About working at a startup
Let me start by saying this won’t be another one of those texts that only tell you the good or the bad about working at a startup. I’m not here to try to convince anyone of anything, I’m just here to share my story (and that includes a lot of good and a little bit of bad, so far).
Well, about 90% of the people that know me or have had any contact with me on any social media channel already know I work at a very cool Brazilian tech startup called Pipefy. I’ve been working here since August 2015, when this company was a little more than a dream of a daring entrepreneur, and I can safely tell you that the decision of leaving a multi-national bank for that 6 person promise was one of the best things I’ve made in my life.
Sure, some people thought I was crazy for leaving a ‘safe’ job at a stable company for something that could be big someday, but I somehow knew that was a bet I needed to make. So I did. I left my job and started working remotely, since I was here in Curitiba and the rest of the team was halfway across the world at the 500 Startups acceleration program in San Francisco.
Those initial months were not easy. First of all because I’ve left a company with tons of standards, structure and definition for one that gave me freedom to establish my own way of working. At first I was a little lost, but once I found my way, things started to flow a lot better. Communication was an issue, though, considering that everyone else on the team was on a different timezone, but we managed just fine.
After that, once the team came back to Brazil, things started to feel a lot more ‘real’. One person at a time our team started growing, we moved out of a coworking, into an office, then got a second floor which is already feeling small for our growing team…and what I can tell you about seeing the company grow and thrive is that (pardon my language) it’s fucking awesome!
Almost everyone asks me whether it’s cool to work at a startup. Duh, of course it is. If it weren’t, why else would I still be here after almost 3 years?
It’s not for everyone, though. As Ben Horowitz said in his book ‘The hard thing about hard things’ (and our head of operations wisely mentioned), when working at a startup you only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. Per my experience, I can say that’s true, and they can happen at the same time.
I’m not joking, things get pretty intense. Startups are expected to grow in a month what most companies don’t grow in a year. To make that happen, everyone has to execute to their limits or, as our CEO says, 10x execution. We’re always commited to deliver more, that’s a lot of hard work — but it doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of fun in the meantime.
Remember what I mentioned about joining the company when there were only 6 of us? Well, today, a little less than 3 years after that, we have almost 20x that many people. That’s insane, right? Imagining that a company is capable of growing that much, that fast. Well, for a startup, that’s relatively common.
To grow that much, that fast, we invest a lot in young talent, which means we value cultural fit and potential over education and work experience. Due to that, we have a lot of really young people on our teams. But don’t let their ages fool you, our twenty-somethings are serious, commited professionals, focused on working hard and hitting goals.
After the work is done, however, they sure know how to party, and that’s another great thing. Even though the company is growing fast, our people are not growing apart. We work together and we party together. You’d think we’d get tired of seeing each other’s faces all week but after work, we all party together as well, it’s certainly more than just a team. We have that ‘family’ feeling, and that’s something I’ve never experienced before, in any of the previous companies I’ve worked at.
Speaking of our team, we have a word to define ourselves: we’re honey badgers. The term started out as an internal joke but we actually adopted the concept and, along with many of our other values, we see each other as honey badgers: we’re fearless, a little reckless when needed and we stop at nothing to get what we want.
Since we have a lot of young people on our team, some even having their first work experience, we find it very important to have clear, strong values to help guide them. We believe that things don’t need to be perfect, they need to be done. We’re always committed to delivering 10x execution and being 1% better everyday. We’re brutally honest, we absolutely don’t tolerate toxic behaviour of any kind and, above all, we want people to enjoy their ride.
Well, I’m a writer so obviously I’ve already wrote a lot more than I initially thought I would, I can't help it, it’s been a crazy ride. To wrap things up, what I can say is that working at a startup is freaking amazing but it is, above all, a learning experience no other work environment can provide.
Over these almost 3 years I’ve learned more than I had in all my other work experiences combined. I learned that sometimes things don’t work the way we want them to, sometimes we have to be patient and focus on doing our job because the results will come, even if they take a little longer than expected (patience has always been something I’ve struggled with). I’ve had the opportunity to get to know and work side by side wirh incredibly talented people, with enough potential to conquer the world. I’ve seen some of these incredible peope come and go, but that’s just the way things work (in life and in business).
During this time, I’ve learned that working at a startup is believing in someone else’s dream and making it your own. It’s diving head first into a crazy journey that will unavoidably get bumpy from time to time, but at the end of the day, it’ll all be worth it.
The best part of it all? Knowing that I’m part of the history of a company that’ll be huge, and that those 3 years are just the beginning of a hopefully very long journey.
