I was talking with a talented young PhD student today about his career ambitions, and the conversation turned to whether it would be better to do a startup after finishing school rather than joining a big company, like Google, to get some "real world" experience first. I asked him what was so appealing about doing a startup, and he said that it would mean having tremendous freedom to choose what to work on and how you pursue problems. That is true, in a sense, but I question how much "freedom" you really have when starting a new company. Doing a startup is also highly constraining, there are real advantages to being at a larger company where you have more resources and a broader set of problems you can work on.
(Caveat emptor: Note that the last time I tried to talk someone out of doing a startup, it was Mark Zuckerberg, and we all know how that turned out -- so perhaps this post should be taken with a grain of salt.)
It seems to me that many startups these days are working on low-hanging-fruit problems: Things that a few guys in a garage can put together with EC2, Ruby on Rails, and XCode. Yes, you can build amazing products this way, but you're not necessarily doing rocket science. There are limits to what one can build with a small team and limited resources, and this means that most startups are constrained in the set of problems they can reasonably tackle.
Also, startups tend to focus on problems that one can build a standalone business around, something that can be monetized or build value in some direct way, in order to make investors happy. For example, it would be difficult to do a startup around a new programming language, since it's not clear how you sell it, although it might form a component of a larger product.
My point is that not all interesting problems are good startup fodder. This is where larger companies come in. One of the reasons I personally like working at Google is because I can work on problems at a scale that most startups would never achieve. Running jobs on terabytes of data on many thousands of cores is routine. For me, this is where the really interesting problems lie: Not in designing another sepia-tone photo filter app, but in solving fundamental problems of computer science that only emerge at the scale and complexity that I can work on here.
Being at a larger company means I am "free" to work on unsexy problems -- problems a venture capitalist wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Network protocol optimization, performance measurement, and infrastructure building may not be everyone's idea of fun, but I really enjoy doing this kind of core systems work that can have huge impact over the long run.
This is not to say that all problems at Google are unsexy. I just tend to gravitate towards infrastructure and networking since that's my background. And damned if I can program JavaScript.
The other side of being at a large company is that you have the freedom to fail. Money is not about to run out in a few weeks, and you don't have to make deals you wish you hadn't in order to keep the cash flowing. You can take your time to try different things, get it wrong, and make big bets that don't pan out. It's unlikely you'll lose your job for doing so, and there are always more cool problems to tackle just around the corner.
On the flip side, doing a startup while you are young and untethered might be exactly the right career move. In some ways I wish I had not sat out the dot-com boom doing a PhD, but taken a risk to join PurpleYogi or one of the other dozen or so startups (including Google) that tried to recruit me back when I was 22, unmarried, childless, and already used to living in a small apartment and eating ramen noodles for dinner. Who knows, maybe I would have learned JavaScript after all.
(Caveat emptor: Note that the last time I tried to talk someone out of doing a startup, it was Mark Zuckerberg, and we all know how that turned out -- so perhaps this post should be taken with a grain of salt.)
It seems to me that many startups these days are working on low-hanging-fruit problems: Things that a few guys in a garage can put together with EC2, Ruby on Rails, and XCode. Yes, you can build amazing products this way, but you're not necessarily doing rocket science. There are limits to what one can build with a small team and limited resources, and this means that most startups are constrained in the set of problems they can reasonably tackle.
Also, startups tend to focus on problems that one can build a standalone business around, something that can be monetized or build value in some direct way, in order to make investors happy. For example, it would be difficult to do a startup around a new programming language, since it's not clear how you sell it, although it might form a component of a larger product.
My point is that not all interesting problems are good startup fodder. This is where larger companies come in. One of the reasons I personally like working at Google is because I can work on problems at a scale that most startups would never achieve. Running jobs on terabytes of data on many thousands of cores is routine. For me, this is where the really interesting problems lie: Not in designing another sepia-tone photo filter app, but in solving fundamental problems of computer science that only emerge at the scale and complexity that I can work on here.
Being at a larger company means I am "free" to work on unsexy problems -- problems a venture capitalist wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Network protocol optimization, performance measurement, and infrastructure building may not be everyone's idea of fun, but I really enjoy doing this kind of core systems work that can have huge impact over the long run.
This is not to say that all problems at Google are unsexy. I just tend to gravitate towards infrastructure and networking since that's my background. And damned if I can program JavaScript.
The other side of being at a large company is that you have the freedom to fail. Money is not about to run out in a few weeks, and you don't have to make deals you wish you hadn't in order to keep the cash flowing. You can take your time to try different things, get it wrong, and make big bets that don't pan out. It's unlikely you'll lose your job for doing so, and there are always more cool problems to tackle just around the corner.
On the flip side, doing a startup while you are young and untethered might be exactly the right career move. In some ways I wish I had not sat out the dot-com boom doing a PhD, but taken a risk to join PurpleYogi or one of the other dozen or so startups (including Google) that tried to recruit me back when I was 22, unmarried, childless, and already used to living in a small apartment and eating ramen noodles for dinner. Who knows, maybe I would have learned JavaScript after all.
