working at a startup

September 13,2023

last update: 2024-11-19

I’ve been involved with tech startups for the last 5 years. And every moment of my time I believe I’ve done very meaningful work.

I attribute most of my love for startups because typically a startup is non-corporatized. There are (usually) no bullshit job, red tapes or corporate fences that people who like playing political games put up.

With a startup there is a hypothesis and we are marching along that general direction to see if there is any value in that direction the team members are very aligned and are trying to get stuff done fast.

Why did I decide to work at a startup?

I was introduced to the startup ecosystem, accidentally. With my first job, I was looking for something interesting to work on, and the job at Acko had a lot more interesting than, I had hoped for. I built a lot of frameworks and tools that had direct impact for everyone involved. I knew within a few months of working, that this is what I like doing very much. I loved the pace and innovation. With my second And third job, I knew they had to be startups.

What do I wish I knew before they started?

There are So many things I wish I knew, Like that one product I worked for 3 months, which never got released. Generally though

• Be comfortable with chaos, there are multiple situations, where everything is crazy, and multiple things are being figured out on the fly.
• Ownership and Responsibility, Very often we are building and selling with incredible resource constraints. Typically, people working with you will also be handling 10 things that they are new to. In situations like these the expectation is that, you will be handed a problem, and are expected to come back with a solution, more often than not it is outside the area of your expertise. So, “I don’t know” / “It’s not something I work on” is usually not an excuse.

What is something that I learned at startups that I wouldn’t have at a larger company ?

Broadly to me there are three reasons major reasons why working at a startup is better than working at a large company.

• The pace of work.
• closeness to the customers.
• Focus on getting things done.

If you try very hard, Maybe you can cover one of the three in a large conglomerate, But good luck trying to work your way into a position where Research and Development happens through you.

I’ve never worked at a large company, but If I had to guess these are the things that would’ve happened.

• I wouldn’t expect to have touched upon such a vast surface of the products We’ve built.
• It also, wouldn’t have been able to talk and interact with the amount of customers that I have.

Takeaways

• Building and delivering absolute value is a lot more important than operating on a hypothesis for a long time. This is something that I’ve seen a lot of people do, and I’ve done it myself. It is very easy to get stuck in the “I’m building this because I think it will be useful” loop. But, the reality is that, it is very hard to predict what the market wants. And, the only way to know is to build and ship.
• Building something with a lot of flexibility is a lot harder than, Building something with fine constraints.

“If I Had More time, I would’ve written a shorter letter” - Blaise Pascal