Hi Friends,
I am engineer with about 12 years of experience in two big tech companies. I want to join early stage startup to experience the early stage hustle of startups.<p>Like everyone else, I am definitely interested in the early success and equity but also want to grow the company myself.<p>I wanted to understand what are the kind of things I should consider joining early stage startups and what are typical red-flags to watch out for?<p>Thank you.
Depends on how "early", but know when you're getting a bad deal. As a general rule of thumb, if you're between employees 1-10, you should be treated like almost like a founder. You should likely only be pursuing that role with the intention of building up a function that will eventually mean you have an entire department running under you, as starting up a function means you are a leader.<p>Start ups hiring people to be ICs and pay them like ICs (in the form of equity) that early is a bad signal. They should be hiring contractors instead if they need specific work done as an IC.<p>The first bunch of full time hires are leadership hires. You will wear lots of hats, and do lots of things you wouldn't do as an IC at a typical large company.<p>Beyond that, you need to be absolutely sure you will mesh with the "founders". You are in essence a founder. You are likely building something that will be foundational to the company. You will be making decisions that will probably live beyond your tenure at the company.<p>So either you need full autonomy, or you need to know that conflict will be handled properly and your opinion will weigh just as much as the "founders".
I joined an early stage start up once. I was employee number 3. I learned the hard way that just as they do a background checks on you, you need to do background checks on them. I later learned the founder of the company had several personal bankruptcies and DUIs.<p>This bled over into the company the company was a mess, and ultimately lead to the company going bankrupt. All this could have been avoided by paying $20 to one of those background check websites. In larger companies the inertia of the companies protects the companies from one or two bad actors, but at a small company one bad actor can quickly sink the company.