Why Working at a Startup Was the Safest Career Choice I’ve Ever Made
Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about anything. I’m just a new grad with less than a year’s worth of experience to my name, including internships!
Disclaimer 2: My situation is probably not representative of 99% of cases. I’ll explain shortly why my job is so special.
Very early on in my college career, I knew I wanted to work at a startup — which to me was synonymous with excitement and responsibility. Perhaps this obsession started when I worked with my older brother the summer after my freshman year on his brainchild SmarterCloud. I was employee #4, engineer #2, and intern #1.
Like 90% of startups, we failed. However, I still consider the experience one of the biggest wins in my career: through the mentorship and prodding of my brother, I developed my skills as an engineer and learned how to be self-sufficient in my work.
After this, I found myself caught in a wave of aspirations that were not mine. In the middle years of my college career, I applied to big name companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon to name just a few. Finding internships was very similar to how I treated the college process: cast as wide a net as possible and pick the best catch. It never occurred to me that by spreading myself too thin, I was losing the ability to make a sincere match.
Despite this strategical error, things worked out pretty well for me. The summer after my sophomore year I landed an internship with Workday. My team was so amazing that it was really tough to turn down their return offer, but after many long talks with my family I knew that I needed more experiences to figure out what I truly wanted. The next year I found myself stealing algorithms from NLP (that’s a field in computer science, not another company) to figure out how to best price houses at Airbnb.
Both jobs were engaging and exposed me to intelligent individuals who were equally compassionate. Something wasn’t clicking though in my day-to-day. I craved exposure to larger parts of the product and the trust of my co-workers in critical projects.
Enter Ridgeline, my current job. Though I had what seemed at the time an incredibly safe path to wealth and success with Airbnb’s return offer, I started thinking for myself my final year at Cornell. While Airbnb was a big and shiny name, with the perk (for me) of being relatively nascent, I always knew in my heart it wasn’t a perfect fit.
Ridgeline, on the other hand, had the same founder as Workday, one of my other previous internships. I knew firsthand the employee-first culture that Duffield companies are able to create. And it was a startup!
Granted, this was not just any startup. With a founder as successful as Dave Duffield comes an unprecedented level of funding and stability for a company in our stage. That is not to say the decision was without risk. When placed side-by-side with Airbnb — which at the time was by any account shaping up for a 2020 IPO — Ridgeline stock felt a bit like monopoly money. We had yet to even take a customer onto our platform.
Do not pass go [live], do not collect $200.
The pandemic’s effect on all of our lives and the economy has shown that we can’t take anything for granted. In a weird reversal, working for a startup became the safer career choice. But if that’s all you’re getting from this story, you’re missing the point.
The safer decision here was following my heart. Having a job that you’re passionate about will mean that the 40 hours you spend a week working are not a waste. Working for a company where you’re in the right role means that you’ll grow in the areas you want to grow. For me, working for a startup means learning about the entire product even though I’m still only on one team. It means being trusted to break things, because even though you have no experience to your name, we need to build something and your role in building that thing is crucial.
So whether or not a startup is your calling, make sure you’re in a job that you do more than “tolerate”. After all, it’s the majority of your day for the majority of your week, for perhaps the majority of your life.
