I have been working for startups through my career of 9 years now (phew!) and the company I will be working for next is a startup too. I got a thought today – why do people work in startups at all, even though conventional wisdom tends to favor working for larger, well established companies. I wanted to write this to put my thoughts together and reinforce my decision for working for startups. Enough has been written about why start a company/work for a startup/pros and cons of working for startups vs large companies, etc. I will only be writing about things that matter to me.
I started my career with a 6-month internship at EMC and soon enough I realized that I need more excitement at work. Not that there was no excitement there but it’s totally different as compared with a startup. To give you a perspective, in the first 2 months at EMC, I had read user manual of the product I was supposed to work on, technical documentation, attended multiple planning meetings of the next project and hadn’t written a single line of code as compared to learning ruby, ruby on rails, going through the codebase of buildabazaar and pushing a bug fix to production in the first 2 weeks at infibeam, where I joined as a full time employee soon after my internship at EMC. Again, not saying that planning is not important but the sheer amount of time that I spent before getting to the interesting stuff killed the excitement.
People is also one big aspect. The amount of responsibility that lies on the shoulders of somebody working in a startup is immense and often times, each individual would be fulfilling multiple roles and still be very humble. They might be facing problems with work-life balance, fatigue, being called on weekends but still there’s something that keeps them going. It’s not just the founders but even the employees. I guess, it’s pure passion that’s driven by a personal connect with the product, the company, founders and a sense of pride in what they are doing. The same people could work for large companies, drawing much higher salaries, in a more relaxed environment. I was amazed by the skill and versatility my team showed when I was running Jiffstore.
For me at this juncture, one of the biggest factors is Impact. Just the idea that what I do has a big impact on the company – the product, business, culture itself gives chills down my spine but also adds to the excitement of working at a startup. Sure, it’s a lot of responsibility but that’s what differentiates boys from the men, isn’t it?
To conclude, there might be different reasons why people work for startups and it’s about priorities too. In different stages of life, one might make completely different choices. Also, a lot of large companies have preserved the startup culture they had during their early days and it would be wrong to generalize lot of things about startups or large companies. I consider working in startups to be a reflection of life itself. You have so many constraints and yet it’s up to you to make it large and live in abundance.
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