I know from experience this isn't always the case, but of all the kinds of businesses out there, a startup should be able to offer the most in terms of advancement. Pre-growth they need people to step into all kinds of roles and meet opportunities that might be there. And when the growth hits these are the companies where you're going to see head count double or triple in a year, which means advancement tends away from a zero-sum game. This is a big part of why startups are supposed to be great opportunities.
In a big company job, unless they're also on a significant growth trajectory, advancement tends more towards zero sum, and the role-choosing process tends to favor the dazzling outsider with the shiny resume more over the familiar insider whose warts and gifts (and establishment in their current role!) are apparent.
Of course, in practice, startups can work exactly the same way.
One of the bits of advice I'd send myself back through time if I could is to ask for the title I'd want to be holding a year or two down the road if the startup sees success. It guides how everyone thinks about you in day-to-day business, and if they're reluctant to hand it over at the start, they'll probably be reluctant to think of you that way later, even if you grow into someone who is fulfilling the role while they grow into a company that needs it.
I'm not saying I want to go into management. But are there paths to greater responsibility, greater salary, greater leadership? Do you offer technical and non-technical training? If I did want to go into management, can you speak to that progression? Do you have a vision for senior people who want to stay in tech? All the companies I talked with seemed surprised I'd even ask such questions. I'm not saying it's easy, but if you don't have any story here, I'll make my own opportunities working for myself.
I'm not saying it's an invalid question, but it's not one I've ever asked going into a startup. Why? Because the reason I joined a startup is for the direct responsibility to ship code and grow a product from zero to millions of users. To do this I sacrificed joining a hugely successful company with many more resources where I could potentially climb quite quickly and make a huge salary without having to personally make a quantitative difference to the business. Maybe I'm just more of an early-stage guy than you, but I assume that I'll learn and progress my career based on the opportunities that come up. I would be highly skeptical of management laying out a 3 year plan and how my job would evolve since by definition a startup does not know how they will find product-market fit. The questions I would ask of a big company to vet the culture would be moot because I would assume that I will be shaping the culture. If that turned out not to be true then I would be leaving.
The term growth-outside-management is meaningless in almost all companies.
A few companies have it, but those are momentary times until they grow, and once the systems are in place. They will put in a middle management guy have it run. Slowly you will the architects would have been phased out and replaced by managers.
