

A Startup Education - relation
http://brianbailey.me/a-startup-education

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patio11
_The knowledge you gain through this experience and the people you share it
with will make you much more valuable to future companies, especially other
startups._

The danger being that you rank up from being worth $30k a year to $60k a year
(and convince yourself that this is great progress), while your buddies at
BigCo have been stagnating in their march from $100k a year to $120k a year.

Seriously, though: like the mindset about focusing on career growth, but don't
ignore BigCo. I personally couldn't stand working for one but you can learn
things and meet people at BigCo, too. That's one of many reasons why so many
people go with BigCo.

~~~
gav
There's also the 3rd option, MediumCo.

You can work at a company of 40-80 or so employees and have all the benefits
of working for a big company without the red tape, politics, and inertia. If
you pick a good one you can pretend you are working at a startup, but with
better hours and a competitive salary.

I've worked at startups before and the biggest thing I've learnt is that a
separation between owners and decision makers is a great thing.

~~~
dkasper
> the biggest thing I've learnt is that a separation between owners and
> decision makers is a great thing

There are plenty of counter examples to this. Facebook is the most obvious
successful one.

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criveros
I would say starting your own startup is the better decision.

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confluence
> _At most startups, you will have unlimited opportunities to push your skills
> as far as you can. With ambitious plans and small teams, you can often set
> the direction of the design, development, support, or marketing of the
> product. You will have the opportunity to decide which problems to solve and
> how to solve them._

You can do that at BigCo too - just not crappy ones. GE does this all the
time, and so does Google, Facebook, Sony, Samsung and many other decent
multinationals - start-ups don't own cool (as much as you want it too).

Also - I'm very sceptical of the learning opportunities that are shown by most
start-ups. The vast majority of startups make a product that never gets
traction, is not technically difficult to implmement and generally adds no
value to the world (it may even actively subtract value - Zynga/failed start-
ups/lost years of productive life).

Conversely - say I work at GE, I might increase the fuel efficiency of diesel
engines by 3-4%. Multiply that out, and I've just saved the world an insane
amount of fuel, CO2 emissions and costs.

Oh and I get paid a lot more by the way, with a ton of benefits, future
opportunities and way more impact.

Or I could build an app for hipsters.

