Comment by sbilstein

6 years ago

The safest risk reward ratio in terms of career development, networking, and financial gain is to work at a startup that is in their explosive growth stage. You will likely get shares valued at some multiple of 100k. Make sure you understand the business and feel confident they will IPO or exit.

The scaling needs, technically or culturally, of a company at this stage are unlikely to be available at a risky early startup that may never see massive growth. At a BigCo, unless you are in infra or deep in the technical stack, many of these scaling problems will have been solved for you.

In terms of networking, you will get to learn from grizzled engineers who were around in the early days, veterans from big companies who have come in to fix the shit that is wrong, and have a front seat to these cultures colliding. Not only that, you'll be surrounded by soon to be angel investors.

I spent one year working at a pre-IPO unicorn and it was highest in ROI for my career as an entrepreneur later and the IPO made me enough cash to not be sweating my rent all the time.

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sbilstein

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patrickxrivera  6 years ago

Agreed. I think this type of company (high-growth and 2-3 years away from IPO) is a much better first job out of school than working at a big tech company. Sure, your cash comp will be 10 - 25% lower, but if you want to start a company someday, this type of experience is on average much more valuable than big tech co.

I've been working at a high-growth company for the past year and as OP mentioned, have learned from early engineers, experienced engineers from big tech co's, and started leading medium sized projects six months in. I'm on the growth engineering team so I've also been able to learn about best practices in growth from people who led teams at big tech co's.

From this experience, I now feel ready to be an early engineer at a startup or build my own thing. I was able to get the benefit of working with the best people from big tech co's but in a high-growth environment where there are more problems to be solved than people to solve them.

For this reason, working at a high-growth unicorn is seen as just as valuable as a big tech co. If not more, for product/growth eng roles.