A Startup Education | Hacker News Reader

A Startup Education

brianbailey.me

25 pointsrelation5 comments

The knowledge you gain through this experience and the people you share it with will make you much more valuable to future companies, especially other startups.

The danger being that you rank up from being worth $30k a year to $60k a year (and convince yourself that this is great progress), while your buddies at BigCo have been stagnating in their march from $100k a year to $120k a year.

Seriously, though: like the mindset about focusing on career growth, but don't ignore BigCo. I personally couldn't stand working for one but you can learn things and meet people at BigCo, too. That's one of many reasons why so many people go with BigCo.

There's also the 3rd option, MediumCo.

You can work at a company of 40-80 or so employees and have all the benefits of working for a big company without the red tape, politics, and inertia. If you pick a good one you can pretend you are working at a startup, but with better hours and a competitive salary.

I've worked at startups before and the biggest thing I've learnt is that a separation between owners and decision makers is a great thing.

> the biggest thing I've learnt is that a separation between owners and decision makers is a great thing

There are plenty of counter examples to this. Facebook is the most obvious successful one.

I would say starting your own startup is the better decision.

> At most startups, you will have unlimited opportunities to push your skills as far as you can. With ambitious plans and small teams, you can often set the direction of the design, development, support, or marketing of the product. You will have the opportunity to decide which problems to solve and how to solve them.

You can do that at BigCo too - just not crappy ones. GE does this all the time, and so does Google, Facebook, Sony, Samsung and many other decent multinationals - start-ups don't own cool (as much as you want it too).

Also - I'm very sceptical of the learning opportunities that are shown by most start-ups. The vast majority of startups make a product that never gets traction, is not technically difficult to implmement and generally adds no value to the world (it may even actively subtract value - Zynga/failed start-ups/lost years of productive life).

Conversely - say I work at GE, I might increase the fuel efficiency of diesel engines by 3-4%. Multiply that out, and I've just saved the world an insane amount of fuel, CO2 emissions and costs.

Oh and I get paid a lot more by the way, with a ton of benefits, future opportunities and way more impact.

Or I could build an app for hipsters.

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