How can I join a top startup and maximize my career experiences?
I was laid off but used to work in big tech and with stock appreciation as well as living with my parents for the past few years, I have a sizable chunk of savings.
I'm living with my parents now and am very grateful that they don't charge me for living at home.
Now I'm debating what to do with my life. I could try to get back into big tech again, but it will be much of the same thing as what I already know. I want to try and maximize my career experiences since I don't need to worry about savings (provided I'm not reckless).
I'm thinking about joining a top startup to maximize my learning and experiences I have in life. Does anyone know how I can find these startups and what stage I should shoot for (ex -> Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, etc)
I'm ok with making an average/below average salary as well as long as I maximize my learning and experiences.
For context, I was a mid-level SWE at FAANG with ~4.5 YOE working towards senior promo.
Discussion
(2 comments)- 3
a month agoThoughtful TarodactylTaro CommunityI personally dont recommend a super early stage startup (<= series A) unless you personally know the founders. imo super early stage companies have highest risk lowest reward as youre doing founder level work for employee level equity+pay
Joining something on the series B+ level, for a lot of decent startups base pay is FAANG level-ish. But stock is paper money. But I think the work here is pretty fun because these tend to be post PMF and so a lot of the work is 1-n instead 0-1.
0-1 work is a lot of prototyping, experimenting, and throwing away something if it doesnt gain traction. It kinda sucks to have to spend day and night working on something to throw it off 3 months later
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a month agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroIt really depends on your risk tolerance as any decent startup at any stage will yield more technical/product learning compared to FAANG.
If you want to be safe, go to pre-IPO unicorn company like Notion, Perplexity, etc. Those companies are a sweet spot where there's still a lot of scope, but you'll get still top-of-market pay with potentially large financial upside. These companies generally match the salary bands of FAANG, and the equity has a very real chance of becoming valuable.
For example, Airbnb doubled its share price in its last round of funding. I know engineers who joined Airbnb as senior just 1-2 years before IPO and after IPO, their TC was over $ 1 million per year. They weren't some geniuses who spotted some diamond in the rough - Airbnb was already very mature by the time they joined.
I personally dont recommend a super early stage startup (<= series A) unless you personally know the founders.
I agree with this advice. If you join a very early startup without being very senior (senior/staff), it can easily be unproductive chaos where you're doing a lot, but a lot of it is random stuff like literally setting up furniture.
In terms of how to find the best startups, just browsing TechCrunch is a good start (and use Crunchbase to see funding/headcount trajectory). There's a lot more advice here too: "How to evaluate a startup?"
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