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If you want to make some
serious money and you join a really good company (where the numbers will
be 1% of Microsoft's), as the 10,000th employee or even the 1,000th
employee, you are not making the right decision - the math just doesn't
work in your favor. If you want to make some serious money, you have to
take some risk and
join something early, at least among the first 50 employees. I'm not
saying that every job you take should be at a start-up, but if you never
do it, it's going to be hard to make serious money in the tech industry,
unless you work for 20 years and climb to the top of a big company.
Reason #2: The
right start-ups are not that risky.
What is the worst case in any start-up, if you are not the founder? The
start-up goes out of business. Your downside is that you have to find a
new job. Going back to my original caveat, if you are good at what you
do and confident about your ability, then in India it will be relatively
easy to find a job. India's overall economy is growing so fast (2nd
fastest growing economy in the world in 2006), and the hi-tech industry
is growing even faster, that most people seem to get a 25% pay increase
when they jump from job to job anyways. If you add in to that a start-up
that has a good working environment, good management, good investors,
good customers, and you feel that the products are useful, then the risk
is dramatically reduced. You've gone from a 5% chance that something
good happens to a 35% chance that something good happens (I made those
numbers up, but you get the point).
I know a number of people
in Silicon Valley who have made a career of working at start-ups, and
are fully aware that some will be winners, and most won't. They figure
if they work at 5 start-ups over 10 years, maybe one or two will be
successful and that's more financially rewarding than working at an
already successful company as the 2000th employee. Crucially, for all 10
years they were excited about the work they were doing. Here is what
Paul Graham, a well-known entrepreneur and writer, has to say about
this: "Economically, you can think of a start-up as a way to compress
your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low
intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for
four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium
for working fast."
Reason #3:
Often that stable job isn't so stable.
I have seen a lot of people go to the stable company and then leave
after 1 or 2 years because they just don't like the work or the company.
What is the difference between joining a start-up that you like and the
worst case happens in 2 years versus you join a "stable" company and in
2 years you leave because you don't like the work?
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