5 reasons to start a career in a "mature" startup

If you graduated from a technical university or you are tired of freelancing, but you don’t know how and where to start a career, the famous venture capitalist, the former director of Google, Hunter Wolf has one good advice for you: start in a startup. In order not to risk much and not to take on too much responsibility, look for a mature (mid-stage) startup that has already received a decent investment and launched a product for which demand has been confirmed.



So, here are five reasons to start a career in a “mature” startup:

1. Your work will really matter.

The period of “finding oneself” by the company on the market has already ended, and corporate ossification has not yet begun. In a new-made (early-stage) startup, you and your team will have to throw all your efforts so that the world will know about your product and spend so valuable time on various trifles due to the lack of proper infrastructure. (Editor's note: save time in the office gym will not work due to its absence). In a more mature technology company, your tasks will be to maintain performance and expand the functionality of an existing product. Working on these tasks, you are likely to be under constant pressure (and, accordingly, will grow rapidly), because due to the rapid traction load will constantly increase, and competitors will force you to quickly add new features. The good news is that you will have all the resources to develop and launch them, which will allow you to receive feedback from customers as soon as possible. Instead of creating templates and product concepts, and then guessing whether someone needs it or not, you can quickly receive a large number of feedback on your work and thus be in a constant process of improvement.

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2. Movement creates opportunities.

Mature startups are still limited in resources, as they are developing quite quickly. They create new teams and organizational structures. There are no four management levels between you and the founders. Therefore, as soon as you prove yourself, you will most likely immediately be given the opportunity to manage new teams / departments, open new offices and do everything that is part of plans to scale a successful business.

3. Your team is your tribe .

The founders and first team members will work with you, because firstly, they most likely have not yet lost interest in the project, and secondly, they are most likely not able to get out of it. These people plus your new colleagues will most likely play the role of your friends, managers, employees, co-founders, investors, and so on for the next 20 years. Building strong ties early in your career is much more important than any title or financial compensation. The guys a couple of years older than you can become good mentors and teach good habits.

4. Your options are likely to be worth something.

Options are such lottery tickets, which, given the likelihood of failure of a startup and per month spent on a project, are rarely more profitable compared to the salary that you could get at a large IT company, such as Google. However, mature start-ups are likely to have raised several rounds of funding, and now they have a much lower probability of failure, and the opportunity to grow 10 times before an IPO or strategic exit within 2-3 years is very high. If you are lucky and such a deal takes place, then having several hundred thousand dollars in your bank account a couple of years after graduating from university will help you to approach your future career in a completely different way.

5. The effect of distortion of reputation.

People from technology companies are more likely to rate those who were in the company before an IPO or takeover than those who joined the team immediately after such transactions. This is not an axiom, but in any case, the sooner you join the winning team, the more valuable you will be in the market.

And we can also talk about 9 technological trends, which lead to the careers of each of us .