Are you there yet? - Why working for startups can be a coming of age journey for future founders...

A lot of ongoing talk these days around why everyone should startup. Starting-up has been popular in the west for a while. The garages and the university dorms have been at the epicentre of trillion dollars worth of value creation just in the last couple of decades. Startups are in the mainstream back home in India as well now, with prime time television slots taken over by the startup founders pitching their business and raising funds for the next million/ billion dollar idea.?

As I get my morning cup of tea, a few thousand miles away, in Amsterdam, I read about how the Dutch government is running their own program to help startups scale, providing necessary resources and helping create an attractive ecosystem. They are also inviting the next, dare I say, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ , to come and build the future innovation in this country, which may change the world.?Similar programs are being run in other EU countries as well.

To put it very mildly, starting-up and raising funds has gone mainstream quite universally. However, today I am going to write about something else. I am going to write about how inspite of the temptation to startup, if you end up taking/ continuing in a job at a startup instead,? it may not be the worst thing in the world and on the contrary, prepare you well for when you eventually do startup.?

First off, let me start with who I am. I am Varun Kaw, almost all of my career I have worked in Pre-IPO tech companies in their hyper growth phase. I have had roles in e-commerce, mobility, and payments across different geographies of the world, with companies like Snapdeal , Uber, and Stripe(where I currently work). I got a seat in all of these organisations when they had or were about to hit escape velocity, which put me in a unique position to experience and learn from the immense scale and pace they produced before they went into orbit.

Most quarters I would think I have been reasonably successful and satiated my inner desire to build value in these roles. I was promoted in pretty much all my stints and if compensation is any measure of establishing success, I increased my base salary by about 20 fold during the last 10 years, a CAGR of about 35%.

So coming to the question of why working for a startup you didn't co-found may not be a bad thing and potentially may be just the gig for you. There are quite a few things that I believe you could seek and do,? if you are building someone else’s dream, and getting paid for it, however my top 5s in no particular order below:?

• Solve problems:? You know what's the best thing about working in this company, a senior leader asked me once as we were interviewing a new manager for the team- ‘you can just go into any part of this company and find problems. And, if you want to fix them please be my guest! ’. I don't think it can be summarised better than that. For most of my stints, I jumped around solving one problem to another, creating value and just learning a new skill-set every single time. Exposure to these wide breadth of initiatives has given me a company wide perspective on things which helps shape my business outlook at a strategic level and at times at the deep tactical level, vital for any startup launch I believe.

• Get your skin in the game: You spend a?big majority of your life at the workplace and it's only fair?you have equity in the company you help build. Once you get a stake, here’s what happens- It starts to hurt you when a company bet fails and it gives you pride when that launch in that new market just turns out better than the plan. As a bonus, experiencing this pain of failure and the highs of success will prepare you for trials and tribulations of starting your own venture

• Find the startup within the startup: Every now and then as the startup matures, things can get a bit 'easy'. If easy is not what you like, find your next gig within the company. ‘Always be hustling’ was one of the core values at early Uber. You would be surprised to know how different teams in the same organization can have such different intensity and most times give you a different skill-set or even a different environment to thrive. In my six years at Uber, every time that I thought it was getting monotonous, I just changed things a bit. It was probably my second week of getting bored in my role and as I went to my manager talking about it she said - want to set up and lead our operations centre in Jakarta? I said sure. I was on a plane a week later, and in an Ikea store over the weekend buying furniture for our new office.?

• You are in a controlled environment right now, experiment: Be friends with change. Things are going to change a lot and most of the time it is going to be an opportunity. Opportunity to learn, to lead and keep your head when a lot of the folks around you are lost.? I like to think that working for big startups is like running a controlled experiment in a laboratory, where things can go wrong but usually there is a way to control the outcomes. When you are building your own startup from scratch, there are a lot more variables that can affect your outcomes and the probability of failure is very high, so you need to nail the controlled environment to have any chance of succeeding at that. So go on, tinker/ experiment!

• Understand what good looks like, you will need it later: When you are working for big startups you will usually be operating at some sort of scale. Big startups really are the best place to understand what good looks like and charting how the organisation got there. Later, if you start your own thing, among other things it gives you perspective on 1) what is the point of arrival for your business as you look to scale, and 2) what are the inefficiencies that can creep over time and how you can potentially quash them right when they pop in the beginning??

Those are all my top 5s. I will end by saying, working for a startup can be a pitstop for you, where you want to spend your hours meaningfully after your previous failed venture, or it can be the warm up session you need before you start running the marathon of an entrepreneur. Whatever it might be, there is only upside to the gig if you are there for the right reasons and know what you want out of it.?

Thanks for reading! Comments and thoughts are welcome. - Varun Kaw        

#startups #techjobs #founders #sharktankindia #india #entrepreneurship #netherlands