5 reasons you should join a startup in your early career

and work-life balance does exist!

Hi everyone! It’s been a while, how have you been?

As of the last post, I’ve moved to a new country, changed my value on work-life balance, and put my ego in place multiple times ever since joining a startup.

A backstory (but skip ahead if you’re tight on time)

For context, my career has been an important consideration. Three months ago, I shouted into the universe (Twitter, Linkedin, and random community Slack channels) to get answers about accelerating as a new grad product designer.

People said startups.

People said don’t marry to a role, marry the learning potential.

People said to find others who are not just great at their craft, but also great at thinking from a holistic business pov.

Fun fact: I got this job after I made a tweet!

It’s been 2 months in my new role, so here are 5 reality checks while working in startups, and why they make the perfect condition for growing in your early career.

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No, but do you really understand it?

One of my first projects was revamping our technical docs. I was excited to get to know our product from a technical lens. However, I quickly realized that understanding why the features/company exist from the surface was not enough.

You have to REALLY know what’s up. Forget about the interface, the social media presence, and the branding for a second.

• How do you integrate the features?

• How does the tech work in the back?

• Do you get emotional about the pain points and ACTUALLY get the urge to share exactly how this product is life-changing?

I didn’t.

Being a designer for dev tools, I needed to understand how APIs work and the process of building an AI app.

So I built one myself, tried out every single feature, and then explained how they are life-changing to my non-technical friends, or talk to myself on the way to the bus stop. Non-tech friends were great audiences since the industry (Gen AI) is so new and no tools like this existed.

It got me to a level where I can translate the best of the features to words that are clear, concise and comprehensive in docs, designed for developers.

You become really good at asking useful questions and removing yourself from the “job title” to take on other roles to become good at your role.

Who says you can’t be a developer to be a designer?

If you’re curious about what the docs look like now, here ya go! https://docs.helicone.ai/getting-started/quick-start

You don’t have time to do it all.

I had a million ideas going in, but I only have me and limited time to execute them.

Over-designing and over-optimizing is a habit that I didn’t realize my co-workers related to. It’s so easy to start with what the customer wants and drift away with oh-i-think-this-would-be-cool features.

One of the biggest lessons was leaving perfectionism behind. You’ll be so much lighter mentally, faster at your craft, and get better in the right areas.

What I mean is as soon as you meet the requirements, get feedback. While you’re at it, talk about how you’d improve the feature and why it’s a great idea, so that you give a chance for your team to deprioritize or support it.

You learn to pick and choose your battles. Some things are just not worth your time. You get so good at getting buy-ins, producing stuff, and minimizing overhead work.

But most importantly, a startup is where you can be hungry and dream big. Everything is experimental in a startup, so what if… it works?

You aren’t the only qualified person, but you are here.

In San Francisco, if I wasn’t feeling imposter syndrome on a daily basis, I probably wasn’t pushing myself enough. This city is full of cracked engineers, people with creative visions and founders. But you quickly realize that feeling like an imposter and less deserving of a spot in the city doesn’t serve you or anyone else.

Being in the startup landscape makes you reflect on where you have been, and where you’d like to go. You’re in an arena of ambition, where people who aren’t willing to settle play.

So you will get pushed to do better. At the end of the day, it won’t be just your qualification that the startup scene sees, but your hunger, growth mindset and risk-taking mentality. You will be rewarded for it in the form of learning (or stocks XD).

At startups, you get to be committed. And when you are committed, you realize boundaries are just what you set for yourself.

Have a growth mindset, be cringe and do it anyway.

They don’t have the answer. Go get them.

In startups, you are expected to be a generalist.

Have a new marketing idea? Go look into it, and make a decision. If you think the startup needs it, propose it, get buy-ins, then execute. Going from idea to execution should be fast.

You have the freedom and the autonomy to experiment, and I think that’s why it’s easy for those in startups to commit. The execution is not just for the company’s benefit, but also for yourself. Startups are great opportunities to test your ability to think and practice execution with real-life constraints, users and feedback.

Most importantly, communicate what you’re working on and keep everyone up to date with the performance. If it’s working, share it. If it’s not working, share it too, propose another way or get ideas.

Startups make you a doer and not just an idea person. It makes you resourceful and kinda cool when things do work out. :D

You gotta ask.

Support is here, and so is work-life balance in a startup.

Going in, I fully expected to work late hours and on the weekends. But most people treat it as a marathon and intentionally design their life with a startup to be sustainable.

What happens to the company when the founders burn out?

It wouldn’t exist anymore.

When life comes up, when expectations were not met, when you feel pressured/blocked in a way that doesn’t serve you, you deserve to bring it up.

There’s always a solution. Either delegating, prioritizing, identifying bottlenecks in your workflow or communicating your capacity and needs. You get good at being realistic about deadlines and communicating them. Having hard conversations is a part of it.

You just gotta ask. Just do it.

Blah blah, that’s it!

Who am I to say you should join a startup? I’m just a stranger on the internet, don’t take my word for it. But if you are like me, you believe that you can get more out of your career, and want to experience it all early on, who knows, joining startups might be cool. :D