Two Years In A Startup: Should you make the leap?

Speed

My startup adventure started as a fully remote endeavour in early 2021, a little before remote working became the norm. There were no long onboarding processes, no one was talking at me about the short-term plan or long-term business vision over a board room table. Instead, I dove right in, meeting most of the team by day two and making myself comfortable submitting merge requests. People had lots of ideas, and there was never any shortage of work, so we had to be ruthless when it came to prioritising. I was constantly learning new things from cloud infrastructure to new ways of building stuff. My GitLab contributions shows a fast-paced world:

Coming from an environment of large-scale organisations it felt different; the best way for me to describe it is being on a speed boat compared to a cruise ship. It is a fun place to be.

Change

A startup will usually be a smaller sized company than what you are used to, so the work you are doing plays a huge part in the growth of the company. Hence, your ideas are just as, if not more, valuable. Suddenly, your work goes from being a small part of a larger goal to being the ACTUAL goal.

Knowledge

This is one of the biggest advantages of working at a small company. When decisions need to be made about what to focus on next, we group up to prioritise the work as a team. I learned a lot about growing a business, hiring, and creating technical roadmaps because people are willing to have these discussions with one and other, whereas in a larger organisation I did not have the opportunity to do so.

Next

Here’s for the most exciting bit (for me, at least): we are on this, journey together. Being part of a great team where we all look towards the same goal, makes we look forward to the times ahead and help the business grown. Having never been part of a journey like this, I plan to embrace it and learn as much as I can while helping others learn as well.

Summary