Optimal Risk-Adjusted Early Career Outcomes for Young Adults with Minimal Experience
If you’re in your teens or 20s, skipping college to work at a startup one of the most valuable things you can do for your education and career.
The next best alternative is to skip college to work at a slightly more mature, yet still innovative, fast-growing company.
Both of these alternatives offer an unmatched ROI compared to the time and financial cost of college — especially if you must turn to student debt to afford college.
(Want to hedge your bet even more? Start your career in sales at a startup or slightly more mature company.)
Why A Startup?
Taking into account all the costs + potential financial outcomes, a startup offers the single-greatest risk-adjusted return for someone with minimal experience. Especially if you can bypass college, student debt, and break into a startup at a young age.
Two defining features of startups are the abundance of problems to solve and high probability of failure. This target-rich environment for learning and creating value attracts competent people with an appetite for risk. It’s an ideal environment for early career experience.
Startups also operate according to the law of constraints. Innovate quickly or die. Limited funds, competition, and the importance of being first to market act as forcing functions.
Constraints act as a forcing function in two important directions:
- This establishes a rapid pace of experimentation
- This forces creativity, you must solve problems quickly, cost effectively, which often spurs novel ways of thinking
Startups concentrate learning and growth. You can’t afford to learn slowly or incrementally. You must learn and upskill exponentially. If successful, further opportunity also expands non-linearly.
Compared to a debt financed college degree, early career startup experience is virtually risk-free. You learn and increase earning potential faster. If successful, the financial outcome can be life changing. If it fails, the network and signal value still offer unmatched ROI.
Why a mature fast-growing company?
The best alternative to a startup is joining a slightly more mature but still innovative company. Think 50–200 employees and expanding quickly.
There problems will still be many but there will be more people to solve them. Which makes for a mentor-rich environment.
You’ll still have ample opportunity to learn, over a slightly less compressed timeline. But you can still accelerate learning by apprenticing in proximity to more seasoned professionals. Opportunity for advancement, financial outcomes, and network are all still in play.
In both scenarios, the signal value of your experience, the network you’ll build, the rapid rate of learning, the context, the skill development, and the possibility of financial outcomes all dwarf the risk of student debt and waiting four years to get started.
Why Sales?
Of all the skills you could develop, sales offers the optimal blend of:
1) Usefulness: Sales skills will be useful the rest of your life, in every domain — even beyond sales.
2) Transferability: Sales skills can be easily transported into another domain. Half the battle of moving laterally in your career will be convincing someone to take a shot on you. Sales will help you get your foot in the door and with long-term upward mobility.
3) Earning Potential: Sales offers as strong of earning potential as almost any career path. It’s among the highest probability paths for making six figures.
4) Risk-Adjusted Return on Investment: Sales offers the risk-adjusted returns in terms of the time and cost required to learn sales and ramp up to a meaningful increase in your income. Compare sales, for instance, with software engineering. While both offer paths to high earnings, the timeline and cost to learn + access your first opportunity vary greatly.
In terms of career optionality and financial standing, working at a startup or mature fast-growing company offer much better upside than taking on debt to go to college. Coupled with sales experience, it’s really no longer a fair comparison.
The average college student graduates with $40k of student debt. Most are underemployed in their first jobs, making minimum wage to slightly more than minimum wage. That’s after the average of six years it takes to graduate.
Compared to a teen who skips college and student debt, spends six years working in startups, mastering sales, ramping up to six figures in income while still maintaining a low cost of living…
Sure, it’s not about money. But it is about having agency over your time, your career, your money, your decisions, and your life.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where delaying the start of your career by 4–6 years and taking on significant student debt leads to more agency than the alternative paths I’ve laid out.
Moral arguments about college aside, consider it probabilistically.
Is the path you’re headed down maximizing the likelihood you’ll have more control in the future over your time, your career, your money, and your life?
If the answer is no, are you sure that’s a bet worth making?
If you enjoyed this piece, you may also find value from my other work. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Mitchell Earl is the Chief Operating Officer at Praxis, a career mentorship program that’s helped thousands of entrepreneurial young adults start successful careers without college. He writes regularly about how young adults can take agency over their lives, careers, and money. His work has been read by millions across the globe. He is the host of The Career Bound Podcast, and author of Don’t Do Stuff You Hate.
