Should college grads work at a startup? Here's my experience being employee #12.

I'll never forget receiving the message on LinkedIn:

"Hey Katie. I saw a few of your tweets and notice you're about to graduate. We're a startup just about to close our Series A and are looking for some help in marketing. Are you open to a conversation?"

It was spring of my senior year as a marketing major at Emerson College in Boston, and the very start of the recession that left many of us wondering how we'd ever achieve our dreams of being the next Don Draper in such a terrible job market.

So you can imagine my surprise to wake up one morning to a message from this Chief Operating Officer from a startup I'd never heard of. This was the early days of Twitter when it was just emerging as a platform for businesses, and this COO had been searching the social network to specifically find a recent marketing grad who could manage social in-house at his nascent B2B startup. He first found me on Twitter (@KatieMartell) then messaged me here on LinkedIn.

The day of the interview, I arrived to the office, located in the basement of a dentist. I opened the door to find a smiling sales guy in shorts and a backwards ball cap. He held a golf club in one hand, a beer in the other, while talking on a headset (likely closing another deal!). The CEO was setting up a cheap Ikea desk in the corner next to the mini-fridge, and I distinctly heard reggae music coming from the conference room. I didn't know what on Earth I'd walked into, but I'll never forget that day. It changed my life, forever.

I knew nothing of the industry this company was in, and did a lot of smiling and nodding in my interview as we discussed the power of crowdsourcing and future growth potential of the marketing technology sector. All I knew was that the passion and energy of this team was addictive, and I wanted to be part of it. The startup was NetProspex, a business data organization that welcomed me as their first marketer that summer. I was employee #12.

Over a period of four years and multiple rounds of funding together, we doubled the company in headcount and revenue each year, earned great press, and won countless awards. I traveled the country speaking, sponsoring and partying, (brand-building, of course) working alongside incredible people, and learning more about myself and the world at large than I can fit into a single post.

It was wild. It was terrifying. It pushed me to every limit and showed me what I could - and couldn't - do. It forced me to be creative, resourceful, and downright scrappy at times. It was fun. And unlike many startups, ours had a happy ending:NetProspex was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in early 2015 for $125M. I went on to continue my career as a marketer, even co-founding my own startup in the process before becoming a marketing consultant.

Now for the million-dollar question:

Should college marketing graduates work at a startup?

It depends.

Startup hiring is often the #1 challenge a startup founder faces. Between customers, product, business model, and financials, the team is one of the core pillars of a startup.

As my friend and client Mollie Lombardi says,

"In a startup, each individual is a huge percentage of the company. Bad hires resonate, loudly."

(She should know, she's a leading analyst in Human Capital Management.)

Most people are aligned to a certain phase of growth in a business. Those who are successful at early-stage organizations share some common traits. If you've just graduated from college, here's how to know if you're cut out for startup life:

If you punch above your weight.

Startups can't afford to hire employees who need an abundance of adult supervision. There's just no time. Each hire must multiply the efficiency of the team. This means taking on projects and problems that are "outside your job description" (really) or "beyond your comfort zone" (welcome to the real world.) It means saying yes, and figuring out how to deliver. It means having ideas, and seeing them through to execution. It means watching what successful people do, and exhibiting their strength, daily. (Even if, inside, you're freaking out.)

If you're comfortable with ambiguity.

You may have been hired with a job description, but every single day brings new challenges and decisions. Your intuition is what guides you towards a general direction that's in line with what the business needs. At a startup, this changes, constantly. If you're the kind of employee who needs a daily task list and clear-cut step-by-step instructions to do a good job, I'd venture to say startup life may not be for you. (And that's okay!)

If you're good at f*cking up.

You're going to make a lot of mistakes in your first job out of school. Learn how to deal with messing up. Own it, accept responsibility, understand consequence, and learn what went wrong.

That's all experience really is, a series of small successes and huge f*ck ups that you figure out how to fix, mitigate the damage, and avoid next time.

If you want to grow.

Startups are chaos. There's always too much to do, there's never enough time, or money, or experience, or validation, or proof to feel 100% confident in what move you should make. That's just reality for every employee in the business, and honestly, that's what makes it exciting. You are thrown into the deep end, and if you can be resourceful and learn how to swim, you'll be great.

If you can listen.

As important as it is to display confidence, and hustle, and swagger, and all that other "startup culture" bullsh*t that has seemingly become the norm, the only thing that really matters is how well you listen.

Can you really listen to what customers need? What partners need?

Are you able to shut up, really, and engage in conversations that matter? Can you put your own ego aside to learn from what many before you have already figured out?

This is the #1 most important skill you can cultivate in your first job out of school, and it matters.

Do it.

At the end of the day, like most things in life, a startup job is what you make of it, and you've got to really know yourself first before jumping in.

For those of you who are ready...

Do it, and don't look back. (Until you're asked to write a post like this about it. Then, look back, smile, and regret nothing).

#JobHunt

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