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There is way more than one lesson to learn from each startup. You will hopefully learn how to hire (and possibly fire) people. You will get insight into the nitty gritty of keeping the lights on at a company (taxes, payroll, office leases, etc...), and you will get familiar with the typical fundraising cycle. Most people don't appreciate how fast 18 months to two years of funding can run out. Going through that stuff once or twice when you don't have the pressure of being the founder can be very beneficial. And while going through an accelerator can be a substitute, I can't imagine that encountering a lot of this stuff for the first time while trying to start your first company would be anything less then very stressful.

For most employees, the best deal for them financially is to go the FAANG route. But I absolutely recommend working at a startup if you are hoping to one day start your own. It should be said that most startup employees are not going to start their own company (even ones who think they will). So certainly keep that in mind. But I suppose another benefit is working at a startup is probably a good way to gauge if starting a startup is something you could handle. After having worked at one for a while, I have certainly come to more realistic understanding of what kind of startup I would be comfortable founding. I almost certainly would prefer to bootstrap a small project rather than go the VC route, but I think I would feel pretty comfortable taking VC money if the opportunity called for it. But I have also come to realize that the best fit for me in my next role is probably not as a founder, but most likely as a very early employee of another startup. But this time around I will have a much better idea of what to look for in the founding team.

I've worked at multiple startups before starting my own, some were more useful than others. In my experience only in lead or above positions do you actually get exposure to these things - a random IC doesn't really get much insight into the company's finances, raising, negotiations, hiring, etc.

From those I was a lead at I got some valuable experience (including what not to do) & also contacts (some former director/C-level people I'm still in touch with). I still learned the vast majority from actually having to handle it myself in my own startup but I think I would have learned even less (in that particular area) if I was working at amazon or google before instead.

Fair enough. I am an IC, but also an early-ish employee. And the startup I currently work at might be anomalous in how much they share about the company. With that said, if you are joining a startup to get founder level experiences, you almost certainly have some agency in this matter (that is kinda the point of working at a startup after all, you get more input and higher level input than at BigCo.) Go out and talk to folks about what they are working on. Ask the founders to share details about the company, including board slides, financial details, and product initiatives. If they don't oblige, it probably makes sense to work somewhere else.

This is... Almost exactly how I feel, to the detail. Glad I'm not alone in that!

Is working at a startup useful? Yes.

Is more more useful than having a longer runway from big co savings? Doubtful.

Most of the lessons you learn are either going to be

1. General startup lessons (This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...)

2. Lessons specific to the problem you're trying to solve (Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night)

Working at a startup will teach you a little of 1, and none of 2. So I'd easily trade the knowledge gained during two years of working at previous startup for 2 extra months of working on my startup.

> Is more more useful than having a longer runway from big co savings? Doubtful.

Having worked at a startup before, I now know to never risk a substantial amount of my own money on the venture. The risk of failure is too high. I would either a) go the side project->bootstrap route or b) have angel or accelerator money lined up, which should be easy because having worked at a startup before, my network now includes angel investors.

> This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...

I have participated in Startup School. It certainly has some value, but it is in no way a substitute for working at a startup. Not even close. Also, your competitors have access to the same resources, so it is not exactly a competitive edge.

> Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night

That is called marketing and market research. Almost every startup in existence does it. And if you work at a startup, you will get a close up look at how it is done, and you will get some valuable lessons on what to do and what not to do. And having worked at a startup, I now also have a list of potential freelancers in case I wanted to contract that work out.

What position were you in that you worked closely with the marketing team and the angel investors?

I was a dev, so I never interacted with either of those groups closely. And when I started my own startup our dev doesn't really interact with marketing and has never met our investors.

Engineer. Employee #7. Maybe as an addendum to my above comments, my startup is fairly open about all of our operations. Other than peoples salaries, pretty much everything about the company is discussed at our all hands. Additionally I just like to ask people what they are working on. It is a good conversation starter.

Maybe another lesson here, is if you are running a startup, consider oversharing with your employees. A fair number of them may be there because they are trying to figure out if the next step for them is founding a company. And oversharing is a good way to keep them engaged. I have been at my current startup for 6-7 years, and would definitely not have stuck around this long had I not felt like I was learning much.

I agree. I joined a few smaller startups and saw plenty about how NOT to do things. Only one I joined a larger company did I feel happier (in hindsight). And now if I went back to a startup, I’d feel more confident about whether the company is run poorly and how much I can help it.

Some problems are organizational immaturity and can be fixed. Some problems come from leadership and won’t change as long as those leaders are there.

I'm not sure I agree with the comparison of picking a start-up to join being the same as one you might invest in.

At least, in terms of this article, a start-up that has growth ambitions and has just raised a round is a great bet. Unlike a potential investor, you didn't need to get in before that round to make the investment worthwhile, and in a sense you don't care as much about the company itself being an outsized success: not if your primary goal is around learning, which I think is legitimate, especially early in your career.

Similarly, I suspect it's not quite right to assume lessons in one start-up don't apply to others. In London at least, there's a strong network of people across the start-up scene who talk a lot. Many of those start-ups have very similar cultures and ways of working, similar enough that they hit the same problems and lessons learned it one often translate to others.

My intention, writing this article, was to encourage people to view joining a start-up with momentum as a valuable learning experience before they start their own thing, possibly more valuable than a big corporation or just jumping into start-ups themselves.

I think finding companies that can provide you with that growth isn't too hard, and I'd be happy to help anyone who wanted to find them, if they wanted it :)

The point is that the valuable lessons and growth on how to effectively build a successful startup only occurs at those high success high growth companies. I've been at successes and failures. You learn much more from success.

+1 Don't think this working for a startup offers much advantage for an engineer if they later decide to work on their own.

If you already know programming, there isn't a lot of value add that couple years of startup experience offers in terms of your programming skills.

The skills that you don't have -- Sales, marketing, hiring -- you will still not have. Working for a startup, as say, a frontend engineer for couple years does not help you get better at Sales. You'll need to hire for them or rely on co-founders anyway. The "wearing multiple hats" trope is extremely over hyped in my experience.

This is much more well-put than I'd have managed to write. Had a couple years of startup experience and I feel like the instability and "wrong lessons" were too much for me personally. IMO a lot of people conflate working in a startup with the experience of being a more senior engineer becoming a founder or early employee with similar levels of autonomy. I worked in roles during my first ~5 years where I was the 4th or 5th engineer and was basically given narrowly-defined tasks to complete, with no great guidance on accomplishing them, and with my coworkers too busy to document or explain how to do basic things like run parts of the codebase locally, connect to the db, etc.

You can get a lot better mentorship in those more "boring" traditional jobs at larger companies. You can get that in a startup environment too, but depending on the startup the degree to which that's actually something people prioritize and have capacity for varies wildly. I guess I'd recommend trying smaller startup environments if you happen to already know everything about their tech stack and/or have a decent amount of experience as a SWE already. Both are probably useful but I've personally gotten a lot better ROI growth-wise when working on an established team with stable goals, time to mentor, document, write tests, etc.

I agree with plenty of what you are saying, at the same time I believe that joining problematic start-ups or failing start-ups can teach you plenty on how not do things.

Remember that before succeeding you have to fail and improve in a cycle of n times until you succeed. If you succeed without failing then there is a high probability of luck being involved.

>Additionally, given how poorly run most startups are today, I'd posit that you're actually in more danger of learning the wrong lessons than the right lessons by joining a startup

this can be more valuable in many ways, I've literally taken notes about things NOT to do when it comes to things like meetings, processes, etc.

Exactly, you get to see how early (or late) decisions have scaled up, for better or for worse.

You have to take an intelligent approach though, you can't just go in the opposite direction, e.g. excess meetings can be very damaging to engineers, so let's do 0 meetings.

Learning what not to do is not an effective use of time.

I disagree, my very first job was at a startup in lieu of a big company. I think I was very naive at the time and thought I knew how things worked coming out of business school. I learned tons of what not to do and saw what I thought were pretty big mistakes like not having tests, not talking to customers and actively saying no to user requests. And despite all this, the company was still afloat and was still growing.

It gave me a lot of hope tbh that you can make several mistakes and still have a decent shot.

And I learned tons of what to do correctly. I saw what "rockstar" engineers were actually. I drank from a firehose from a tech standpoint.

Agree with the "what not to do" not being valuable (and that's most startups). You can read that in HN comments every day. Sure you can learn "I must not do X or my devs will feel shitty and leave", but what is the answer to "how can I keep my top performers happy and growing so they don't leave and instead make the company a rocketship?"

What I really want to know is how to make a buddying startup a high growth startup. And only a tiny amount of companies can give you that, and only if you are working in leadership roles.

>Not particularly great advice though, because then the challenge becomes identify those startups.

Only 1 out of 100 companies, if that, VCs invest in don't go out of business. Even with their ton of experience, their smart people, and all kinds of opportunities that you don't have, it's little more than guesswork on their side.

Trying to look for what is going to be a successful startup is a fool's errand. Pure luck.

I see that in real life at the moment, the part about the badly run start-up. With some experience, it is easy to spot the mistakes. Most employees are too young / unexperienced so realize it. Heck, half of the middle management is still at their first jobs out of university. And man, it shows. Nowhere near FAANG in terms or organisation or best practices.

Great place to learn a thing or two, if you have the necessary background and experience.

There really are millions of lessons to be learned though, not just the “how to be successful”. If all you did was working at a big corp or at a FAANG you will run into tons of issues which you will have to deal with at the same time as founder-related issues.

Anti know-how can be a pretty good teacher as well. 18 months at a terribly run startup showed me all things not to do when I started my own.

I agree you can learn many lessons about what not to do. The broader point I'm making here is that there's a billion things not to do and a few things you should do. The successful startups will also make mistakes, iterate, and teach you the things not to do but teach you how to figure out what you should be doing. The unsuccessful ones just stubbornly plod forward and you, the employee, just know you guys screwed it up, but have no idea how to find success.

TL;DR YMMV, but it's much more valuable to learn a selection of "winning moves" you can apply than it is to learn a bunch of "losing moves" not to apply.