Startup Work 0 - Start Looking

"What types of jobs are you looking for?"

It was an obvious, straightforward question. But to be honest, I didn't really have an answer.

I was in business school. I know.

I know.

(I'll talk more about the pros and cons of business school later.)

There is a glut of information about startups. Search twitter, tech news sites, podcasts and you'll see tons of advice, hacks, and strategy about fundraising, product-market fit and talking to customers.

Most of it written by and for founders and VCs. Which is important! There is no startup if someone doesn't found it.

But startups are all about scale. If a startup successfully scales, then 99+% of the workers at the company will be non-founders.

This series is for those people: those who want to work at a startup, as employee n>0.

And the first question you should ask yourself isn't what you want to do, but rather: what types of startup jobs exist?

THEN, based on what is out there, can you start to hone your search.

At a high level, most tech startups have a CEO and the following divisions:

Engineering/Technology
Finance/HR
*Operations
Product
*Revenue: Sales, Account Management, Marketing, Client Success/Support

(*Where I have spent most of my career.)

One of the best parts of working at a startup is that you get to work closely with your peers across teams.

Product needs lots of feedback from the "front lines" (Revenue), Operations needs to know what is technically feasible (Engineering), Finance/HR needs detailed visibility into each team to set budgets and approve vendor tools, etc.

What isn't on that list? Strategy. General Management. Jobs that may exist at large corporations, but are baked-in components of virtually every job at a startup.

to be continued...