One of the most important jobs of a founding entrepreneur is building the team with incredibly talented individuals. An interesting concern for the candidate considering joining a startup is the perception of risk.
“Don’t most startups fail?”
The short answer is yes. But it doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think. Here’s why. Let’s say you’re an incredibly gifted software engineer, a few years out of school, working at Amazon, Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. You’ve had a great mentor, learned a great deal about the craft of software construction, but you sense it might be more exciting to work for a startup. There’s just that nagging concern that they’ll go belly up 18 months after you join. So you stay put and keep daydreaming about joining the next Zillow, wetpaint or Redfin.
Let’s understand the facts. You have a strong education. You were recruited by, passed the interviews, and were actually hired into one of the big software companies. You benefited from the mentoring and learned how to build commercial software.
Then you jumped to a startup. You worked your butt off, learned the LAMP stack, became a pretty good Rails developer, if you do say so yourself. You even picked up a little Linux system administration, and tweaked your startup’s Asterisk VOIP system. And because everybody wears a lot of hats in a startup, you did some program management, some product management, even did some pre-sales work in the field. Then the company failed to raise another round of capital and laid off half the staff. You made the cut, but the mood was depressed. Finally they shut the doors and gave you a lousy two-weeks severance.
Did you make a mistake? Not at all. You are now a much more valuable contributor. You’re far more versatile. Your skills have been updated. There’s a huge shortage of good talent in the market. Microsoft still has 10,000 open reqs. I assume Yahoo, Google and Amazon are equally starved for good engineers. So you got 2 weeks of severance. Take another week or two at your own expense and spend a month finding the right company for your next stint.
If you suspect you’ll like the pace and energy of a startup, take the leap! While there’s a lot of risk of survival for the startup itself, there’s a lot less personal career risk than you might have initially thought.
The experience that I want to share is that you cannot just look at your career one job at a time, instead you have to think of your career as a piece-wise continuous journey with multiple rest stops. A good example is Youtube and its two co-founders who were entry level engineers when they met at Paypal. My own career is similar. If I focus on one startup at a time, it was a disaster. But if I look at it over a ten year span which happens to involve two startups, then it made more sense.
–Denny–
Denny K Miu
Startup for Less – Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs
http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/startup-for-less.html