What to expect in a startup?

I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with few startups through out my career and have seen this question surface in many a discussions with experienced engineers/managers in India who are passionate to build something ground up but are not sure what to expect.

This kind of question would never ever surface in States but the product development culture is still at nascent stages in India. The product scene has become hot only in the last few years with more India focus product companies entering the market and it is only going to get better from here. So, here are my 2 cents or 90 paisa, whatever your favorite currency is -

1. Expect to work around highly talented and passionate people. You would generally find most startups filled with extraordinary talented people expert in their fields and completely committed to realizing the dream. If they are not experts, they would definitely have the innate ability to work hard and get better every day. These are the kind of people who are great at what they do, want to do great work with other like minded people and are not there for paychecks. Well, they may be there for the big payouts :)

2. Agility. A startup is not a place of perfunctory processes and boring, good-for-nothing, mind-numbing, why-don’t-you-please-kill-me-now meetings. The idea is doing, not discussing about doing. Don’t even think about joining a startup if you are a kind of a person who loves to rope in everyone before doing anything or are in the habit of cross team collaboration. Also, to enable quick decision making, the organization would be extremely flat and one wouldn’t be 100 levels below in the organization hierarchy to the C level executives.

3. Work, Work, Work. It is a place where you would probably achieve what one would typically achieve in a week’s time in a big corporate setup. It is generally a far more productive workplace as there are lesser number of distractions like meetings. Also, more or less every startup has a Big Hairy Audacious Goal and one has to work smartly and diligently to realize it. I’m not trying to say that one would get buried under the work load but expect to work close to 10-12 hours a day, some days even more.  I’m sure there are startups out there which honor the work life balance but they are few and far between.

4. Fun. And, the point is? Okay, I contradict, so? I know I mentioned that it would be lot of hard work but there would be an intense amount of fun as well. The thing is that startups are more like tight knit groups or families thus the environment lend itself to doing fun things like having Friday evening beer fest, watching Avatar in 3D together, to having impromptu Rock concerts within the office. Contrary to the popular belief, these kind of activities help in creating long lasting bonds and building the team camaraderie, which is the bed rock of building great software and companies.

5. Donning Multiple Personas. Everyone in the startup play multiple roles. A software engineer in a startup would generally play the role of an analyst, manager, designer and a tester. These are traditionally played by different people in big organizations but a startup would generally demand all of this be rolled into one. You would be asked to own up the requirements, understand them clearly, work with the UX designer, point out flaws in the design, unit test your code completely(please, shoot for 100% code coverage, will you?). On the other side, if you are joining as a top level employee expect to do HR, hiring, legal, operations, run the coffee machine, be slave to the engineers. The point I’m making is that you would have to own  your domain area completely and run it like you were running your own company in that space.

6. A big fat payout i.e. stock options. Stock Options, Check. Big fat payout, ahem, may be not. The fact of the matter is they won’t be worth that much if you are not one of the early employees or joining at the top level. All the startups sell the options hard but the fact of the matter is the options are loaded towards founding employees and top level executives. Moreover, only 1 out of 10 startups are ever successful thus what are the chances that you would end up making boat load of money at exit? Thus, make sure you get paid adequately to help realize the dream, work with like minded people and enjoy the ride.

7. Frugality. I’m not sure if it is true for every startup but for the majority that I know. As they generally have to stretch their financial runway or build good cash base, you would find most of them spend money where it is really needed. Thus, the most pragmatic startups won’t have swanky offices, jaw dropping Infosys like campus, ten different kind of coffee blends, yoga sessions, massage therapy etc. Not to say we are stingy, I’m just saying we would spend where it is absolutely important like hiring the best talent in the market.

Startup Photo By: William