A few days ago I met the Bitorical team in person. I visited their offices and we had lunch together. Out of everything this year, that’s easily the best part of this quarter.
That probably sounds like a normal week in other times, but I don’t know adulthood without a pandemic. I literally turned 18 and the next day the coronavirus arrived in Latin America.
So how did I decide to apply to a startup?
In March 2020, during the very few days I actually went to class (you know why), I read a book on the bus that I ended up loving: Startup Essentials.
A lot of us want to make the world a bit better, and some of us want to start a company someday. The book is a free O’Reilly collection with chapters from four of their books about what working at a startup is like and how to build one.
There were the usual stories about becoming a millionaire, founding companies, and having Hollywood and David Fincher make a movie about you (without you even being the CEO). But I also read stranger stories that could only happen at a company trying to grow exponentially. The chapter that stuck with me was “Why I Left Consulting and Joined a Startup”, by Michelle Wetzler. It comes from Managing Startups, a collection of the best startup blog posts picked by Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann.
So yes, Michelle moved on to a better life: a great startup. Good for her!
What left me speechless, though, was how she described both workplaces.
Maybe my idea of startups was outdated, or maybe it was always like this and I just underestimated them. Either way, this is what I took from it.
Work-life balance
People matter at any company. At a startup, they become absolutely necessary. The team doesn’t only care about the quality of the minimum viable product they’re about to launch. They also care about the quality of life of everyone on the team.
I care about this one a lot. We move fast to build something people love, but not at the cost of our lives.
Merit-based pay
Startups are small teams, so what each person brings has a much bigger impact than at a giant company.
And when you move things forward, people notice.
Hard work
Everyone on the team works hard to ship the product. But you don’t need to go full speed at every moment to get better results.
The idea that developers sleep at their desks and code all night, 25/8, isn’t real.
What I realized
I was about to get off the bus (it wasn’t that many pages) when I realized startups had stopped being, for me, this monster that only a handful of people could survive. They’re just different.
I grew up with the idealized version of Silicon Valley, and also with the backlash against it and the fear of it. It’s all incredibly… incredibly what?
In the end, what could I do? Young people take more risks than we need to, so, doing my part for the post-2000 generation, I applied to a startup.
And now I’m part of one.
I’m 19, and my work experience is about to reach one year. I know how much I still have to learn about this way of building things. Chaotic shit show. I want to see the bigger picture.
I’m not sure about a lot of things. But I can say I took the right step.
I feel happier.