Ambitious people should work at startups
“Your career is meaningless and you’re wasting your lives on something that doesn’t matter. There are big problems in the world and you’re not part of solving them!” - Palmer Luckey
If you’re ambitious but not sure what to do with your life after college, don’t become a consultant. Go work for the most exciting startup you can find.
Startups are the best professional setting for most ambitious people.
They offer: (1) the potential for lots of money, (2) lots of power, (3) EXTREME challenges, (4) the chance to work alongside other ambitious people, (5) on things that truly matter, while (6) having enormous amounts of fun.
Money and power: This one’s obvious. Being an early employee at a startup puts outlier outcomes on the table in ways that other jobs simply do not. If you’re at a startup and you own a chunk of the company, you’re playing a different game than the guy who’s been a broker at Schwab his whole life.
It’s an exponential game.
EXTREME challenges: It’s trite but it’s true: at a startup, any day might bring the most critical challenge the company has ever faced.
It’s entirely possible that whether the company lives or dies is up to you. You may have just graduated from college or you may be decades into your career—either way, one thing is certain: you won’t be fully prepared for the moment. The types of problems you’re solving will often be fundamentally new. It’s up to you to dream up novel solutions, and it’s up to you to do so fast enough to get the company to the other side.
This is insanely nerve-wracking the first time you experience it! But it’s exhilarating. And more than anything else I often find myself thinking: gosh this is all just so darn fun.
Work that truly matters: Philosopher Susan Wolf argues that meaningful lives consist in: (1) active engagement in (2) a successful project of (3) objective worth and positive value. I think ambitious people have an even higher bar here than the average person. Startups are so wonderful because you will be given more responsibility—and usually within the first week or two—than you have any right to be given.
When I joined Topline Pro, I was fresh out of a coding bootcamp. I had no real coding experience. I’d never used Python. I didn’t really know what an “endpoint” was. I often mixed up camelCase and snake_case. And yet, within the first few weeks I was tasked with building features that would go on to serve as the foundation for our business for years to come. Our Facebook and Google integrations, payments, photo uploading, contact management.
Despite being completely overwhelmed, I will always remember those months as some of my favorite. Active engagement, a successful project, objective worth. Excellent recipe.