"As you get older, if you're lucky, you realize two things: what you like, but also what you're good at," Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph told Forbes in 2019 on why he left Netflix. "The answer to both of them [for me] is early-stage companies. I like the chaos. I like the fact that you're working on hundreds of things at once."
Some of you who have done startups will disagree. Some who flee corporate life find they did not like the challenges or gain satisfaction from doing a startup. Failure is common, for one thing. Resources are limited, for another.
And actual benefits will be lower than in a larger corporate setting. One has to gamble that success will outweigh those disadvantages. In some ways, corporate life is a grind, but less personally risky.
Startups represent the opposite. There are no guarantees. Founders might win big; they might lose all. Employees might not win as big, but won’t lose as much, either, in case of failure.
Larger organizations are more bureaucratic: they have formalized rules for all sorts of things. We most often think that is a bad thing, but it has good aspects: it is one way of assuring equal treatment of people and a constraint on arbitrary processes.
And as much as we tend to criticize large organization behavior as too slow; too political; with too many meetings and unproductive activities and people, scale sometimes is necessary to support the business mission.
And scale means more bureaucracy. Uniform processes and repeatable practices are arguably essential for large-scale businesses and organizations, to ensure that customer requirements are met.
The point is that not everything in business or life can be done by smaller organizations or startups. Some things take scale. Also, every scale business started small at some point. Growth itself produces bureaucracy, because it leads to size.
Still, some--and not all--will agree with Randolph. The chaotic, unstructured, highly-challenging startup experience is going to appeal to some more than the safer, more structured corporate life. But there are advantages to that choice as well.
As we have seen with attitudes towards personal safety during and after the peak of the Covid pandemic, people have different risk profiles. Neither choice--more risk or less risk--is inherently normative.
But such differences tend to be reflected in job choices as well. Me, I’ll take the chaos and uncertainty. There are clear downsides, none of which I especially like. But most of us who have done startups will agree there is much-greater chance to be creative; greater scope of work; more chances to take initiative and always much greater opportunity to innovate.
Against which one has to balance greater personal financial danger, it has to be said.
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