Will you thrive in a startup environment?

Before even completing my PhD, I had the opportunity to intern for a big company - employees were housed in a large five-story building, with about 30% of that being the engineering department.

This was a defining experience for me.

I realized that working at such a large company was not going to be a priority for me.

How I got to be an intern there and what happened at the end of my internship is quite comical so I will share the story with you.

In 2007, I was one of sixteen science students to join the inaugural group of the Kauffman Foundation Global Scholars program, where we would learn about entrepreneurship and launching a high-tech business. For three months, we had lectures from some prominent entrepreneurship figures, both academic and industry, and the program would end with a three-month internship of our choice.

Before placing us on a company in Kauffman’s large extended network, we were asked:

What would you like to take away from this internship?

My answer then, was:

To learn how large companies make decisions.

I just couldn’t fathom how a company with so many people could organize itself to decide on something.

Ha! Boy, was I in for a surprise.

At the internship, I was tasked to create a comparison between the company’s product and an open-source competitor that was gaining traction and was rightly making them worried. I showed up every day dressed in business apparel, did my research, and completed my report at the two-month mark.

A month later, at my exit interview, I asked about the report and whether a decision had been made. My manager said that the report wasn’t even read by anyone, yet. He then proceeded to tell me their plan of action.

I was baffled!

If the company already had a plan of action, why would they ask me to analyze their predicament for two months?

Because… while the company had already decided, having a document or other kind of artefact that could support that decision was valuable. If I wanted to be cynical, I would say that, to a certain extent, it shielded the managers if the plan failed.

For the next 15 years I worked for, or with, various startup organizations to bring their product to life. Then another 4 years building Zero to MVP from… zero (pun intended).

This is what I’ve learnt about being in startup environments and the kind of people who thrive in them:

• If you like creating order out of chaos, connecting the dots, experiencing a context on various levels and so on, you’ll thrive at a startup. If you require order to be effective, forget about it .
• If you only do what you are told to do and you stop when it’s done, either because you don’t care or you don’t know, you’re better off getting a job at a big company. If you understand the goal behind a task and you enjoy achieving the goal more than you enjoy completing the task, a startup is the way .
• If you care about what your title is more than you care about the work you do, “big corp”. If you value being able to say you work at this company more than the work you do, that’s a 50-50. My recommendation: find some meaning in how you spend ~8 hours a day.
• If it’s important to you that your contributions are more visible in the end product, don’t go working for a huge company with an established product where you’ll likely be tending to bugs or adding nice-to-have features. Many engineers working for such companies feel like “just” a “cog in the wheel”.
• If building something in a day and releasing it seems too fast or too pressured, definitely go for a large enterprise. Features (and anything really) will take weeks or months to be decided, budgeted, approved, planned, developed, tested for quality etc.

TLDR; if you want to be doing high-impact work and be recognized for it, to move fast and challenge yourself, sometimes more or in different ways than you have before, a startup is a good place to do that. Things will likely be a little chaotic and change quickly so you’ll need to be the kind of person who thrives in that, instead of hindered by it.

If you think that these are gross generalizations, they are! There are always exceptions that confirm the rules.

Whatever you decide, startup or large enterprise, be attentive to the culture of the organization you’re going and the kind of behaviors that are implicitly or explicitly rewarded there. Notice who and why goes “up” and who doesn’t and what that may mean to you. At Zero to MVP , we are proudly organized around merit: the best idea should win, not the largest title and our team members are rewarded according to their contribution.