Astrophysics and career trajectories in a hyper growth startup
Co-authored with
(Head of HR@ )The big bang theory, the astrophysics one, not the hugely successful TV Show, is a cosmological model explained in the following statement (from Wikipedia) :
The model describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of extremely high density and high temperature,[4] and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure.
In layman terms, it means that the universe started in an initially highly dense state and then expanded at an ever accelerating pace. It’s like plotting a bunch of points with a pen on a balloon and then blowing air in it. The distance between two points keeps expanding as the balloon gets bigger, despite the fact that they didn’t move.
It doesn’t take an astrophysicist to see the parallel with a hyper growth startup, starting with an idea (the highly dense state) and expanding at an ever accelerating pace.
In such a startup, the initial team, say the first 10 people, usually carve out what needs to be done in an organic way. Everybody contributes anywhere they can to keep hope alive. This can be illustrated by a couple of points drawn on a balloon.
People get titles such as Lead Engineer, Senior Engineer, Principal Engineer, Head Of, which they sometimes may not have gotten so “easily” in other more mature environments. This is part of the implicit contract when joining early at a startup :
The employee takes a risk by joining early but gets some level of title inflation as a reward (or a curse in some cases, more on that later).
An early stage startup is a high-octane environment where creating value, against all odds, comes at a very high cost — emotional or physical or both. As humans, we seek rewards to compensate for such “pain”. Those rewards come in the ultimate form : a Promotion.
Fast forward after a phase of very fast expansion and the Tech team grows from 10 to 30 people. Complexity increases, certain skills become critical, whereas they weren’t earlier.
The first Wall hits.
Say you joined this startup 2 years ago, as a new grad, and after 18 months, got promoted from SW engineer to Senior SW engineer, right before Christmas the previous year. You were very happy and told your parents who were very proud of you. “Senior” is a really nice moniker to have on one’s title!
You couldn’t help but think : “My next promotion is in sight, I just need to work hard for 18 more months and I am gonna make them even prouder!”
As the team grew in the subsequent months, the system started to grow more complex. The pace of iteration needed to increase. New people joined the team to help out, often at a similar grade as you. This is when you start feeling that things are getting harder — wah these people are smart! — and they are so used to these new patterns that were introduced to help tame the complexity. There is so much to catch up on and so little time!
Every day at the job feels like torture, like being a failure. You start losing confidence and you start questioning everything. You consider quitting but you compose yourself and you decide to stick with it and keep fighting.
What happened here is that as the universe expanded, there was more room for new galaxies to form and they happen to be bigger and stronger, dwarfing the original ones.
You get past this rough patch and you keep working hard to catch up with these new people. 18 months later, you get to review time, you’re happy with how far along you’ve been in your journey as an engineer, and you expect that next promotion. After all, you’ve been at this company since almost day-1 and you’ve seen it all. You clearly deserve a promotion more than these newcomers.
The second Wall hits
Your manager tells you that the expectation for the next level on the engineering ladder have changed and that unfortunately, you need to continue working as you’ve been doing for 3 years now, and that you’re on the right track to get that next promotion but it won’t be this year. You feel extremely disappointed. It’s like starting a marathon and you realize that the finish line keeps moving as you get closer to it. How did this happen?
The answer goes back to our balloon analogy. If the engineering ladder has N levels, the gap between two levels gets larger and larger as things go. This is true in any organization as it’s usually not a linear scale, but it’s even more so in a hyper growth startup. Climbing between the first and second steps on the ladder when the team has 10 members is much much easier than climbing between step two and three when the team has 30 members et and it gets even worse later.
As the universe’s expansion accelerates, the speed of expansion becomes much faster than the pace of people’s progress, leading to a perception of stand still or even going backward!
This is where it’s important to take a step back and contemplate the options here.
- Keep at it and commit for the long run if the startup’s culture offers mentoring and growth opportunities. Two ideas come to mind. The first one is to latch on to the newcomers, who have, hopefully, some new ideas which should help you make progress faster, especially given that you already have the advantage of being soaked in organizational knowledge. The second is to make a lateral move into a different team (from engineering to product or from engineering to data science or from frontend to backend, etc) where organizational knowledge would be valued and new skills can be acquired.
- Accept that a promotion is almost out of reach (in the short/medium term) and focus on personal development (e.g soft skills) as opposed to hard skills. This is beneficial in the medium-long term to the person and beneficial to the team as having steady members who have organizational knowledge and can mentor new comers, is highly valuable.
- Decide to go somewhere else to join a startup that is at an earlier stage of development and where you can leverage your experience to be yourself the “bigger fish”.
One thing we haven’t mentioned so far, is the outliers. Those who can make progress fast enough to keep up with the expanding universe. They usually end up getting high up the mountain until they hit altitude sickness. There is no such thing as infinite scalability :)
As the manager though, what can you do?
It’s important, as a manager, to remain vigilant to such situations, to identify them and to help those going through them. Coping with the first and second walls are really hard. They make the person question their worth, especially for an ambitious individual. It’s critical to offer the best mentoring opportunities possible to help the team member(s) through this rough patch.
Also, it’s key to be aligned with the HR team and be upfront about it in the team’s internal communication. Preparing the team before hitting those walls, softens the blow.
Hyper growth is hard on all fronts. The toughest part remains the human cost of it.
P.S : If you would like to contribute to changing healthcare and experience hyper growth in the process, we’re hiring! Come, check out our Open Positions.
