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Ask HN: Why do you work at a startup?

3 points by searchableguy ↗ HN
Given all the downsides, I cannot think of enough upsides to work for a startup. I'm interested to know what reasons people have here.

The term startup here includes any private company under 500 employees. Companies like stripe and cloudflare won't count.

6 comments

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eimrine
Youth and/or believe in product.

BTW it would be welcome to clarify of what to consider a startup since this word seems to be slightly overused.

searchableguy
believe in the product is hard to digest for me.

The product in a startup is dynamic. How can you believe in something that is always changing?

The product is always what the customer needs and what the growth demands, not what engineers will dictate.

It might be more appropriate to say aligned with ideology or problem space.

onion2k
Most of the downsides are financial - you work for a bit less than you might earn elsewhere and equity usually ends up worthless. Those don't really matter if you're earning plenty though. Someone who can command a $150k salary doesn't need to accept a job that they don't enjoy. They have choices. One of those is a startup, where the product itself is often much more interesting. You have real agency over what you're building that you wouldn't have at a BigCo, you're likely to be working on a problem that actually feels like it'd make a difference to customers, and ultimately you have more power over your own destiny. Plus it's can be a smaller, closer team than you might get at a more established company.

Add to that the hiring practises in startups are usually something like a quick chat, a tech test, and then an indepth interview rather than 6 rounds of interview and whiteboard tests, and just the process of getting a job in a startup is more appealling.

searchableguy
> Most of the downsides are financial - you work for a bit less than you might earn elsewhere and equity usually ends up worthless

Considerably less. One of the things I've noticed is people who join early stage startup as early employees get screwed harder on this than latter employees. The early employees work for low cash comp with equity that gets diluted over time. The new hires once the startup is established come from big companies to scale up and receive higher cash + equity comp.

> that the hiring practises in startups are usually something like a quick chat, a tech test, and then an indepth interview rather than 6 rounds of interview and whiteboard tests,

This doesn't ring true in 2022. It's almost opposite of what YC and other startup incubators would recommend as well - be very selective and careful to hire.

ramtatatam
For me it's all about growth. I worked for corporate and after almost decade moved to startup world, never looked back. At first I was picking a lot more of technical experience compared with corp. At later stage my interest shifted towards business side, I love to learn how to build startup while being focused on tech. Also I found it was easier to find remote work within startups world (and before remote work was a thing).
jcusch
People and processes are what I love about startups. I've worked in Government, a startup when it was 50 people all the way to 200 and a successful exit. After the exit, joined a much larger org with 1,000s of employees. Now I'm part of another startup I co-founded and got funded.

In my experience, larger organizations and government tend to have too many processes that distract from meaningful work and progress. People feel detached from the success of the company, I mean how much influence can you have as one person amoung thousands? It seems to lead to lower motivation and more tribalism.

Startups are personal, you know everyone, you can make an impact and when things go well you share in the success.