
Questions to Ask Before You Join a Startup - djjose
http://mediashift.org/2016/08/when-to-join-a-startup/
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swagtricker
From my nasty 2002/.COM era experience with a startup would have said the 3
questions were:

1.) Do you like Kool-Aid, psychotic office politics & megalomania? 2.) Can you
handle bizarre CXO behavior & feature requests designed for investors and not
customers? 3.) Are you financially prepare to be underpaid for your skills AND
have your paycheck 'not show up' one day when it tanks?

I hope to hell things have improved since then. I'm personally not willing to
take the chance though.

~~~
jonsterling
still exactly like this

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HarryHirsch
This piece wants to sell us the startup ethos. Be young, work 14 hours a day
and get paid 40 kEUR. But we are in Lisbon and will throw in a surfing pass
for Ericeira beach!

Other people recommend asking things like the amount of runway left, who the
CFO is and how successful he was in past rounds of fundraising, if the founder
is fresh out of academia and doing their first company, nevermind the location
and the cost of real estate. And the usual things, like the immediate
supervisor, company culture and benefits.

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tofof
"Startups are for grownups. [...] Grownups are willing to give the next five
years of life to the pursuits of the startup — the people. Blindly."

Nothing to see here except more patronization. Move along.

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susan_hall
This is actually more an aspiration than a reality of startup life:

" Grownups do the difficult thing when it’s the right thing to do, with
composure. This means giving peers and employees critical feedback. It means
saying the unpopular things about your startup’s product or service offering
and assuming responsibility for failures. It means being really honest about
the strengths and weaknesses in the management team. This strength comes from
surviving and overcoming difficult circumstances. Grownups can do this over
and over without losing credibility or support of the team."

But I agree that I tend to find more of this kind of honesty in small startups
than in big companies, and for this reason I prefer to work with startups.

