Startups: What’s in it for me?
Welcome back to the View from the Monolith! I’ve spent the last few years siloed in a monolithic organisation, but now I am adventuring in the world of startups. In this blog, I share the learning I glean along the way.
As I was preparing my post on recruitment in startups (and if you didn’t see it, check it out here), I noticed something of an odd contradiction. People were open about discussing the challenges of working at a startup but were less forthcoming about the advantages. They would offer dire warnings about long hours, hard work and financial uncertainty, and yet they were all clearly happy and excited about their jobs. Which left me pondering the question, what is so great about working for a startup anyway?
Several of the startups who have visited The Shortcut to talk at the Startup Mingle Lunch have spoken about their work environment. Different speakers have talked about their free snacks and drinks, office games and sports activities. At one company, coders were encouraged to spend a percentage of their paid work hours on personal projects outside that startup’s field. As I spoke about in my recruitment post, startups generally aren’t great at recruitment and if they can avoid it by keeping their team happy with frills like this, they will.
If you are looking for more practical benefits to working for a startup, there are the quality of life benefits too.
Startups tend to be results-oriented, so as long as the work is getting done they offer flexibility for working hours and location. Most startups have a flat organisational structure; if you have ideas, chances are they will be listened to. While there is a financial risk to joining a startup, there can be substantial benefits too. Depending on your role and the size and age of the startup, you may be offered equity in the company as part of your package. How valuable that is differs wildly depending on the success of the venture.
Of course, no two startups are the same, and there is no guarantee that the startup you join will offer any of the above. So that still leads back to my original question. Gimmicks and fringe benefits aside, what is so great about working at a startup? I got my final answer in a conversation with Makke from Eduten. Makke is a ten-year veteran of several startup ventures, and when I posed my question to him, he paused for a long while, before framing the best answer I’d received. “I’ve been reflecting on that recently,” he said. “Startups are so much more flexible, less bound by bureaucracy, they are a place where every team member can have real influence, where you can be excited that the whole world is yours.”
That, I think, sounds pretty great.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to read more of my Views from the Monolith, check out the first post in this series. If this post has piqued your interest in the idea of joining a startup, but you’re not sure where to start, The Shortcut offers training and events that help bridge the gap into startup life. Check out their website for more details.
