Why Working For a Startup Isn’t So Risky

Monica O’Brien is a guest writer from Twenty Set, a blog about personal and professional development for millennials.
Young Go Getter: One of my friends graduated in June 2007 and was headhunted for a startup after posting his resume on CareerBuilder. He was 20 years-old and had a choice: do the startup or take the other, much safer offer at a larger company. He chose the startup and joined a team of nine employees who built robots for large firms – in the CEO’s father’s basement.
What I failed to mention is how I met my friend – we’ve been coworkers for the past four months. The startup company was doing great business by building the top robots in the industry – but went bankrupt five months after my friend started due to lawsuits from the CEO’s old company.
But my friend survived his first affair with a startup, and you can too – because startups aren’t that risky. Here are three reasons why…
You Can Find Another Job Easily
Startup goes under? Sure, it’s tough to see something you worked so hard at fail; but you’re awesome and you will find another job easily.
How do I know? Because if you’re not awesome and great at personal branding then you don’t get recruited for startups in the first place. So even if the startup goes under, you still have yourself and your fabulous skill set. Oh, and you have a startup under your belt, which makes for a pretty impressive resume builder.
So you can do one of two things:
* Get into another startup, which you already have the experience and connections for
* Reenter corporate where they are looking to recruit people with awesome resumes like yours (Hat Tip: Ryan)
Neither is better or worse. In fact, I have another friend who moved to Chicago from Silicon Valley last August. He worked for a few different startups, including this little one called Facebook, and now he’s an investment banker (of all things).
But that’s the great thing about careers these days – there is no clear-cut path to where you want to go. The playing field no longer looks like a game of Chutes and Ladders; it’s more like a football game, where there are lots of different plays that can score a touchdown.
Job Security Sucks These Days
The economy is not so good and companies are changing hands – this means that people can get laid off in a blink. This happens in the public sector when companies get acquired. This happens in the private sector when companies go under.
It doesn’t seem to matter where you work anymore; good people are let go from their jobs every day. It starts with a hiring freeze and progresses to layoffs, often around performance review time. Since job security in the traditional sense is nonexistent at most companies, you may as well work where you want and stop worrying. For many of us young go-getters, that’s a startup.
Working For a Startup is Like Starting a Business 101
I want to start a business someday, but pretty much every entrepreneur I know tells me I need to do a startup first. I’ll admit I thought this was dumb the first time I heard it; but 15-people-giving-me-the-exact-same-advice later? It would be foolish of me to think I know better.
So if you want to start a business someday, you have two choices:
* Stay in corporate America for awhile and then start a business with no entrepreneurship experience
* Do a startup (or a few), get experience starting businesses, then start your own business without repeating the same mistakes
Which one sounds riskier to you?
Why Working For a Startup Isn’t So Risky [Young Go Getter]