Why I left consulting and joined a startup
blog.keen.io
My first real blog post... I hope you like it!
blog.keen.io
Despite how well I was treated in general, it was the most angst-inducing and soul-draining experience of my life. I left after only a few months and felt incredibly spoiled for doing so. Now I'm a smelly startup hippy again.
Consulting offers a great balance between personal freedom, and cash flow, and that to me is one of its greatest strengths. You get the small team comraderie too, as you mentioned. With a startup, if you can build that product, yes, then a startup is ideal. But that's extremely tough.
For me, I'm willing to sacrifice a small piece of my freedom in exchange for that cash flow.
My corporate job for five and a half years after college offered amazing cash flow and other perks and I didn't feel like I was sacrificing anything. But eventually I felt like the pace at which I was learning slowed down too much and I knew I needed to make a change. With the nest egg I had built up over the years, I knew I could quit without sacrificing a ton.
Starting Keen was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Do you think your opinion will change in the next five years?
Consulting gives me that freedom, which I appreciate more and more as the years go by.
It's too early to tell if this approach really has legs but if I can keep it up it's hard to imagine what would entice me back into a salaried job again.
I think the only thing that would make me consider a full-time salaried job again is a family to support.
What's your cost of living like in Nha Trang?
Vietnam is very cheap. I can live quite comfortably here for about $1000/month and I could squeeze it down to about $600 if necessary. I'm currently renting a big, comfortable house within walking distance of the beach for about $350 a month. If you're at all interested in the hacker commune idea you could easily fit four people in a house this big and basically live for peanuts.
(I'm in a fairly similar situation, spent a few weeks in Vietnam this April, currently spending 3 months in Thailand, and then headed off to Japan - pretty much planning on bouncing around from country to country over the next few years.)
Japan would be fun too but you burn cash a lot faster there.
One of my major concerns is finding apartments. How do you manage to find short term leases, especially when you don't speak the language? I'm also curious about how you handle health insurance and cell phone usage. Could you point me in the right direction with these things? Any links would be great, my email is in my profile if you don't want to keep going on this thread.
For insurance I've used World Nomad's travel insurance.
You'll find that a lot of startups will be very flexible to your needs, the worst you can do is ask and see.
Only going off of anecdotes here, but doesn't it take being a very early or significant employee plus a big dollop of luck to get enough equity to make it "interesting" in net worth terms? (The author seems to be an early employee, but from employees of startups I know, being employee 43 or whatever gets quite boring equity wise..)
Here is Joe Spolky's on how equity ought to be divided: http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/6949/forming-a-new-s...
It gives you an idea of reasonable percentages.
edit: changed he to she
And maybe it's just me, but I almost stop thinking of startups as 'startups' when you're at 40+ employees. I don't know if that's fair, or even rational, but it's much harder to be the same plucky young company with 40 employees that you were with three to five.
Probably I'm just being obnoxious though, because clearly there are cases where it's still 'obviously' a startup, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any that don't involve VC.
In my mind, startup-ness is not about size, but about culture. You've got invaders and you've got occupiers. Invaders have to improvise, have to be agile, have to seek out a better way because they have no incentive to uphold the status quo. Occupiers just keep doing what they already do, optimizing it perhaps, but never truly innovating. There are 40-person companies out there who've already become occupiers, and there is one 400 billion dollar giant who is arguably still in invasion mode.
I also like Eric Ries' definition: a group of people operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Would you say by that definition, GitHub isn't a startup? (Since they're well established in their niche, despite being young, and have a huge subscriber base forking over wads of cash every month?)
What I failed to convey is the feeling of accomplishment from personally contributing to the company, and the notion of ownership in the company. In a huge consultancy, you never really feel like you're personally moving the needle of the enterprise. You're paid for your work and you get bonuses based on company performance, but that's just one form of compensation.
I like that in a small startup, salary & equity compensation is just one piece of the picture. I like that I can increase the value of the company itself, and the company itself is important to me personally. I'm compensated tangibly in the form of salary & equity and intangibly in the form of pride.
In part its the level I'm "expected" to go into at (Manager), when I don't have consulting experience and the reluctance for firms to let me willingly start at a lower level to learn those internal skills and knowledge. I also doubt start-up experience is valued as much in the countries I'm most likely to work in, as it is in the US.
Another issue which is largely unsaid, but was in one interview when I made final round interview with the Partner, was that I was possibly "too old" for Consultant level for most of the larger firms doing the international work I'm most interested in. I was older than all of their managers and he had concerns they wouldn't be able to give me instructions. My reply was that I was willingly going in at that level to learn and if feel intimidated to give me instructions, that says more about their own potential and level of confidence.