Working at a startup — Notes from my first week
by Vinit Joshi
This. Couldn’t describe it better. Working with professors for academic projects or doing an industry internship prepares you for a lot of things. But not this. The person who coined the phrase “hit the ground running” must definitely have been working at a startup. Here’s five reasons why my first week has surpassed all my expectations.
1. The training wheels are off from Day 1
Most of the more established companies have some sort of an orientation programme where they train fresh recruits. The duration ranges from 1–6 months so that they gradually get acclimatized to the work environment and get familiar with the job at hand. Now, while this may not necessarily be a bad thing, but for someone who hates spoon-feeding and likes to figure out sh*t for himself, this can be a drag. For us (me and two others), it was no different . Right from the outset, we, to use that oft-repeated phrase, “were thrust into the limelight”. We were handed a bunch of articles to read, even before we started and those in engineering were asked to set up and get familiar with tools and frameworks like Android Studio, Jenkins Continuous Integration and Amazon AWS. If that doesn’t get your head spinning, I don’t know what will. Startups work at a breakneck pace and everyone has to be on their toes constantly, or risk getting left behind.
2. The People
This is a no-brainer. Most of your co-employees in a start-up are 20-somethings who are still trying to figure life out, let alone how to run a startup. I know I’m just starting out but even in my short stay here, I’ve picked up a lot of useful things from my colleagues, things which I might not have learnt as easily in the bureaucratic setting of a corporation. It’s easier to tell your startup CEO that he is not doing his job properly and not worry about getting fired than your Product Head at Wipro. Let’s face it. It’s much better to get approving looks from your 25 year old startup colleague than the death stare from your 43 year old Product Manager when you’re caught swiping right that cute girl on Tinder.
3. The Freedom
Working at a startup gives you unlimited freedom to carve out your own path, rather than be shackled to something / someone you don’t like. In a startup, you are your own boss. You have to create your own tasks, set your own short-term and long-term goals and ensure that you meet your deadlines, else risk a ton of work piling up. You are given the freedom to fail multiple times, with the expectation that you will eventually get it right. To put things in perspective, I was charged with the task of preparing a deck for the weekly investor meeting, that too on my second day. The deck went through 4 iterations before it was deemed acceptable. In every iteration, I learnt something new about what works and what doesn’t. All 4 iterations were completed in a couple of days. That’s how fast you’re expected to learn.
4. Your opinion counts
The smaller workforce in a start-up enables you to speak out and be heard. You have a voice, a strong opinion on things that matter. For example, all of the product design updates are shared on Slack (a tool we use for internal communication) and even though I may not know as much about design as the UX guy, but my views are respected and considered. Right now we are working on a card-based UI and and everyone’s opinions are taken into account for making small tweaks, till it feels just right. Consequently, it is in your own interest to voice your opinions, as what you say might ultimately shape policy and influence strategy. It can determine whether the company needs to stay on course or pivot to something new. I think this individuality is lost somewhere among the thousand other voices in a corporate
5. The Company Culture
The atmosphere in a startup is pretty relaxed. Nobody makes a fuss about clocking in your standard 8 hours of work. You can come in and go back whenever you like, you can even work from home if you don’t feel up for it someday. The only expectation is that YOU GET SH*T DONE.
In a startup, you won’t get ahead by cozying up to your boss, unlike the sycophantic algorithm deployed in some corporates. Group-thinking and being a yes man is avoided like the plague. Here, we are paid to have a different opinion. Everything is run transparently. Heck, even the whole team’s salaries were shared with everyone in a Google spreadsheet.
At Cubeit, it’s kind of a tradition to go out and play football every Tuesday and Thursday, which serves as a great camaraderie-building exercise and also offers you a chance to lambast your CEO for not making that run. We know that someone here is a pro at getting picked up by women just as we know that someone else just can’t hold down his liquor.
I’ve also come to realize that it is important (and interesting) to keep in touch with what is happening in the VC/startup ecosystem, and something we did yesterday helped me understand exactly what goes on in those hallowed VC/startup discussions. The exercise took the form of a role playing activity in which we were assigned the roles of VC, startup, and established company. The goal was to maximize the outcome for whichever firm you represented through negotiations. I was assigned Zilla, the largest online US real estate company (looking to make an acquisition), while the other two represented Lookdown.com and HardBank, an investor of Lookdown. Although I ended up paying 300 million dollars for the data science lab of Lookdown (epic fail :/), I learnt a lot about the scale of the numbers involved in funding, valuation and acquisitions.
These are some reasons why coming here and not jumping on the big corporate bandwagon is starting to feel like one of the best investment decisions of my life. In the coming year, I expect myself to grow exponentially, while getting put through the grinder every day. As Paul Graham said, “Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.”
I just joined Cubeit, and we are building an app that will make managing your content a breeze. Check out what we are doing at http://cubeit.io. If you’re excited and want to join us, look no further, we are actively hiring UI/UX Jedi for our team in Bangalore. Reach out to us at careers[at]cubeit.io or apply on our website.
