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OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory, which is behind ChatGPT. OpenAI conducts research on artificial intelligence with the declared intention of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work".

Thoughts on breakout/rocket ship startups vs big tech

Software Engineering Intern at Taro Community profile pic
Software Engineering Intern at Taro Community

Breakout startups are basically startups that have found product-market-fit and are growing at an incredible pace. So think of the OpenAIs and Databricks of the world. Back in the day these would've been baby Google and baby Facebook. Here's a link for more examples:

Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz and a few others strongly suggest people in any stage of their career to join these startups.

I revisited Taro's course on picking a company, and there doesn't seem to be much info on them. The course does talk about startups but I feel that startups have so many stages that it's hard to make generalizations across them.

From my understanding, it seems like breakout startups are a great place to join:

Pros

  1. You get incredible career growth since you're a part of a rapidly growing company
  2. TC is usually pretty competitive with FAANG (with a caveat)
  3. These startups usually have very strong engineering culture and network, with most people being Ex-FAANG

Cons:

  1. Work life balance seems to be worse than big tech on average since there's so much stuff to do (like 20-30% worse on average?)
  2. The equity portion of your TC is still paper money, so there's a chance the IPO flops and your TC basically halves
  3. Brand name is not may not be as good as big tech, though this is heavily dependent on the company (like you'd definitely interview someone from OpenAI, but I doubt many have heard of Helion). A question I have is how big is the difference in the brand value between your average breakout startup and a big tech? Is it negligible?

The Taro course suggests new grads to pick big tech. Funnily enough Sam Altman laments that someone picked big tech over a breakout startup. I'm not saying that these two pieces of advice are contradictory, but what factors should you consider if you're deciding between big tech and breakout startups?

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Posted 16 days ago
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