be either bootstrapped (hard) or raise money (hard). But they are focused on growth. In my opinion, if a business isn’t scalable, it is not really a startup.
- A laundromat: not a startup.
- Laundromat management software: startup.
- Being a real estate broker: not a startup.
- Building a tech focused real estate brokerage: startup.
- A web development consulting company: not a startup.
- A company building product that makes web development easier: startup.
The lines can be blurry of course; if you start a laundromat and make a custom app to improve operations, you can perhaps use that software as the foundation of a laundromat software startup.
I know there is absolutely an opportunity cost to starting a startup, but I don’t want to focus on those. Buy me a beer sometime and I can chat with you about that.
This growth is the key to the benefits. Because of the growth, you’ll learn a ton about a bunch of different parts of building a company. These can include:
- devops
- hiring
- product
- creating process
- conflict resolution
- customer support
- sales
Of course, what you learn depends on what stage you join a startup and the role you are hired for. But in my experience, especially at startups under one hundred employees, there’s so much work to be done that you can help almost anywhere. (If you are an engineer, talk to your manager before jumping into a sales call, though.)
All of this is exposure you won’t get at a bigco.
Of course, you need to ask yourself if that is what you want to do. Some people are happy building a system and business, while others are more content when embedded in a system which can make them productive.
And even for the same person, you can be ready for different challenges at different times of your life.
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