Try a Startup after College

After graduating college last year, I was faced with a problem— albeit the kind of problem that most recession-era Americans dream of having.  Surrounded by tech companies, I had to choose where I would go for my first real, this-doesn’t-end-after-three-months, job.  While I thought it would be a straightforward decision, and I figured I should be grateful for any job offers at all, choosing where to go was a lot more complicated than I expected.

Having gone through this decision I feel comfortable giving a few pieces of advice.

1.  Never optimize for salary straight out of college

Salary the only completely quantifiable and comparable part of a job offer— a dollar is the same everywhere.  Just because it’s the most straightforward to measure doesn’t mean it’s the most important.  In fact, I’d argue that salary is the least important variable, and here’s why: you aren’t used to having money yet.  Coming out of college, you already know how to live frugally and generally have very little financial responsibility outside of food, rent, and potentially loans to pay off.

Making more money than all of your friends is a great way to falsely convince yourself that you’ve chosen the right job, but in reality it’s only an indication of how much you value a large salary.  Sit down and figure out how much you’ll be paying in rent, food, and reasonable living expenses, and you’ll probably realize you can live very comfortably off of a salary much lower than anything you’re being offered.  Any dollar above that baseline just goes into your savings account, and while saving money is really important, it shouldn’t be the deciding factor straight out of college.

2.  Optimize for learning

Walking into a large company means walking into a lot of established process, even in companies that pride themselves on being lean.  The way code is reviewed, meetings are scheduled, employees are recruited and interviewed… all of this exists before you walk in the front door.

While learning another company’s established process can teach you about best practices, the best learning happens when you’re faced with a problem and you come up with a solution so it never happens again.  It makes you explore every option and see how each one works in reality.

You’ll learn lessons that you can apply at any other job, but you’ll learn them much faster in a smaller company that doesn’t dictate the rules of the game to you.  No matter how much a company promises you’ll get complete freedom, no one can escape process, and convincing an HR department to change their recruiting techniques is a lot harder than changing the way you personally recruit employees.

3.  Do it while you can

I can’t explain how excited I am to be part of a fast-moving four-person startup. The thrill of hiring our first employee, of seeing our first users, and of going into work every day caring so much about our product may be immeasurable, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

There will come a day when I’m risk averse, but that day isn’t today.  To recent college grads: go small.  You won’t regret it for a second.

This post was written by a recent college grad who is now a founder of a high-tech startup.