Here’s why you should join a startup over a big tech company
Big tech companies routinely top the lists of the most prestigious and coveted internships — and with good reason. Yet much of this stems from pressure to go to a company that people will immediately recognize and associate with success. In contrast, few students set out with the intent of working at (or starting) a startup — even though it can be just as rewarding, exciting and educational.
I spoke to co-founder of Traena and Pratt ’09, Chris Wade, and two DTech women currently working at NEA- and Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup Smartcar: Sydney Palumbo, Trinity ’18 and Smartcar employee #10, and Helena Merk, Trinity ’21 and current software engineering intern, to learn about how they fell in love with the startup life and their thoughts on the merits of working at a startup.
In 2016, Chris took a brief detour from his investment banking career to co-found Traena, an enterprise software startup based in Chicago that makes it easy for enterprise teams to learn from industry experts. The company was born out of his insatiable desire for self-improvement and the observation that consultants are paid $20K-$30K for afternoon-long training sessions at big companies. With Traena, he saw an opportunity to deliver consultant-grade, on-demand training to businesses at a fraction of the cost.
Although he hadn’t majored in CS — Duke graduated just 20–30 CS majors in 2009, and will graduate upwards of 400 this year — Chris had always harbored an interest in tech. He brought to the table his knowledge from the private equity industry of how to build and grow a company.
Similarly, the combination of business and tech drew Sydney Palumbo to the startup world. As an economics-turned-CS major, Sydney got her first taste of what it would be like to work at a small to mid-size company by interning at Fanatics in San Mateo, California in her sophomore and junior summers.
That experience gave her the confidence to take a leap of faith after graduation and join Smartcar — an API company enabling developers to connect to cars through simple HTTP requests that currently has just 15 employees — as a front-end software engineer in Mountain View. Since she started in June 2018, she’s built a documentation center and a dashboard for developers to access their API credentials as part of the developer experience team, and is currently rebuilding the homepage.
A Silicon Valley native, Helena grew up immersed in startup culture. She co-founded AdoptMeApp through a hackathon in 9th grade and, as an 11th grader, landed an internship at Bracket, a cloud security startup that was subsequently acquired by VMWare, through attending Hack@Brown. That experience was her first experience at a more established startup, and also showed her the importance of working on a product that she felt a personal connection to.
Currently, she’s taking her sophomore spring off to intern on Smartcar’s reliability engineering team. Though she’s only been there for two months, Helena has already contributed extensively to the codebase, represented Smartcar at a hackathon in Chicago, and helped out at a technical interview.
“I feel like I’m part of something — and I’m just an intern!” — Helena Merk
What’s life like at a startup?
A key aspect of working at a startup is how cross-functional the average day’s work is — even for full-time software engineers. Smartcar’s engineers are sometimes asked to write a technical blog post for the marketing team or help the business team with meeting a customer who’s having trouble integrating with the API. Although Sydney is formally a front-end software engineer, she’s also done the majority of the product design for Smartcar since she joined in June 2018. That’s been a good learning opportunity, allowing her to marry her interests in art and engineering at work.
Additionally, Smartcar’s engineering team holds standups together with the business team, which gives everyone insight into what’s happening in the company as a whole. “You have to figure out what you can do as an engineer that’s going to have the biggest impact on the company,” Sydney said.
“You’re just constantly learning new things, and you do much more than the typical software engineer, which is why I like it so much.” — Sydney Palumbo
That’s especially valuable because the non-software aspects of a startup can be more complex than building the software itself. Chris explained that there’s a big difference between academically building an app for class or a hackathon and getting a product to market.
For example, Traena is a hybrid tech startup whose business model depends on CEOs and consultants creating digital content on Traena’s software platform. Getting users onto the platform isn’t a software problem — it’s a business operations problem. “Having a vision is great, but the devil of it is tangibly creating a product that people need, want, and are willing to pay for today,” Chris said.
Challenges of the startup life
Everyone I spoke to acknowledges that working at a startup brings with it some challenges. For one, startups are lean, especially in their early stages. That doesn’t just mean you might not get tons of free swag. It also means that the features a startup chooses to include in its product have to be mission-critical.
“When you have a team of five people, you get to build one feature, not 20, for the next three months,” Chris said. “How does that one feature solve a problem that the users you’re trying to attract have? That’s really a lesson in limiting yourself and focusing on exactly the problem you want to solve.”
Another inevitable part of the experience of working at a startup is a lack of name recognition. “Everyone at Duke is super high-achieving, and that comes with the pressure of feeling like you need to finish Duke with a perfect job,” Sydney observed. “But when you choose to go to a startup, it can be hard to make that jump because you don’t get the validation that comes from telling people where you go and them immediately recognizing it.” Of course, this ignores the circumstance of being one of the first employees at a startup that subsequently becomes incredibly successful.
A third factor that counts against startups is risk. Unlike bigger companies which have a product that customers already love, Chris said, startups are by definition still unproven. With this comes the need to build quickly, estimate tradeoffs and move fast in a short period of time, in order to attract customers or investor funding and prove that the product works.
That’s no mean feat. It’s also why an employee’s alignment with the mission and values of a startup is crucial: “You need to love the product and believe in it enough for that to outweigh the risk,” Helena said.
“Yes, it is more chaotic, it is less structured, there is more risk — but there is nothing like the learning experience of trying to start something from scratch.” — Chris Wade
Is the startup life for me?
How should you decide if a particular startup is worth working at? Some considerations that informed Sydney’s and Helena’s decisions to work at a startup are:
- Are you excited to work with and learn from the founders?
- Are you passionate about the company’s mission and values?
- Do you love the product?
- Is the company well-funded?
- Do you think you can work well and have fun with the team?
- What kind of mentorship will you have?
- Overall, are you a good cultural and technical fit for the company?
Being a cultural fit for the team is important, not just in terms of the specific people at the company, but also in terms of being comfortable with the pace of work and a relative lack of guidance.
In the first sense, Helena has especially loved her time at Smartcar because, as she put it, “It doesn’t feel like I’m going to work; it feels like I’m building a product with friends.” Her colleagues are receptive to feedback, willing to give her ideas serious consideration, and open to one-on-one coffee chats about everything from coding philosophies to weekend plans. Being a cultural fit for your team in this sense is important no matter what size company you work at.
In the second sense, the fast pace of development and iteration at any startup means that employees cannot hope to be handheld. While Helena has a great mentor at work, she acknowledged that there isn’t always room for someone to guide you the whole way, and that startups ultimately need their employees to be self-starters. “The employee will not be successful if they don’t like that or thrive on that, and the company won’t be successful if they’re just getting bogged down and moving at the pace of a bigger, slower company,” Chris added.
If you’re self-motivated, an independent problem-solver, and comfortable with unknowns, then the startup life might be for you. As a startup co-founder, Chris says he often vets candidates by asking, “Is this person comfortable being in an environment where there will not be clear direction, where it’s, ‘Here’s the top five high-level things that we’re looking to do in the next 3, 6, 12 months. Go get it’?”
For this reason, Chris especially favors applicants who have run a student business or worked on side projects. This demonstrates their ability to problem-solve in the absence of strict requirements or clear directions. If you’re planning to intern at a startup, Sydney also recommends building up your skill set by starting a company on campus or building something of your own in general.
And if you’re still in the process of searching for an internship, Helena strongly encourages women not to sell themselves short. “There are all these stats about how guys will apply for jobs where they meet one of the requirements while women will only apply if they meet all of them. And you should fight that,” she said. “These are all technical skills you can learn; you just need to be a critical thinker and self-motivated.” (Smartcar’s blog has more advice for prospective applicants.)
Ultimately, and particularly for current college students, the time to try working at a startup is now. “If you’re interested in this and think it could be cool, there’s almost no better time to try it out,” Sydney said. “You don’t have deep roots in any company, job or career path, and you really have so little to lose.”
The Duke Technology Scholars program (DTech) promotes diversity amongst Duke undergraduates pursuing degrees in computer science or electrical and computer engineering through relationship-building, mentorship and hands-on experience. Learn more about DTech here.
