This week, I’ve been talking to a college senior who is deciding between Astranis and Big Company X.

He loves our mission and the opportunity to do real work early in his career, but his advisors are telling him to choose the big company over the startup.

This candidate’s decision isn’t a financial one — the offers are roughly equivalent — he just wants to do what is right for his career.

His advisors say that joining a large, well-established company is a resume-builder that will set him up for life. They think startups are fun, but risky. And why bet your career on anything less than a sure thing? This line of thinking is pervasive among advisors/elders, but, respectfully, I think it’s misguided.

The beginning of your career is a perfect time to be a little risky.

In the rest of this piece, I’ll cover the best reasons to work at a startup right out of school — and the worst reasons not to do so.

🌟 THREE REASONS TO JOIN A STARTUP AS A RECENT GRAD 🌟

🎓 Working at a startup is the best way to learn quickly.

Your primary goal in your early career should be to learn as much as humanly possible, not only about your intended specialty, but also about the wide variety of possibilities that exist for your career.

At big companies, you’ll be given horse blinders on day one: they’ll ask you to look straight ahead, and proceed down the path that the company has built for you. Having an extremely well-defined career path is a blessing and a curse: it’s awesome because it is predictable, but it’s limiting for folks who want to learn and advance more quickly than the rest of the pack.

When I first joined Astranis, one my co-workers who had spent years in Big Tech companies described his experience there in a way I’ll never forget: he said Big Tech pays you to not learn anything new.

If you want to learn fast, a startup is a better fit for you than a big company.

At a startup, you’ll be given real work right away, you’ll be forced to put your academic learning to the test, and you won’t be given training wheels. At a later-stage startup like Astranis, you’ll still have mentors who are industry experts, and they’ll actually know who you are, but the responsibility for doing great work will be yours.

Big companies will store you in the middle of a massive silo filled with people in your discipline, but startups — being smaller and more integrated — will expose you to engineers and businesspeople on other teams, external companies, external advisors, and more. There’s a concept at big companies asking if you’re “client-ready,” which rests on the assumption that young people are not to be exposed to the outside world. Startups can’t afford that kind of siloing.

There’s just no contest: if you want to learn fast, join a startup.

💪 The best way to succeed is to work hard. The best way to work hard is to be surrounded by other people who want to work hard.

Before moving to California, I wanted to work harder than the people around me did — I cared more about doing awesome work that mattered for the world.

The entrepreneurial drive to “make the world a better place” was hilariously parodied by the Silicon Valley TV show… but it’s real!

My logic was, and still is, intentionally idealistic. I refuse to be cynical. If I’m going to spend 40+ hours per week doing anything, then it should:

1. Matter for me — if I work hard, I want to be rewarded; if I slack off, I want people to hold me accountable

2. Matter for my company — if I disappeared, I would want my company to care; if I do great, I want my company to succeed

3. Matter for the world — if my company succeeds, I want the world to be a better place

I quickly learned during my consulting tour of Corporate America that most people only care about #1. And that’s lucky, because the sad reality of most big corporate jobs is that nearly everyone is replaceable.

I can’t imagine being motivated to work in an environment where my work doesn’t actually matter to my company, and my company doesn’t actually matter for the world.

My work at Astranis meets all three of the criteria above — I know that my hard work will be personally rewarding, that it will help my company succeed, and that if Astranis succeeds the world will be become a better place. That reality is incredibly motivational. It makes me want to work hard, it makes my co-workers want to work hard, and it’s a magical, invigorating thing to see in person (particularly when you’ve worked at a normal job in the past).

👨‍🔧 It’s easier to identify what you personally accomplished after working at a startup

Working at a startup is a great way to set up the rest of your career. This is counterintuitive — many folks rightly believe that if recruiters recognize the company names on your resume, they’ll be more likely to pull your resume out of the pile and give you an interview.

Remember, however, that the goal isn’t to get interviews, it’s to get job offers — and interviewers care more about results than experiences.

At a big company, your personal contribution can be hard to isolate. You’ll work beneath a more senior person. You’ll work on a small sliver of a large project. You’ll have “air cover,” meaning people that review your work, give you suggestions, and take responsibility. And everything will move slower.

At a startup, there is nowhere to hide. You’ll be forced to actually do things and be responsible for your work. That can be scary, but the best candidates will consider it a worthy challenge — and they’ll be rewarded for it after a few years of work. It’s very easy for me to point to work that I, myself, have completed at Astranis, and everyone else here can do the same.

So, after a few years at your job, there’s a big advantage to having worked at a startup: you’ll have tons of examples of doing great work. Those examples are invaluable in an interview process — after all, interviewers need evidence of exceptional personal ability to hire you — which will set you up for your career better than any brand name would.

🔀 THREE REASONS NOT TO NOT JOIN A STARTUP AS A RECENT GRAD 🔀

👎 “Make the responsible choice. Your career is riding on it!”

I reject the premise of this advice — there’s no time like the present to start your career for real. Why take a worse job to pay your dues if you have the chance to skip ahead and do what you want right away?

Modern careers aren’t linear. My career will look way different from that of my grandfather, who got a job at Ford and stayed there for decades. You’ll get tons of at-bats in your career. Join a startup and don’t like it? Leave a year later. You’ll be fine.

The folks that tell you that this single decision will “profoundly alter your destiny, and that of your family, for generations to come” are wrong (and kinda mean). Don’t let fear overrule what you know to be the right decision.

As a new grad, your personal overhead is at an all-time low. Getting older means getting married, have kids, buying a house, and more of a reason to be conservative with your money and protective of your time. The perfect time to work at an early-stage startup is when you’re young and achieving ramen profitability is easier.

Boris Tane ⚡ @BorisTane

first step towards ramen profitability: reduce expenses I just moved to a slightly cheaper apartment

April 14th 2021

144 Likes

🤦‍♂️ “Big companies are secure. What if the startup fails?”

This is, again, a false comparison.

First, literally every one of my friends that has worked at a large company — including Deloitte, Target, Adobe, etc. — has gone through a round of layoffs. They happen all the time at big companies, and even though the big company doesn’t “fail,” layoffs feel like failure to the employees who get let go.

Second, Silicon Valley startups are great at “failing.” When Atrium went under, they made a massive effort to get every single person hired into a new job. They made Google Docs that listed their employees, and seemingly every company in San Francisco scoured that list to find talented people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

For far more, check out the dedicated piece I wrote on this note:

Silicon Valley Outsider

Startups aren't as risky as you think

Startup life seems scary from the outside. Every time I talk to students about what it’s like to work in Silicon Valley, I get at least one question with this sort of emotional tenor: “Given that a light breeze might push you into financial ruin and career-ending failure, how do you sleep at night…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Christian Keil

🙄 “Startups don’t have structure. You want to know how to climb up the ranks.”

This is true for some startups, but not for others. Again, see here for the trouble with lumping all “startups” together.

Silicon Valley Outsider

The many, varied stages of startup life

Welcome to Silicon Valley Outsider, a newsletter for aspiring startup founders and investors who live outside the SF Bay Area. Subscribe today to become one of my 170 closest friends: 🍎 Quick bite of the Week: A practical, tactical guide to getting hired at a startup…

Read more

a year ago · Christian Keil

Going against the wisdom of your parents is hard. Believe me, I know — I’m an agnostic whose parents named him Christian. But it’s your life, and your advisors are disproportionately likely to recommend one of two things: something they can understand, and/or the more conservative option.

As Paul Graham wrote:

“All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.”

Make the best decision for yourself, and don’t look back.

If you want to work at a startup, consider applying for Astranis. We’re going to get the next four billion people online, and would love your help!

Thanks for reading Silicon Valley Outsider! I’m Christian, the Chief of Staff of Astranis, and I write this newsletter for folks who are interested in startups but live outside of the SF Bay Area.

If you want to join 500+ folks in getting an email from me each Monday, I’ll help you understand Silicon Valley using normal-human words.

Here are a few past editions that you might like if you enjoyed this one:

• 😱 Don’t be afraid of working at a startup

• 💼 How to find a business role at a startup

• 🚀 The many, varied stages of startup life