There are a lot of reasons cited by the employees working for start-ups. It is a no-brainer that joining a start-up or an early-stage company can do marvels to your career and self-satisfaction, which can never be matched with by joining a behemoth corporate. It can give you a good tagline: Its brand name that may or may not help in pulling you through your career after you reach middle management. Career-hierarchy is like a pyramid. Higher you go, the chances of finding a job reduce, as at higher levels number of personnel required [i.e. number of job vacancies] reduces to a great extent. For every rank up, the ratio of the number of vacancies vs. the number of competing professionals keeps reducing.
Another gruesome fact is that as you go higher in the echelons, you become more and more dispensable overhead. To top it all, if a black-swan type catastrophe occurs, then the overheads get butchered. You are usually an endangered species out there, ready to get extinct!
Agreed that not everything will be hunky dory at the start-ups. There are many more instances of start-up failures than successes. But if you carefully choose from a slew of start-ups, then the odds will be in your favor for getting your dream career. This is true especially from India’s standpoint, which is currently witnessing an entrepreneurial revolution. On an average around 2500 start-ups are incubated per month!
To prop up the question of why join a start-up, in a better way, I have listed 5 key reasons as follows:
1. Steep Learning Curve:
The start-ups have to undergo a tough roller-coaster ride in today’s competitive world. The ‘do-it-all’ hat usually donned by most of the employees, exposes them to a vast range of functions especially during the time of crisis. It should be understood that start-ups do not come with a deluge of funds. They are always scarce on financial front, even if it has had a round of angel or VC funding. The growth and expansion plans force them to be thrifty, and hence to achieve targets many a times, employees have to get into performing different roles and functions. This gives profound experience and your learning curve goes steeper than when compared to what it is if you are assigned tasks within the professional boundaries defined by the large corporations. Your creativity and thinking get paralyzed!
2. Faster Career Growth:
The fact that start-ups do not have a 3-5 digit employee numbers, the odds are higher that the career growth will be much faster in a start-up organization, than in an established big company. Joining at the nascent stage puts you in an advantage, as during the growth phase of the company, your career move will be much ahead of those who typically join at the maturity phase [typically beaurocracy sets in by this stage]. The maturity phase actually is the worst time to join any company. Much of the processes are streamlined and not much creative thinking is required of the people. The working culture turns mundane and boring. You almost live like a zombie.
3. Employee Wealth Creation:
The concept of Employee Stock Options has proven as one of the biggest ways of making wealth for the employees by many companies now. It is always easier to issue ESOPs in greater number and at very nominal cost when the company is at the nascent/growth stage, and when the company is not listed. Once the company is listed, the price differential of ESOPs vs. the market creates wealthier and happier employees. In order to avail most of this perk, you should consider joining a start-up.
4. Doing Something Different Or What You Believe In:
Many times you would like to do something different. You might get fed up of doing something, which you do not believe in or you do not agree with, especially in big companies. You have a drive in you to venture out yourself, but due to either lack of resources or lack of right business partner, you end up landing in a job in an established big company. Joining a start-up may, to a great extent, pacify your passion towards starting your own venture. If your ideas and interests match, then your own performance will also be at its BEST!
5. Higher Job Satisfaction:
What is job satisfaction? Actually there is nothing as a 100% job satisfaction in the whole world. It may vary from negative to maximum or an optimum level. It is a highly subjective parameter, for which assigning a “yes” or a “no” would be meaningless. Joining a start-up can give you a kind of job for which you would like to wake up every morning; you will look forward to going to work; you would be excited about the tasks and the day ahead! Doing your tasks with job at hand should feel effortless. It shouldn’t feel like a frustration or a burden. When you get all this, I call it as HIGH Job Satisfaction. All the above aspects cited here almost definitely enhance the job satisfaction among the employees working in a start-up.
So, just remember. The road to happiness can start with a single step: Join a start-up with a business idea that you love. Don’t let the dogma of doing a job in an established firm bog you down. In India we are at the crossroads where many companies which are a start-up or an early-stage company today, will make a big difference in our economy 10 years from now. Let your creative thinking come alive and save yourself from turning into a zombie!
 About Mridula: Mridula is a freelance writer. She writes on Entrepreneurship and has worked for a start-up in the past. To know more check out her profile at LinkedIn/Mridula Velagapudi |
