Join a startup to accelerate your life

Life @ 2x speed.

I wasn’t aware of startup culture until I was part of one. This article summarizes my learnings. I joined one of Asia’s largest software companies right after completing my degree. Back then it seemed the right choice. But enterprises work differently. They have many stake holders who need to be satisfied and unfortunately none of them are the real users. This was very hard for me to accept as I used to be a freelance web developer and this new approach seemed counter productive.

Fortunately, something magical happened to me. I stumbled upon a job posting on a spammy job portal. I applied and after the most interesting interviews I got in. SlideShare had happened to me. I was going to work in a startup.

I used to think startups are small companies run by a few people on low salaries. How wrong was I! Startups are large companies run by high performance individuals with zero ego. The day I joined, I met a team, a family working on products with users as their only focus. There was no bullshitting to be done.

As the days went by, I started to understand more and more what startup culture is. In a startup, there are no rules, you have no limitations, there is no competition. When you take these distractions out of work and your life, you can concentrate on the real problems which can elevate you to the next level professionally and personally. You start to see things differently as you are taught what you are doing might not have been achieved before or you don’t have the usual resources. You start pushing your boundaries, start discovering passions which you thought never existed, become more responsible, walk that extra mile and most of all discover how rewarding life becomes. You keep asking yourself why is your team trying their best to help you, where is the all the love coming from?

In the past two years at SlideShare my perspective of life changed. I no longer want to slog for hours in a corner office working for some big corporate and making big money. I want to start my own startup and see it grow. Something I had thought I could do 10 years later. But now I want to work with high performance individuals and create/fail fast rather than be a spectator of my own life.

Most people have jobs where they go to work. In a startup, you have a life, a 2x life, and you get stuff done while having fun.

If you want to discover yourself, your limits, your aspirations and your passions. Join a startup, stay for a year and see the magic hit you.