I've been speaking with friends about starting their own companies recently, and one thing it's made me consider is what experience would best prepare you to become a founder.
Having spent my career in start-ups, the idea of founding my own without first working at one and seeing what works terrifies me. There's so much stuff you only learn from doing it over and over again, at different company sizes, and seeing how it works/doesn't.
I thought it might be useful to share some of that experience, if only to justify why joining an existing start-up can be an amazing education for anyone wanting to start their own. As opposed to, for example, joining an existing big-corp or jumping straight into start-ups without that experience.
If you lack the confidence to start a startup then working at one can help you gain than to create one in the future. But I'm not confident it increases the chances the company is going to be successful.
Actually if you had the chance to work at a company that became a unicorn, you will have better chance to get founding which increase the chance that your company is going to work, so yeah.
Except for that confidence and founding part I'm not sure it is valuable
But aren't these already valuable? I now run my own startup and i feel i benefited a lot from my former stints in other startups, even when some of it fell into the "what not to do" category :)
Also in a startup you're more likely to need to wear multiple hats and deal with uncertainty, which are two things you'd definitely need to deal with even more in your own company.
I'm first employee at a start-up now, and while not a founder, the experience I have from seeing this stuff in previous companies totally changes the game.
When we decide to do something, such as make key hires, build new teams or invest in infrastructure, we have way more confidence that we're doing it at the right time. And when we do it, it's 90% what we need, skipping so many of the painful intermediate stages I've seen before.
It makes a huge difference in velocity, which is key for successful start-ups. So while you're right about funding and network, you execute better too.
Yeah so what you explain is that you have more confidence about what your do, but that says nothing about the success rate of previous startup employee vs success rate of others
Yes, having experience in a domain can help you be more confident in your decisions. Are you trying to argue that experience plays no role in long term outcomes of building businesses?
I don’t think he’s arguing about the benefit of having confidence and experience in a domain, but rather the origin of the experience and confidence and how it impacts a startup’s success.
In this case: the startup success rate of those who worked for startups vs those who worked in some other institutions (or for some, no work at all).
Sure, working at a startup might make you be confident at making decisions, but will that confidence lead to good results when you’re a founder? Working at another place can give you confidence as well, but again, will it help you get the results you want in your startup?
Anyhow, I’m not sure the answers matter much because the author didn’t write much about the uniqueness of the skills learnt in startups. He emphasised more on velocity of learning skills that can be learnt in many places, but high-growth startups can provide the fastest route.
Another massive advantage is finding cofounders and employees from the pool of people you work with and meet.
I think that is the best way to find suitable people outside your specialty where you can properly judge people’s integrity, ability, and their match with you (working style, filling the holes in your skills, compatibility, boss vs employee).
I have done this, no I have seen other successful entrepreneurs do it.
Hmm I feel like most founders I know just started companies after college without much experience. While people that want to get experience first seem to never end up starting a company. I think it mostly comes down to risk adversity.
I think this may just be your bubble - I'm 39 and worked as a programmer since I was 18 in 3 different cities/countries & I know lots of both experienced people and people out of college who started companies.
I think the average US founder age is 40s. But I'm not sure since most statistics focus on successful founders. This link seems to look at all of them.
The average founder of a business is not founding a VC-targeted startup, or even a technology business. There are a lot more landscapers counted in all of these surveys of successful startup businesses than founders who even considered YC.
I am absolutely not saying you can't do this. In fact, GoCardless is an example of a company started by very young founders with little start-up experience, and is now a unicorn.
The difference is that if you have this experience when starting a company, it can help you avoid so many stumbling blocks, and you can skip forward to more mature company stages.
While you can't really compare two companies, I think it's interesting that the company I currently work at (incident.io) has only taken a year to go from me joining as the first employee to 40 people + series A + hundreds of customers now.
There's no way we'd have moved so fast if it wasn't a case of replicating what we already knew worked, tweaked for the environment we found ourselves in.
So yes, it doesn't mean you can't be successful as an inexperienced founder, but I do think it makes a difference in terms of execution.
Is a "startup" the same as starting a company? If I start a company without ever seeking external funding/accelerating/etc, is my company a "startup" in the same way that "founding a startup" implies?
I was under the impression that starting a company in general and 'starting a startup' are not exactly the same thing, though I surely might be wrong about this.
> I believe if you want the best chance of succeeding as a founder, first join an existing high-growth start-up where you can learn what good looks like, before you start something yourself.
We're all entitled to our beliefs, but this seems very specific to me. Why doe sit have to be "high-growth"? What if your startup isn't meant to be "high-growth"? Why do you specifically have to work at a startup? I believe getting some work experience is a good idea, mostly just because if you want to put other people's livelihood in your hands, one should probably mature a bit.
Additionally, this advice falls into the classic trap of "I did this, and therefore I think everyone else should". The advice could be true, or it could not, there is no way of knowing, so at the end of the day, the value of such advice is pretty low, IMO.
Specifically, high growth is useful because you can spend a few years there and get experience of doing many things at several different company sizes.
It means you get several opportunities to learn how to do a specific thing, and see how different attempts yield different results. At a company that grows more slowly you'll need to revisit things less frequently, which reduces your opportunity to learn.
You're right though, I don't have experience doing things other than what I've done. I can only speak to how useful my experience has been when going back to very early stage as a first employee, which has a lot of overlap with founder.
And in that sense, I'm continually thankful I have the experience I do in my current position. I think it means I'm materially more impactful, and I can only imagine performing significantly worse without it.
> You're right though, I don't have experience doing things other than what I've done. I can only speak to how useful my experience has been when going back to very early stage as a first employee, which has a lot of overlap with founder.
I think you're missing the critique: you don't know how useful your experience has been just because you experienced it. This is why systematic studies are necessary: to collate a lot of experiences to see what works and what doesn't (and even those are hard).
I think the content is still useful, though. Especially as it gives some examples of the type of challenge that appear routinely when scaling a company, and why experience seeing this before can help you avoid similar mistakes if you ever start your own thing.
I'd personally love to see people write competing posts from other angles, even if they too will be limited by the author's own experience.
It would be great to hear what type of stuff you can learn from working at a large corporation was particularly useful when starting a company. I'd read that in a heartbeat!
Because startup companies are by definition high-growth. The term has become significantly overused by clueless journalists and business types looking to pad their resumes with buzzwords.
The needs of a startup are quite different than (and often conflicting or opposite to) the needs of a stable, large company. So if you have learned "what good looks like" elsewhere and have no first-hand experience in a high-growth environment, then you as a founder may be prone to decisions that are a poor fit in the context of a startup, which by definition is a high-growth. Launching an "ordinary" (i.e. non-high-growth) new business in an established niche will have much more overlap with previous work experience at some corporation than trying to get product-market fit for a startup.
Let's take it as a given that the needs of a startup are different from a stable, large company. That doesn't mean working at a startup is the best way to learn how to make your own startup. You could work at a company that is seriously dysfunctional and learn things you shouldn't. You could work at a company that just fell into amazing success and not learn anything that applies to the startup you'll make.
I've worked at several startups, but my experience has been that I've been relatively siloed in my work. Maybe I wasn't taking advantage of the startup experience, but aside my limited view at standups, I didn't know how the sausage was made in different areas of the company. I couldn't see how it all fit together, because I had an incomplete picture.
For me, it was good to see that the person who started the start up I worked at was just a normal guy. He hired this CTO though that was amazing to work with.
Unfortunately, my impostor syndrome (along with my inexperience) became quite crippling and I had to leave.
Looking back, I probably should have left sooner or been comfortable with standing up for myself.
We have a "Founders Program" for people that know they want to start a company in the next few years. I think it's better to have full transparency on both sides:
As the company: You get highly motivated, amazing talent
As the employee / future founder: You make your intention clear to leave in x months to start your own thing and can openly discuss strategy for your company with the current founders instead of hiding your side projects.
I took this idea from Mighty / Supabase.
Application process is simple, pitch me at mike@luabase.com. Tell me what you want to do to grow Luabase and what you're thinking of doing for your company.
We have a few people who are explicitly at incident.io to gain experience of how to build companies. It may be that they won't go to do this, but their time here will put them in a great position to do so, if they ever want to.
I've seen some companies who have a standing offer to angel invest in your start-up too, though I was never sure how I felt about that.
On the angel investing, I was thinking that was the next logical step too but rather than building an internal mechanism and pulling focus I wonder if you could just partner with an early stage vc to give them first look in return for special consideration and earlier mentorship or something. Tons of early vc's with dry powder and minimal differentiation to lean on!
So we are doing exactly this, which is cool! I think the primary value is in leveraging the investor network, as you say, though the angel investment is a nice bonus.
That's a super cool program, props to you for actually putting it in place! I guess the next step is to also have a small internal vc mechanism (or partnership with a vc firm) that gives the first check to people who join? I know that'd be a huge plus for me just as an option for something I could potentially rotate to in the future if I was thinking of joining a new co, it definitely sends a strong pro-entrepreneurial signal regardless of whether you're founding something or not.
We'd never write checks out of the company, but I personally angel invest and make intros to our investors and any others I've talked to. I've pitched nearly every VC someone would want to talk to.
Really, the secret ingredient was McKinsey? Maybe I'm biased but except for one person, I've never worked with McKinsey folks (and working in Germany you work with many) and thought they'd be great entrepreneurs
I think I failed to communicate this nuance in the article, but my major point was how to most quickly develop the experience you'd need to start your own company.
I'd imagine McKinsey is a great place to see loads of companies and be exposed to a lot of useful stuff. But it probably won't pack as much relevant experience into as short a time as several years in a start-up 5-10x'ing in size.
Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson – two of the GoCardless founders – both left McKinsey to start GC. I'd imagine that experience was incredibly useful, though you'd have to ask them if they think it's more or less valuable than seeing things at a different start-up beforehand.
I would suggest joining even smaller than 40 if you can, although that’s not bad. I had joined a 250 person startup before founding my first company and I can say confidently I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I think the experience would have helped.
Either way you’re going to be figuring out a lot of stuff on your own, but I think I would have recognised that earlier and would have had a little more practice.
My experience at a few startups does not align but I support the overall thesis.
More than one startup talked a big game in hiring about the product, the customers and the culture only to be more of a cult of personality where decisions were made in private between cofounders despite being an "open" company, unequal pay despite "transparent" salaries with bands, a lack of managerial skills or care for personnel management (once told not to bring my feelings to work) and in almost every single instance a technical founder or early engineer that cannot or will not share work by delegating.
The most important things I have learned have absolutely came from being involved with startups and 90% are what NOT to do.
The good thing is I identified what I love:
"Devops" and adding automation and structure to processes very early. Everyone thinks is has to get in the way or will slow them down. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Building people is was more fun than building tech but you have to be on top of your hiring game early on. And you have to be willing to share and trust.
You have to ship. But that doesnt mean you dont invest in yourself. If you have money for 100 days then build for 100 days. If you have money for 2 years then build for 2 years. This means making that investment in your tools and your process.
Lastly, if you are B2B, buy a SOC2-in-a-box and get it over with and use something like auth0 or workos and just be ready with SSO integrations. Dont put off the foundational tablestakes of doing business with other tech companies.
Last suggestion deserves a caveat. Unless more than 5% of your revenue will unconditionally require SOC2, you should avoid doing it and accept the small revenue hit.
But you are correct, if you do need it, you should do it as early as you can and buy it out of the box as much as you can. I recommend Tugboat Logic for this.
For those that do not know, an audit is going to cost AT LEAST $20k but the total cost could be more than $50k (certainly more if you are paying market rate and you account for the team's time to pull everything together). And the requirements can cause side effect costs (penetration tests, etc).
As an incident management tool, getting certified was a thing we knew we needed early.
Gotta hand it to Chris (one of our founders) who came from being Director of Platform at Monzo (a UK neobank) and had spent years battling auditors, and knew exactly how to play it.
Kinda hammers home the point of my article... but about three months into our company life, we were SOC 2 certified, and it didn't feel like much effort at all.
In case anyone is looking for actionable advice, we used Vanta to help us through the process. If you're funded, I think it's well worth the money.
How do you pick a high-growth startup that makes it through several stages? It's like saying the best way to make money is to pick stocks that beat the market.
Look for the phrase "scale-up" instead of "start-up", these are usually well-funded, up-and-running companies that still have some of the start-up mentality but without the financial worries.
Of course, some of these are already a decade old and may employ hundreds or thousands of people already, so YMMV; they might just be like older, boring enterprises, just not as formal or fixed in their ways.
Those are companies that believe they have product market fit though. At that point they are starting to transform from a startup into an established company.
So most of the early stage learnings can no longer happen.
Look at their investors. When interviewing, ask to speak to the investors. See what they say. When speaking with founders do they have numbers they can show or is it pure show-personship?
I mentioned this above, but unlike an investor you don't have to pick a start-up that exits successfully for you to gain really valuable experience that can help you on your own.
Pick a company with a team you respect, a product you connect with, and has money in the bank (just completed a funding round).
You can't go much wrong if you do that, at least in terms of learning.
Work in a startup where the founder has done it before and top management has some experience. I've worked in many startups and seen many more, and if people are not knowledgeable enough, you can't learn a great amount of things.
Follow a top CEO/CTO as person 2-10 with a market you like...
... And then:
* Learn how 0->1 , product market fit, and overall process works, which you miss by joining growth-stage
* Grow from working with customers hands-on to becoming an area owner with responsibility around customer journey, revenue, hiring & firing, etc. VP Sales, early CTO/Dir of Engineering, CTO where you are heavy on sales/solutions engineering flow in big enterprises, ... . Working for a VP/director/manager is different from owning a part of the business, especially where you have a teneous & sales-oriented external aspect like revenue or customer success. Likewise, not owning the customer journey hides a lot, which is easy to miss in a growing company as specialization happens fast, esp in engineering.
* Pick carefully on enterprise vs consumer, which market within that, and which internal teams you work with. That's the customer persona you need to live & breathe later.
Not easy!
Also, fwiw, there is a big class of professional startup people who are 'scale up' experts that can take a working product, VC capital raised by other people, and help that grow faster. The OP's advice is more for getting on that track. And from a founders perspective: you can just hire them, everyone wins. Just don't confuse that with a 0->1 skillset, not inherent..
This article is not really about what’s unique about working at a startup that can give you an advantage when founding your own, but more about how to accelerate the learning of skills required to do so. Hence, the emphasis on high-growth startups.
But, obviously, not all high-growth startups can provide an environment of rapid learning. It’s not just about high-growth; it’s also about how much output the startup is trying to extract from its people. The more they try to extract, the faster the learning cycle. In that case, a high-growth startup with limited resource seems to be the ideal company to work for.
I wish I had had that opportunity back in 1985 when I founded my first one, but being outside of the Bay Area (as in 1500 miles away) there were basically no software startups at all, and with no internet/web/ycombinator etc, no way to learn anything except by trying and failing. We did ship our product, do marketing, make some sales but not enough so we had to sell the product and close down. Today I know all things I did wrong but back then you were working in a world unlike today, and not even one person to ask as everyone starting software companies back then was just as clueless unless you were in a few places in the country. It's hard to explain to people today just how hard this was (for example I tried to borrow some money at a local bank to buy computers, and when told we were a software company, the loan officer assumed we were making ladies undergarments).
A rather unique take on spreadsheets that would wind up influencing others to try experimentations on the spreadsheet idea, but all were ultimately killed by Excel, as what happened to us. Search "trapeze spreadsheet" on google if you care to know more.
Very cool. I think one doesn't need to join a startup for such experience nowadays. Simply joining YC/XYZ accelerator might help get a structure around the million things that are now institutional knowledge so you can focus on what matters.
No doubt my desire to start my own thing has increased 10x since joining a startup (back in November)
Why? I think it's a mix of:
- Getting comfortable building from scratch (we're early stage so almost everything we are doing right now is from the start)
- Getting comfortable with new technologies that previously felt inaccessible to me (ML, AI)
- Founders are very transparent with the operational and legal details of our startup, so I learn a bit here and there about the non-technical hard things
- The chase for the first dollars. This is really energizing (and hard) part of where I am at right now. It can be prone to burnout, but I do now want to try and go for my first $100/month
Most startups don't know what they are doing, so first-time starter-uppers get the wrong idea. Instead of moving at a steady pace without burnout, the lesson they can take away from it is that startups are all about heroics and working until 2AM while chugging tequila.
There are a lot of clowns out there with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger who run these companies (usually into the ground).
I've worked at multiple startups sub 50 to >1000 (unicorn status) and have founded and sold my own company. I've also worked at a few of the FAANGs. This is common advice, especially among VCs since it's one of the key benefits used to pitch prospective employees on giving up that fat FAANG salary, but in my personal experience, it's not so cut and dry.
Working in a startup will brand you as a startup person and help you meet VCs which may make it easier to raise. It'll also show you the problems that that particular startup faces and give you n=1 degree of pattern matching. On the flip side, something like YC can give you the same benefit or just shipping a for-profit side project on the side. Additionally, given how poorly run most startups are today, I'd posit that you're actually in more danger of learning the wrong lessons than the right lessons by joining a startup. At the end of the day, the truth is likely to be Peter Thiel's observation that joining the right, highly successful, high growth startup as a very early employee is a great way to learn exactly 1 method of starting a successful company--the way that company did it. But if the startup you join isn't that rocketship, you've only learned how to (or how not to) achieve that particular path of failure or mediocrity.
Not particularly great advice though, because then the challenge becomes identify those startups. And if you could do that reliably, I'd suggest you switch careers into VC instead :)
I'm not sure I agree with the comparison of picking a start-up to join being the same as one you might invest in.
At least, in terms of this article, a start-up that has growth ambitions and has just raised a round is a great bet. Unlike a potential investor, you didn't need to get in before that round to make the investment worthwhile, and in a sense you don't care as much about the company itself being an outsized success: not if your primary goal is around learning, which I think is legitimate, especially early in your career.
Similarly, I suspect it's not quite right to assume lessons in one start-up don't apply to others. In London at least, there's a strong network of people across the start-up scene who talk a lot. Many of those start-ups have very similar cultures and ways of working, similar enough that they hit the same problems and lessons learned it one often translate to others.
My intention, writing this article, was to encourage people to view joining a start-up with momentum as a valuable learning experience before they start their own thing, possibly more valuable than a big corporation or just jumping into start-ups themselves.
I think finding companies that can provide you with that growth isn't too hard, and I'd be happy to help anyone who wanted to find them, if they wanted it :)
The point is that the valuable lessons and growth on how to effectively build a successful startup only occurs at those high success high growth companies. I've been at successes and failures. You learn much more from success.
I agree with plenty of what you are saying, at the same time I believe that joining problematic start-ups or failing start-ups can teach you plenty on how not do things.
Remember that before succeeding you have to fail and improve in a cycle of n times until you succeed. If you succeed without failing then there is a high probability of luck being involved.
I see that in real life at the moment, the part about the badly run start-up. With some experience, it is easy to spot the mistakes. Most employees are too young / unexperienced so realize it. Heck, half of the middle management is still at their first jobs out of university. And man, it shows. Nowhere near FAANG in terms or organisation or best practices.
Great place to learn a thing or two, if you have the necessary background and experience.
I agree. I joined a few smaller startups and saw plenty about how NOT to do things. Only one I joined a larger company did I feel happier (in hindsight). And now if I went back to a startup, I’d feel more confident about whether the company is run poorly and how much I can help it.
Some problems are organizational immaturity and can be fixed. Some problems come from leadership and won’t change as long as those leaders are there.
There really are millions of lessons to be learned though, not just the “how to be successful”. If all you did was working at a big corp or at a FAANG you will run into tons of issues which you will have to deal with at the same time as founder-related issues.
There is way more than one lesson to learn from each startup. You will hopefully learn how to hire (and possibly fire) people. You will get insight into the nitty gritty of keeping the lights on at a company (taxes, payroll, office leases, etc...), and you will get familiar with the typical fundraising cycle. Most people don't appreciate how fast 18 months to two years of funding can run out. Going through that stuff once or twice when you don't have the pressure of being the founder can be very beneficial. And while going through an accelerator can be a substitute, I can't imagine that encountering a lot of this stuff for the first time while trying to start your first company would be anything less then very stressful.
For most employees, the best deal for them financially is to go the FAANG route. But I absolutely recommend working at a startup if you are hoping to one day start your own. It should be said that most startup employees are not going to start their own company (even ones who think they will). So certainly keep that in mind. But I suppose another benefit is working at a startup is probably a good way to gauge if starting a startup is something you could handle. After having worked at one for a while, I have certainly come to more realistic understanding of what kind of startup I would be comfortable founding. I almost certainly would prefer to bootstrap a small project rather than go the VC route, but I think I would feel pretty comfortable taking VC money if the opportunity called for it. But I have also come to realize that the best fit for me in my next role is probably not as a founder, but most likely as a very early employee of another startup. But this time around I will have a much better idea of what to look for in the founding team.
I've worked at multiple startups before starting my own, some were more useful than others. In my experience only in lead or above positions do you actually get exposure to these things - a random IC doesn't really get much insight into the company's finances, raising, negotiations, hiring, etc.
From those I was a lead at I got some valuable experience (including what not to do) & also contacts (some former director/C-level people I'm still in touch with). I still learned the vast majority from actually having to handle it myself in my own startup but I think I would have learned even less (in that particular area) if I was working at amazon or google before instead.
Fair enough. I am an IC, but also an early-ish employee. And the startup I currently work at might be anomalous in how much they share about the company. With that said, if you are joining a startup to get founder level experiences, you almost certainly have some agency in this matter (that is kinda the point of working at a startup after all, you get more input and higher level input than at BigCo.) Go out and talk to folks about what they are working on. Ask the founders to share details about the company, including board slides, financial details, and product initiatives. If they don't oblige, it probably makes sense to work somewhere else.
Is more more useful than having a longer runway from big co savings?
Doubtful.
Most of the lessons you learn are either going to be
1. General startup lessons (This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...)
2. Lessons specific to the problem you're trying to solve (Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night)
Working at a startup will teach you a little of 1, and none of 2.
So I'd easily trade the knowledge gained during two years of working at previous startup for 2 extra months of working on my startup.
> Is more more useful than having a longer runway from big co savings? Doubtful.
Having worked at a startup before, I now know to never risk a substantial amount of my own money on the venture. The risk of failure is too high. I would either a) go the side project->bootstrap route or b) have angel or accelerator money lined up, which should be easy because having worked at a startup before, my network now includes angel investors.
> This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...
I have participated in Startup School. It certainly has some value, but it is in no way a substitute for working at a startup. Not even close. Also, your competitors have access to the same resources, so it is not exactly a competitive edge.
> Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night
That is called marketing and market research. Almost every startup in existence does it. And if you work at a startup, you will get a close up look at how it is done, and you will get some valuable lessons on what to do and what not to do. And having worked at a startup, I now also have a list of potential freelancers in case I wanted to contract that work out.
What position were you in that you worked closely with the marketing team and the angel investors?
I was a dev, so I never interacted with either of those groups closely. And when I started my own startup our dev doesn't really interact with marketing and has never met our investors.
Engineer. Employee #7. Maybe as an addendum to my above comments, my startup is fairly open about all of our operations. Other than peoples salaries, pretty much everything about the company is discussed at our all hands. Additionally I just like to ask people what they are working on. It is a good conversation starter.
Maybe another lesson here, is if you are running a startup, consider oversharing with your employees. A fair number of them may be there because they are trying to figure out if the next step for them is founding a company. And oversharing is a good way to keep them engaged. I have been at my current startup for 6-7 years, and would definitely not have stuck around this long had I not felt like I was learning much.
>Additionally, given how poorly run most startups are today, I'd posit that you're actually in more danger of learning the wrong lessons than the right lessons by joining a startup
this can be more valuable in many ways, I've literally taken notes about things NOT to do when it comes to things like meetings, processes, etc.
Exactly, you get to see how early (or late) decisions have scaled up, for better or for worse.
You have to take an intelligent approach though, you can't just go in the opposite direction, e.g. excess meetings can be very damaging to engineers, so let's do 0 meetings.
I agree you can learn many lessons about what not to do. The broader point I'm making here is that there's a billion things not to do and a few things you should do. The successful startups will also make mistakes, iterate, and teach you the things not to do but teach you how to figure out what you should be doing. The unsuccessful ones just stubbornly plod forward and you, the employee, just know you guys screwed it up, but have no idea how to find success.
TL;DR YMMV, but it's much more valuable to learn a selection of "winning moves" you can apply than it is to learn a bunch of "losing moves" not to apply.
+1 Don't think this working for a startup offers much advantage for an engineer if they later decide to work on their own.
If you already know programming, there isn't a lot of value add that couple years of startup experience offers in terms of your programming skills.
The skills that you don't have -- Sales, marketing, hiring -- you will still not have. Working for a startup, as say, a frontend engineer for couple years does not help you get better at Sales. You'll need to hire for them or rely on co-founders anyway. The "wearing multiple hats" trope is extremely over hyped in my experience.
Agree with the "what not to do" not being valuable (and that's most startups). You can read that in HN comments every day. Sure you can learn "I must not do X or my devs will feel shitty and leave", but what is the answer to "how can I keep my top performers happy and growing so they don't leave and instead make the company a rocketship?"
What I really want to know is how to make a buddying startup a high growth startup. And only a tiny amount of companies can give you that, and only if you are working in leadership roles.
I disagree, my very first job was at a startup in lieu of a big company. I think I was very naive at the time and thought I knew how things worked coming out of business school. I learned tons of what not to do and saw what I thought were pretty big mistakes like not having tests, not talking to customers and actively saying no to user requests. And despite all this, the company was still afloat and was still growing.
It gave me a lot of hope tbh that you can make several mistakes and still have a decent shot.
And I learned tons of what to do correctly. I saw what "rockstar" engineers were actually. I drank from a firehose from a tech standpoint.
>Not particularly great advice though, because then the challenge becomes identify those startups.
Only 1 out of 100 companies, if that, VCs invest in don't go out of business. Even with their ton of experience, their smart people, and all kinds of opportunities that you don't have, it's little more than guesswork on their side.
Trying to look for what is going to be a successful startup is a fool's errand. Pure luck.
This is much more well-put than I'd have managed to write. Had a couple years of startup experience and I feel like the instability and "wrong lessons" were too much for me personally. IMO a lot of people conflate working in a startup with the experience of being a more senior engineer becoming a founder or early employee with similar levels of autonomy. I worked in roles during my first ~5 years where I was the 4th or 5th engineer and was basically given narrowly-defined tasks to complete, with no great guidance on accomplishing them, and with my coworkers too busy to document or explain how to do basic things like run parts of the codebase locally, connect to the db, etc.
You can get a lot better mentorship in those more "boring" traditional jobs at larger companies. You can get that in a startup environment too, but depending on the startup the degree to which that's actually something people prioritize and have capacity for varies wildly. I guess I'd recommend trying smaller startup environments if you happen to already know everything about their tech stack and/or have a decent amount of experience as a SWE already. Both are probably useful but I've personally gotten a lot better ROI growth-wise when working on an established team with stable goals, time to mentor, document, write tests, etc.
Want to found a startup? Just become great at your craft. Dont waste time with success stories and their advices, because it is all survivor bias. Just keep building.
This and “never give up” are the only solid startup advice one should follow.
What I work on today I can imagine myself doing until I die.
I’m 15 years into my first startup and 3 into my second. Maybe it takes a simpleminded person to have that patience but that’s how you win.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadI've been speaking with friends about starting their own companies recently, and one thing it's made me consider is what experience would best prepare you to become a founder.
Having spent my career in start-ups, the idea of founding my own without first working at one and seeing what works terrifies me. There's so much stuff you only learn from doing it over and over again, at different company sizes, and seeing how it works/doesn't.
I thought it might be useful to share some of that experience, if only to justify why joining an existing start-up can be an amazing education for anyone wanting to start their own. As opposed to, for example, joining an existing big-corp or jumping straight into start-ups without that experience.
Actually if you had the chance to work at a company that became a unicorn, you will have better chance to get founding which increase the chance that your company is going to work, so yeah.
Except for that confidence and founding part I'm not sure it is valuable
Also in a startup you're more likely to need to wear multiple hats and deal with uncertainty, which are two things you'd definitely need to deal with even more in your own company.
When we decide to do something, such as make key hires, build new teams or invest in infrastructure, we have way more confidence that we're doing it at the right time. And when we do it, it's 90% what we need, skipping so many of the painful intermediate stages I've seen before.
It makes a huge difference in velocity, which is key for successful start-ups. So while you're right about funding and network, you execute better too.
In this case: the startup success rate of those who worked for startups vs those who worked in some other institutions (or for some, no work at all).
Sure, working at a startup might make you be confident at making decisions, but will that confidence lead to good results when you’re a founder? Working at another place can give you confidence as well, but again, will it help you get the results you want in your startup?
Anyhow, I’m not sure the answers matter much because the author didn’t write much about the uniqueness of the skills learnt in startups. He emphasised more on velocity of learning skills that can be learnt in many places, but high-growth startups can provide the fastest route.
I think that is the best way to find suitable people outside your specialty where you can properly judge people’s integrity, ability, and their match with you (working style, filling the holes in your skills, compatibility, boss vs employee).
I have done this, no I have seen other successful entrepreneurs do it.
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
https://www.zippia.com/founder-jobs/demographics/
The difference is that if you have this experience when starting a company, it can help you avoid so many stumbling blocks, and you can skip forward to more mature company stages.
While you can't really compare two companies, I think it's interesting that the company I currently work at (incident.io) has only taken a year to go from me joining as the first employee to 40 people + series A + hundreds of customers now.
There's no way we'd have moved so fast if it wasn't a case of replicating what we already knew worked, tweaked for the environment we found ourselves in.
So yes, it doesn't mean you can't be successful as an inexperienced founder, but I do think it makes a difference in terms of execution.
Which I guess makes sense, as they've been exposed to certain industries from top to bottom, as well as people with enough funds to actually invest.
I was under the impression that starting a company in general and 'starting a startup' are not exactly the same thing, though I surely might be wrong about this.
We're all entitled to our beliefs, but this seems very specific to me. Why doe sit have to be "high-growth"? What if your startup isn't meant to be "high-growth"? Why do you specifically have to work at a startup? I believe getting some work experience is a good idea, mostly just because if you want to put other people's livelihood in your hands, one should probably mature a bit.
Additionally, this advice falls into the classic trap of "I did this, and therefore I think everyone else should". The advice could be true, or it could not, there is no way of knowing, so at the end of the day, the value of such advice is pretty low, IMO.
It means you get several opportunities to learn how to do a specific thing, and see how different attempts yield different results. At a company that grows more slowly you'll need to revisit things less frequently, which reduces your opportunity to learn.
You're right though, I don't have experience doing things other than what I've done. I can only speak to how useful my experience has been when going back to very early stage as a first employee, which has a lot of overlap with founder.
And in that sense, I'm continually thankful I have the experience I do in my current position. I think it means I'm materially more impactful, and I can only imagine performing significantly worse without it.
I think you're missing the critique: you don't know how useful your experience has been just because you experienced it. This is why systematic studies are necessary: to collate a lot of experiences to see what works and what doesn't (and even those are hard).
I think the content is still useful, though. Especially as it gives some examples of the type of challenge that appear routinely when scaling a company, and why experience seeing this before can help you avoid similar mistakes if you ever start your own thing.
I'd personally love to see people write competing posts from other angles, even if they too will be limited by the author's own experience.
It would be great to hear what type of stuff you can learn from working at a large corporation was particularly useful when starting a company. I'd read that in a heartbeat!
I got lucky, in that GoCardless gave me a load of opportunity and I grew a lot with the company, which opened more doors.
Not every company is like this, so that's a significant caveat to this advice. But ideally you'd find companies that are.
Unfortunately, my impostor syndrome (along with my inexperience) became quite crippling and I had to leave.
Looking back, I probably should have left sooner or been comfortable with standing up for myself.
As the company: You get highly motivated, amazing talent
As the employee / future founder: You make your intention clear to leave in x months to start your own thing and can openly discuss strategy for your company with the current founders instead of hiding your side projects.
I took this idea from Mighty / Supabase.
Application process is simple, pitch me at mike@luabase.com. Tell me what you want to do to grow Luabase and what you're thinking of doing for your company.
0 - https://luabase.notion.site/Founders-Program-16f8d963328a47d...
We have a few people who are explicitly at incident.io to gain experience of how to build companies. It may be that they won't go to do this, but their time here will put them in a great position to do so, if they ever want to.
I've seen some companies who have a standing offer to angel invest in your start-up too, though I was never sure how I felt about that.
https://github.com/StellateHQ/future-founder-promise
So we are doing exactly this, which is cool! I think the primary value is in leveraging the investor network, as you say, though the angel investment is a nice bonus.
https://github.com/StellateHQ/future-founder-promise/pull/6
We also offer full benefits in the US if the person needs them. Finding healthcare in the US without it being thru an employer is a huge pain.
He recently got handed multiple billions to expand from 500 HC. Secret ingredient: two decades at Mckinsey.
Biggest trend other than experience is TIME. Most businesses take a DECADE to really get going.
I'd imagine McKinsey is a great place to see loads of companies and be exposed to a lot of useful stuff. But it probably won't pack as much relevant experience into as short a time as several years in a start-up 5-10x'ing in size.
Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson – two of the GoCardless founders – both left McKinsey to start GC. I'd imagine that experience was incredibly useful, though you'd have to ask them if they think it's more or less valuable than seeing things at a different start-up beforehand.
Either way you’re going to be figuring out a lot of stuff on your own, but I think I would have recognised that earlier and would have had a little more practice.
More than one startup talked a big game in hiring about the product, the customers and the culture only to be more of a cult of personality where decisions were made in private between cofounders despite being an "open" company, unequal pay despite "transparent" salaries with bands, a lack of managerial skills or care for personnel management (once told not to bring my feelings to work) and in almost every single instance a technical founder or early engineer that cannot or will not share work by delegating.
The most important things I have learned have absolutely came from being involved with startups and 90% are what NOT to do.
The good thing is I identified what I love:
"Devops" and adding automation and structure to processes very early. Everyone thinks is has to get in the way or will slow them down. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Building people is was more fun than building tech but you have to be on top of your hiring game early on. And you have to be willing to share and trust.
You have to ship. But that doesnt mean you dont invest in yourself. If you have money for 100 days then build for 100 days. If you have money for 2 years then build for 2 years. This means making that investment in your tools and your process.
Lastly, if you are B2B, buy a SOC2-in-a-box and get it over with and use something like auth0 or workos and just be ready with SSO integrations. Dont put off the foundational tablestakes of doing business with other tech companies.
But you are correct, if you do need it, you should do it as early as you can and buy it out of the box as much as you can. I recommend Tugboat Logic for this.
For those that do not know, an audit is going to cost AT LEAST $20k but the total cost could be more than $50k (certainly more if you are paying market rate and you account for the team's time to pull everything together). And the requirements can cause side effect costs (penetration tests, etc).
Gotta hand it to Chris (one of our founders) who came from being Director of Platform at Monzo (a UK neobank) and had spent years battling auditors, and knew exactly how to play it.
Kinda hammers home the point of my article... but about three months into our company life, we were SOC 2 certified, and it didn't feel like much effort at all.
In case anyone is looking for actionable advice, we used Vanta to help us through the process. If you're funded, I think it's well worth the money.
Of course, some of these are already a decade old and may employ hundreds or thousands of people already, so YMMV; they might just be like older, boring enterprises, just not as formal or fixed in their ways.
So most of the early stage learnings can no longer happen.
Pick a company with a team you respect, a product you connect with, and has money in the bank (just completed a funding round).
You can't go much wrong if you do that, at least in terms of learning.
Follow a top CEO/CTO as person 2-10 with a market you like...
... And then:
* Learn how 0->1 , product market fit, and overall process works, which you miss by joining growth-stage
* Grow from working with customers hands-on to becoming an area owner with responsibility around customer journey, revenue, hiring & firing, etc. VP Sales, early CTO/Dir of Engineering, CTO where you are heavy on sales/solutions engineering flow in big enterprises, ... . Working for a VP/director/manager is different from owning a part of the business, especially where you have a teneous & sales-oriented external aspect like revenue or customer success. Likewise, not owning the customer journey hides a lot, which is easy to miss in a growing company as specialization happens fast, esp in engineering.
* Pick carefully on enterprise vs consumer, which market within that, and which internal teams you work with. That's the customer persona you need to live & breathe later.
Not easy!
Also, fwiw, there is a big class of professional startup people who are 'scale up' experts that can take a working product, VC capital raised by other people, and help that grow faster. The OP's advice is more for getting on that track. And from a founders perspective: you can just hire them, everyone wins. Just don't confuse that with a 0->1 skillset, not inherent..
But, obviously, not all high-growth startups can provide an environment of rapid learning. It’s not just about high-growth; it’s also about how much output the startup is trying to extract from its people. The more they try to extract, the faster the learning cycle. In that case, a high-growth startup with limited resource seems to be the ideal company to work for.
Also founding a startup makes financial sense, working at one usually does not.
Why? I think it's a mix of:
- Getting comfortable building from scratch (we're early stage so almost everything we are doing right now is from the start)
- Getting comfortable with new technologies that previously felt inaccessible to me (ML, AI)
- Founders are very transparent with the operational and legal details of our startup, so I learn a bit here and there about the non-technical hard things
- The chase for the first dollars. This is really energizing (and hard) part of where I am at right now. It can be prone to burnout, but I do now want to try and go for my first $100/month
Most startups don't know what they are doing, so first-time starter-uppers get the wrong idea. Instead of moving at a steady pace without burnout, the lesson they can take away from it is that startups are all about heroics and working until 2AM while chugging tequila.
There are a lot of clowns out there with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger who run these companies (usually into the ground).
Working in a startup will brand you as a startup person and help you meet VCs which may make it easier to raise. It'll also show you the problems that that particular startup faces and give you n=1 degree of pattern matching. On the flip side, something like YC can give you the same benefit or just shipping a for-profit side project on the side. Additionally, given how poorly run most startups are today, I'd posit that you're actually in more danger of learning the wrong lessons than the right lessons by joining a startup. At the end of the day, the truth is likely to be Peter Thiel's observation that joining the right, highly successful, high growth startup as a very early employee is a great way to learn exactly 1 method of starting a successful company--the way that company did it. But if the startup you join isn't that rocketship, you've only learned how to (or how not to) achieve that particular path of failure or mediocrity.
Not particularly great advice though, because then the challenge becomes identify those startups. And if you could do that reliably, I'd suggest you switch careers into VC instead :)
At least, in terms of this article, a start-up that has growth ambitions and has just raised a round is a great bet. Unlike a potential investor, you didn't need to get in before that round to make the investment worthwhile, and in a sense you don't care as much about the company itself being an outsized success: not if your primary goal is around learning, which I think is legitimate, especially early in your career.
Similarly, I suspect it's not quite right to assume lessons in one start-up don't apply to others. In London at least, there's a strong network of people across the start-up scene who talk a lot. Many of those start-ups have very similar cultures and ways of working, similar enough that they hit the same problems and lessons learned it one often translate to others.
My intention, writing this article, was to encourage people to view joining a start-up with momentum as a valuable learning experience before they start their own thing, possibly more valuable than a big corporation or just jumping into start-ups themselves.
I think finding companies that can provide you with that growth isn't too hard, and I'd be happy to help anyone who wanted to find them, if they wanted it :)
Remember that before succeeding you have to fail and improve in a cycle of n times until you succeed. If you succeed without failing then there is a high probability of luck being involved.
Great place to learn a thing or two, if you have the necessary background and experience.
Some problems are organizational immaturity and can be fixed. Some problems come from leadership and won’t change as long as those leaders are there.
For most employees, the best deal for them financially is to go the FAANG route. But I absolutely recommend working at a startup if you are hoping to one day start your own. It should be said that most startup employees are not going to start their own company (even ones who think they will). So certainly keep that in mind. But I suppose another benefit is working at a startup is probably a good way to gauge if starting a startup is something you could handle. After having worked at one for a while, I have certainly come to more realistic understanding of what kind of startup I would be comfortable founding. I almost certainly would prefer to bootstrap a small project rather than go the VC route, but I think I would feel pretty comfortable taking VC money if the opportunity called for it. But I have also come to realize that the best fit for me in my next role is probably not as a founder, but most likely as a very early employee of another startup. But this time around I will have a much better idea of what to look for in the founding team.
From those I was a lead at I got some valuable experience (including what not to do) & also contacts (some former director/C-level people I'm still in touch with). I still learned the vast majority from actually having to handle it myself in my own startup but I think I would have learned even less (in that particular area) if I was working at amazon or google before instead.
Is more more useful than having a longer runway from big co savings? Doubtful.
Most of the lessons you learn are either going to be
1. General startup lessons (This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...)
2. Lessons specific to the problem you're trying to solve (Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night)
Working at a startup will teach you a little of 1, and none of 2. So I'd easily trade the knowledge gained during two years of working at previous startup for 2 extra months of working on my startup.
Having worked at a startup before, I now know to never risk a substantial amount of my own money on the venture. The risk of failure is too high. I would either a) go the side project->bootstrap route or b) have angel or accelerator money lined up, which should be easy because having worked at a startup before, my network now includes angel investors.
> This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...
I have participated in Startup School. It certainly has some value, but it is in no way a substitute for working at a startup. Not even close. Also, your competitors have access to the same resources, so it is not exactly a competitive edge.
> Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night
That is called marketing and market research. Almost every startup in existence does it. And if you work at a startup, you will get a close up look at how it is done, and you will get some valuable lessons on what to do and what not to do. And having worked at a startup, I now also have a list of potential freelancers in case I wanted to contract that work out.
I was a dev, so I never interacted with either of those groups closely. And when I started my own startup our dev doesn't really interact with marketing and has never met our investors.
Maybe another lesson here, is if you are running a startup, consider oversharing with your employees. A fair number of them may be there because they are trying to figure out if the next step for them is founding a company. And oversharing is a good way to keep them engaged. I have been at my current startup for 6-7 years, and would definitely not have stuck around this long had I not felt like I was learning much.
this can be more valuable in many ways, I've literally taken notes about things NOT to do when it comes to things like meetings, processes, etc.
You have to take an intelligent approach though, you can't just go in the opposite direction, e.g. excess meetings can be very damaging to engineers, so let's do 0 meetings.
TL;DR YMMV, but it's much more valuable to learn a selection of "winning moves" you can apply than it is to learn a bunch of "losing moves" not to apply.
If you already know programming, there isn't a lot of value add that couple years of startup experience offers in terms of your programming skills.
The skills that you don't have -- Sales, marketing, hiring -- you will still not have. Working for a startup, as say, a frontend engineer for couple years does not help you get better at Sales. You'll need to hire for them or rely on co-founders anyway. The "wearing multiple hats" trope is extremely over hyped in my experience.
What I really want to know is how to make a buddying startup a high growth startup. And only a tiny amount of companies can give you that, and only if you are working in leadership roles.
It gave me a lot of hope tbh that you can make several mistakes and still have a decent shot.
And I learned tons of what to do correctly. I saw what "rockstar" engineers were actually. I drank from a firehose from a tech standpoint.
Only 1 out of 100 companies, if that, VCs invest in don't go out of business. Even with their ton of experience, their smart people, and all kinds of opportunities that you don't have, it's little more than guesswork on their side.
Trying to look for what is going to be a successful startup is a fool's errand. Pure luck.
You can get a lot better mentorship in those more "boring" traditional jobs at larger companies. You can get that in a startup environment too, but depending on the startup the degree to which that's actually something people prioritize and have capacity for varies wildly. I guess I'd recommend trying smaller startup environments if you happen to already know everything about their tech stack and/or have a decent amount of experience as a SWE already. Both are probably useful but I've personally gotten a lot better ROI growth-wise when working on an established team with stable goals, time to mentor, document, write tests, etc.