Hi there,
My name is Darshan, a founding engineer. Right now working at Huddle01. If you are hearing this term for the first time, “Founding Engineer” – it is basically an engineer who is a core member of a startup when it was started or a core member of a team when the product is getting built.
This blog is about how it looks like working at a startup. This may help you decide whether you should consider working at a startup or not.
The Odds of Success
It’s risky. Working at a startup is risky. You probably have heard this: “9 out of 10 startups fail” and that is somehow true. But even though it fails, you should aim for learning.
In the early stage of your career, a startup feels like a giant empty canvas where you can experiment, build, and break things. Most importantly, you do this faster.
The Plot
When a startup is yet to figure out product-market fit, all they have is time and budget. Time matters the most, so they tend to work at a higher pace. You have often observed how startups ship faster, ship new updates every week, and sometimes a team is working late at night. (That’s not the case every time, but yeah you gotta.)
The reason why they have to be extremely careful with deadlines is because every startup starts with a foundation idea, and that idea is based on some hypothesis.
A founder or a group of founders needs to test this hypothesis as soon as possible. After all, the users decide whether the startups are onto something or not. So speed matters.
The Swiss Army Knife Engineer
Be ready to do more than just your role. You are not just an engineer but a founding member. Sometimes you will find yourself juggling between product requirements, implementing some analytics tools, working with the marketing team to make tweaks in the product, and it can go on.
When I was working at my first startup job Nintee, I was in the user interview call with my product manager, and we both had to observe user behavior and look for implicit feedback from users.
Either users understood the flow, whether the design was complicated, or which part was high cognitive load for users. We had to take care of all small nuances so we could improve our product.
This is a completely different experience. Like Paul Graham said, “Talk to your users.”
Changes are necessary. You will have times where your founders are gathered around and talking about the learning you had so far, and now in order to move forward, here’s what you as a team have to do.
The Turning Point
Sometimes the initial hypotheses were wrong and the sooner the team realized it, the more you save your time and resources. In this case, you either change the direction of a product. This is known as a pivot. In this process, generally the existing product either gets replaced with something new or you build something on top of it.
So yeah, be ready to throw out your code. As engineers we tend to make things perfect and well-optimized, but in a startup first as a team you gotta make sure you are building the right thing.
A Working Product Over Perfect Code
If you are building something and putting 100% of your efforts into making sure the software is well optimized, but people won’t use it because it’s not making sense for them, it’s useless no matter how awesome it is.
So the first priority of a startup is to make sure they build something that must solve users' problems, and in order to figure this out, the team has to do many experiments. A lot of use-and-throw code is written. User calls happen frequently. The team is looking for a pattern in the analytics dashboard.
So at this point you are not a software engineer anymore but a product engineer who is responsible for the end-to-end process. Unlike MNCs, you are not working in one particular team but you have to collaborate across teams. Startups have a small number of people so it’s very easy to collaborate and you do cross-functional work. That’s the most exciting part.
Hidden Levers
One thing I have noticed and experienced as well is that if you get a chance to work with the smartest and most ambitious people who are shaping the startups, you will realize it eventually shapes you as well.
Your mindset, your growth evolves around it. You are witnessing a kind of history where either you break it or make something happen which has the potential to have a huge impact on thousands of users.
How Startups Create Wealth
Startups can also be the way of creating wealth. The definition of wealth may be different from person to person. Many times people think of wealth as money. Many people get motivated by this. If you are an early member of a team and if you have some equity or stock options, if the company works out, you get rewards for taking risks. You may never work for capital anymore but look for problems that you can solve. But more than just money, you gotta work with a product you genuinely care about. You sometimes find people for life who teach you not just about startups but a general overview of life.
Startups Are Ambiguous
I am not glorifying working at startups, but it’s just very random that unless or until you see it working, it just seems this thing is never going to work out.
Again, startups are risky and you never know where you will be in the next quarter. Things move fast, some startups get shut down, some get acquired, some just change their vision.
So if you are someone who wants to work at a startup, make sure you have some sort of backup, so even if things don’t work out you can prepare yourself for the what comes next.
But risk is worth taking. Youngster have potential and it can only unleash if we work in a challenging environment.
You have to mentally and physically prepare yourself to work at startups. You are going to deal with a large amount of ambiguity and there will be times where you as a person or team will think you are lost and need to figure out where to go next.
Building a resilient attitude will eventually help in the long run.
But this can be a time you will look back and be proud of yourself for the attempt you made.
A Continuous Learning Journey
Learning is the most important part in a startup, either as a person or team. You have to reflect on whatever data you get and you have to work on that. This process is so beautiful and that’s how most startups work.
That’s it for today. That’s my overall thought on startups. If you have any doubts or suggestions about the blog, please feel free to leave a comment.
Thanks for reading.
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