The right mindset for an early stage Start Up employee
It was a picture perfect Sunday morning in San Mateo. I woke up and decided to go hiking in my neighborhood. There is a short one mile trail about 10 minutes away. When you go up the hill, you can see San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear day.
Although I’ve hiked that hill many times, for some reason I got lost. May be it was the dry summer heat. Things looked different. I went down the wrong trail and slipped and fell couple of times. But that was the least of my worries. I couldn’t find the trail back. I didn’t have water or money and my cell phone barely had any reception. I was beginning to wonder if the mountain lion warning signs were real. Am I supposed to stay put or run when I see one?
I stubbornly followed the trail to the end but I realized I was in a different neighborhood. Apple map told me I was an hour away from my house. I tried Google Maps. Luckily it found a better trail. I found my way back home and I laughed about the whole thing and told my coworkers. Happy ending.
I am telling this story because working for a start up is sort of like getting lost in the woods. There is no trail and you end up somewhere that could be the right road. Or not. Did I know that Carta will become a series C start up with 400 employees? No. I hoped we would be successful but I didn’t have a vision of what that would look like. Stewart Butterfield co founded Flickr, the photo-sharing app and Slack — a platform for group communication within teams and both companies started as online video games.
This is the biggest difference between working at a start up and a corporation. In a fortune 500 company, the HR department will make you develop a set career plan. But in a start up, it’s difficult to know where you will end up as a start up employee. Your start up might not be around in a year or it might become a unicorn. So how should you stay motivated about your job ?
- Think about how you feel about the start up mission. Are you 100% committed?
You control your start up’s future more than you think. When the start ups get to the unicorn standing, the media almost always raves about the brilliant founder CEO. They downgrade the achievement of the teams behind the founder because it’s not easy to see beyond the end result.
Jason Portnoy, Managing Partner at Oakhouse Partners talks about his perspective on employees role in his blog post: “We’ve noticed that mission-driven companies with ambitions to improve the world are able to attract and retain the most talented employees. The best people can choose where they focus their time, and many of them choose to work at companies where they feel like they are making a positive contribution to humanity.” When employees vision is aligned with the start up and they stay productive, great things can happen.
2. Early stage start ups have first mover advantage. Building something new comes with many challenges but does have advantages. Fred Wilson, co-founder of USV says, “If I had to pick first mover or second mover, I would still pick first mover because I think it is easier to attain a dominant market position when you don’t have any competitors.”
It feels incredible when you are an employee of a first company ever to tackle a problem and succeed. That’s a huge accomplishment. But this feeling doesn’t last long because “once the market opportunity has been identified, and there are multiple companies competing for market leadership, it becomes more difficult to win.”
This all seem pretty obvious. But think of this from job search perspective. When a start up is in an early stage, there is less competition and it’s easier to make a difference and take on more responsibility. There is more room for you to grow. You are able to try something you’ve never done. And you will get more stock options.
When the market opportunity has been identified and the start up becomes successful, applicants will increase and it will be harder for you to make a difference because the processes (the dreaded word!) get defined and the roles become structured.
So how do you find the RIGHT early stage start up in the first place? There is no magic formula but look at the investor list, find out when the next financing will be and the founder’s linked in profile. After that find out what their mission is. Follow it if you have the passion for it. You might lose track of the original trail but eventually you will find the right way.
And know this : “first movers can and often do maintain their market leadership” if the right employees (that could be you!) are working for them.
