Considering Joining a Startup? Think Carefully!

At AdAstra Talent Advisors we place executives and technical professionals at NewSpace and Clean Tech startups. That means we understand the inner workings of startup environments and we understand what makes someone a great fit (or not) for that environment.?

When considering if a startup is the right fit for you, it is important to get really honest with yourself about how you operate. For the right people, a startup energizes and maximizes them. For others, a startup can feel overwhelming and exhausting.?

There are a few elements that make someone an excellent fit for a startup environment, and these? differ from what makes someone a great fit for a more established organization.?

Ownership

• At startups we are looking for people who take extreme responsibility. We are looking for people who do what they say they will do, own their mistakes and are able and willing to learn from them, and hold themselves responsible for getting their commitments across the finish line, regardless of the hurdles they meet along the way. For some people this sounds like a breath of fresh air - not being required to get buy-in from five stakeholders to approve every action that they’d like to take. To others, that sounds like an overwhelming weight to carry.?
• An important note to add here is that some of the most consistent and powerful messaging I hear from people who build their careers at startups is the pride and accomplishment they feel from being on these small teams and building something incredible together. The completion and satisfaction of making a truly measurable difference is one that people don’t often get at larger organizations, and it is a piece of working at a startup that leaves individuals fulfilled and eager to stay in the startup space.?

Self Starters

• In fledgling businesses managers often do not have time to do much hand holding through projects. Instead, managers are player-coaches. The expectation is for teammates to see a problem and come up with solutions. Instead of coming to their manager with a problem, they come to their manager with the first three ways they aimed to fix the problem and the next two suggestions they have to solve it. For people who are used to needing to wait weeks for approvals to try a solution, this can feel like break-neck speed. For people who are used to getting all solutions handed down to them, this can feel like overwhelming responsibility to think critically and design solutions themselves.?

Deep Partnerships

• At startups you often have one person doing the same depth and breadth of work as entire teams within established organizations. In order to do that, and especially in NewSpace and Clean Tech, you need the top talent available. Even once you’ve hired the top talent, they will need to learn from people with more experience and work as a team. This deep work and fast assimilation of information can feel like micromanagement to teammates who aren’t ultra hungry to learn and produce at high speed and levels.?

Breadth of Deep Knowledge

• At established organizations there are large numbers of brilliant people. Those brilliant people often get really specific in their areas of expertise. At startups, we are looking for brilliant people who are able to successfully own a project from cradle to grave. Not one subsection of the project, but the whole project, and know it well. This is one of the main factors that makes the work we do highly specialized, as the number of people who can do that breadth of work is quite limited.?

Drive to Create New Processes

• When interviewing professionals from established organizations we often hear that they are following a process that was created 10 years ago. At startups, you are building the processes. They haven’t been built before. This means a lot of additional work, and working your brain in a different way, and it means that you can build an optimized process that works for you and the intricacies of your team.?

Fast Pace

• Yes it may be cliché, but it’s also true. At large established organizations there are processes, approvals and bureaucracy, but for good reason. With such large teams needing to find harmony, more process is needed. Larger organizations with big teams can be negatively impacted by an employee who decides to ignore established processes in favor of their own solution, without full understanding of the effect it could have on other processes or systems.? At startups we want the best system and we want it as soon as possible. That means making decisions using fundamentals and all available information, and then adjusting if the outcomes aren’t sufficient.?

Passion?

• I’ve heard it said that some people work to live, and some people live to work. I don’t really understand the first one, since so much of my personal life enjoyment comes from producing high quality work. But I recognize that some people want work that is just a job that pays the bills. That is not a perspective that works well for startup team members. Startups require not just a dedicated mind, but a dedicated heart as well. We find that people who are successful in startups bring passion to their work.?

What other differences do you see between the talent that thrives at startups and legacy organizations?

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