When should you take risks in early career?
My brother got an offer from Google and a series A startup. The startup has all the good qualities for a startup:
- Founder successfully built a company that IPO’d
- High talent density in a small team - 20 employees most with PhDs and undergrads from T5 schools. He’s also friends with the employees.
- Backed by a top VC firm (Benchmark, Accel, a16z, Sequoia, etc.)
- Brother’s skillset fully aligns with the startup’s needs.
- Brother wants to become a founder eventually, so this is great training for him.
At Google, he will likely work on ads - solid team but probably a heavily optimized product already.
My friends and family all encouraged him to do the startup, and he himself is also excited by the startup. However, startups are risky at the end of the day, and he’s worried that if the startup doesn’t do well, he won’t have anything to show for on his resume. Meanwhile, Google, while less interesting, can set him up for better opportunities down the line because of the brand name. Given how tough the job market is, having a good brand can really change things for him.
He performed a best and worst case analysis of the startup and here’s what he came up with:
Startup
Best case:
Startup IPOs and he becomes a millionaire. Can go and start his startup or anything he wants.
Worst case:
Startup fails and he’s out of a job, can’t find a job because he doesn’t have a brand on his resume
Best case:
Gets fast promotion
Worst case:
Gets laid off. At least he has the brand on his resume so job hunting won’t suck
So my brother has been really torn about the decision. The startup job has perfect career alignment with his future aspirations, but its future is uncertain. Meanwhile, Google is the safer option, albeit more siloed. So should he take the risk?
By extension of this, when should early career take risks? YC (although biased) and other sources encourage early career people to take risks. From the best/worst case analysis shown above shouldn’t early career be the time to build career liquidity rather than take risks?
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Discussion
(2 comments)- 1
19 days agoThoughtful TarodactylTaro CommunityOne thing I'll say is if your brother was able to crack Google as a new grad, even if the startup fails, he'll be fine imo because if he was able to do it once, then I'm confident he'll be able to do it again.
- 0
16 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroNormally I recommend that junior engineers go to Big Tech first to build a foundation, but your brother's situation is different as he already knows he wants to become a founder someday.
Honestly, I'm leaning towards the Series A company. Series A companies generally have some semblance of product-market fit already, and the team seems very strong while also being a good fit for him.
Google's great, but I imagine working on ads is super stressful (source: I worked on ads at Meta which is also primarily a digital ads company). If you're going to be super stressed out and have poor work-life balance, might as well do it for an exciting product you're super passionate about. Google ads is so mature now that I can't imagine any reasonably sane person being genuinely passionate about it.
Anyways, on to the question in the title: "When should you take risks in early career?"
My answer: Literally all the time when you can. For 99% of people, their energy levels will go down as they get older while their personal life complexity goes up. It only gets harder and harder to take risks as you age. When you're in your 20s, just do as much fun crazy stuff as possible unless you have some hard blocker (health issue, actually need the high TC of FAANG to survive, etc).
