What’s more risky than being at a startup? Being in a job you don’t care about regardless of how “safe” it is.
Following up from my previous post about the notion of startups being hard, I’d like to address a similar issue around the idea of startups being “risky”.
There was a lot of semantical debate from my last post regarding what I meant by “hard” so I’ll start off by defining risky. In most cases, when people talk about the startup life being “risky” they are referring to job security. Because startups are so fragile and the margin for error much smaller than a business that has been around for a while with ongoing profits, job safety is always at risk.
My answer to that is: job safety is an illusion. The benefit you get by being at a startup with much less job security is significantly greater than the ongoing safety of a job you dislike. The reason? The professional decay you experience while being at a mediocre job that you don’t really like is, in the long run, much more detrimental to your long-term success.
When you are working at a job you love and are passonate about, you find yourself going above and beyond the call of duty without being asked. In fact, to you, you aren’t going above and beyond because there is no above and beyond. You enjoy it. You feel you are making a difference. You are interested in learning new things, interested in doing your best.
Another big issue with being in a job you don’t like is network decay. If you are interested in growing your career over time, becoming an entrepreneur, raising money from investors, or hiring great employees, you need a solid network. Job #1 for any burgeoning entrepreneur should be to pound the pavement at Starbucks and meet with as many people as possible. When you are at a mediocre job, you don’t care about networking. Why would you want to meet other people that are related to the mediocre job because they are probably mediocre too. If you love your job, you want to meet more people like you. You don’t always know it, but those connections will help you 1, 3, 5 years down the road in ways you never imagined.
The reason all of this is important is because job safety is a myth in today’s business world. I worked at one of the best and biggest high tech companies in the world in a job that any engineer would have loved to have had, but during 2008 there were grumblings that my department might be cut. Typically these kind of cuts are done with a clever not with a scalpel. I like to think that if they had cut my department they would have spared me, but there are no guarentees. My manager didn’t seem to think he was all that safe. The worst part was my job (to me) was mediocre. My network had eroded over time (and mainly consisted of other disgruntled corporate types). My skills hadn’t eroded because I kept doing things outside work, but I can see how they would had I not had StatSheet.
To sum up, job safety is an illusion and you are just fooling yourself if you think you are better off working a medicore job long-term than exploring something you are passionate about (like a startup if that’s your thing). I’d rather work on something where I’m growing even if there is no promise for tomorrow than a crappy job that will one day pull the rug out from underneath my career.
