I changed jobs a few months ago. I shifted back from Korea to India and I now work at Babblebots. I found myself unsure of what to do next career-wise but I had a few pointers that guided me in terms of what I would like to experience at my next job. I wanted to experience working at a smaller place which moves faster, and I wanted to do work on something AI related. Startups seemed like the best place to experience both the above preferences.
Searching for startups to work at is a difficult and time-consuming process. Compared to a handful of highly sought after big tech companies, there are a myriad of startups spanning different industries and growth phase. I lacked knowledge about startups in general and found it difficult to compare different startups. Wanted to write this article to provide some clarity on the search process.
Have a role in mind when you start to apply. The role isn’t necessarily a specific title (say Data Scientist) because the day-to-day work could differ a lot for the same title at different startups. Have an idea of what kind of work you would like to do – could be backend development, AI, bizops etc. When you start interviewing at a startup for a role, make sure you clarify the day to day responsibility and whether it matches or not.
[Note] I was looking for a role at the intersection of AI and engineering, which is typically called AI engineer role. It doesn’t exist at many companies so they may ask you to pick the software engineering (backend) route or the AI research route.
The next set of dimensions you can use to evaluate startups are -
Out of the four dimensions above, the size of the startup would be the most important differentiator in terms of your experience of the work. There are trade-offs involved and it would help to properly understand them and then decide what stage of the startup would be a good fit for you.
As the size of the startup increases, you’ll find more structured work, that means your role will be well defined. There will be opportunity of mentorship from senior people. Close to market salaries and probably working on scaling efforts. Things happen in well defined way, with discussion and proper research. There are systems in place - testing, QA etc. At a much smaller place, you’ll find hardly any structure in your work. This will require you to frame the scope of your own projects. Good for developing ownership. You will probably get salary lesser than market rate but the chance of growing quickly within the company in senior positions.
For me, I was preferably looking for a very small team size. So that the work is not very structured and defined (didn’t want to work at a place where the work is cut out too small to learn and grow).
It’s difficult to optimise for all 4 dimensions together. Luckily for me the salary ranges were similar so that wasn’t a consideration. In person office vs remote office is also something you can think of. (I preferred going to office than work from home). Optimising for 2 (or 3) of the dimensions would qualify as a good fit in my opinion.
If you decide to work for small sized startups the next hurdle is to search for them. Unlike unicorns that are all over the internet, it’s not so straight forward to find small startups to work at. I suggest
Time to learn more about startups in general. The best way in my opinion is to ask seniors who are already working at startups. I reached out to many seniors for college asking for their opinion on choosing between startups. (Topmate helped). I also suggest learning about ESOPs, funding rounds, venture capital etc.
Some mistakes I could have avoided.
One of the reason motivating people to join startups is learning. Wanted to shed more light on what exactly does the learning at a startup comprise of (after being here for 5 months).
Startups make you better at practical coding skills (doing things quickly, making things work etc.), so I do feel I’m becoming more productive engineer (in terms of code pushed, features built etc). A major learning here is in terms of confidence in yourself. Slowly developing the confidence that I can build things on my own and also ship complete features independently. This is coming because of doing a lot of tasks here. It was severely lacking before because there weren’t enough tasks to make you feel productive/confident. You also learn a lot about other aspects of startups – funding, hiring, sales, product etc and general knowledge about the ecosystem is also increasing. Work makes you feel important on a day to day basis.
However also startup’s aren’t the one stop solution for learning. If you were thinking of gaining hard skills, dedicated courses, self study (or sometimes grad degree) could be a better way. At startups your attention may be split into multiple different tasks so you wouldn’t be able to gain depth in any particular technology. The learning is more wide than it is deep.
Found another well written article on this - How to choose a startup
Job Boards
One way to start the process of job search is to look for active jobs on LinkedIn. Mid / large sized startups post their active roles on LinkedIn Jobs. These startups are well known and their roles would pop up towards the top on the job page. Early stage startups too use LinkedIn but unless you follow the company page or founder, it is unlikely it would come in your feed. There are other job boards where I suggest creating accounts to look for who’s hiring. These include Wellfound, Weekday, Y Combinator (and then filter for India location)
Curated Lists
The above method works for startups that have ongoing opening and come into your feed. However the best startups where you would like to work for might not have active job openings on LinkedIn or other job boards but still be interested in hiring you based on your profile. It’s useful to start with a (big) curated of startups already and filter from that based on your preferences. There already exists many highly curated lists globally. For India specifically I had created a list of AI Startups (and subsequently a bigger list - AI Startups (Extended)) for myself that you can check out. Found a similar list for Dev Startups (India). The global lists (which also include Indian startups) can be found on startupsearch.com (AI list, Dev tools list etc), breakoutlist.com, topstartups.io
I highly recommend asking friends in VC companies to help with the filtering and also to understand the lens through which they evaluate startups. A good evaluation strategy is to find startups which have received investment from top-tier VC firms. Check out the portfolio companies of Peak XV, Lightspeed, Accel, Nexus, Kalaari, Stellaris, Blume etc and companies accepted at startup accelerators such as Y Combinator, Antler and Techstars.
If you have an idea and would like to venture directly into building a startup, you can look for co-founders of complimentary skillset on YC Cofounder Matching