Graduating Into Your First Startup or: “It’s Vegas, Baby!”
This is a guest post from Oliver Taco, a specialist in Web 2.0 promotion and Social Media Marketing.
Have you ever been to Las Vegas or seen it on CSI? Did you ever wonder how they built those enormous casinos? Yep - people who think they can beat the odds over any term. (You see, math *is* important.)
Have you been looking at FaceBook and Digg and [insert your favorite startup here] and wondered how they were built? Yep, same answer..
Look, if you want to work in the startup world then you have to accept the fact that most startups fail. And they break your heart. And you get pale and flabby and tired, and probably gain weight.
But there is no better job in the world. That’s why I’ve been involved in so many over the last 25 years: programmer, team lead, COO, VP/Bus-Dev, Managing Director, consultant, principal, and now COO again. I beat the odds - only 8 before I was involved in one that did something successful.
(Of course, I did have to take time off between gigs to spend around 10 years working for “the man” to fill in my money pit!)
And there are no better work friends in the world than the ones you make during the regularly scheduled Death Marches. I recently hired a guy I worked with almost 20 years ago at my first startup. We’ve worked together twice since in startups and once as consultants. I can pick up the phone and start making calls and find out the answer to almost anything you’d want to know, from telephone standards to PPC dynamics to a guy what actually understands Black-Scholes valuation. All part of my startup network.
But, like Vegas, it’s all about the odds. Most of the folks I know have done OK, I can only count six who’ve made really good money ($3M+) and one who really hit it and kept it ($200M+). I’ve got 1,600 contacts in my address book, 75% of them are from startup contacts and around half of them are still in the startup game. If you’re good at math you can see that that means my network in startups is 600 people. So if I know six who’ve made it good that is 1%. Are 1% of your friends multi-millionaires?
Which brings me to the point (finally) - how do you get in on the game. Well, I’ve given you one clue - network. Surely you know someone like me?
I would never *not* forward your resume to 10 friends doing non-silly startups to see if you had a shot. Does your roomie know someone like me? Your mom or dad? It is a basic networking rule.
Something else that will work at a startup that will *never* work at a real company (you know what I mean) is to just cold call your way in for a half hour of someone’s time to explain the company. You see, startup folks are always excited and willing to talk - if you push your way in a bit you can probably get a cooks tour of the building and a chalk talk about their business. You’re not looking for a job, you’re just presenting yourself.
Oh, and if you follow up with an email and your resume, they’ll just assume you’re a smart guy.
How do you find startups? There’s a local business paper where you live or want to live. Not the business section of your local paper, but a local business paper. Read it. Find the websites where people discuss VC funding. Pay attention. Do google searches on the key words and look for new pages - those will often show you new sites popping up in the field.
Finally, be prepared to choke when they discuss salary. I find it helpful to pretend the stock options are worth something when I take a startup salary and trim my consulting take home by 50% or so.
Oliver Taco is an experienced, if not yet filthy rich, entrepreneur. He’s gone into almost a dozen startups (telecom, logistics, mobile, enterprise software, etc) as an engineer, lead software designer, architect, COO, MD, and VP/Biz Dev). Over the last 25 years he’s been through several booms, worked on great and flawed ideas, and generally had a blast. Plus he’s married with children, which is the ultimate startup. His current company is finally through the startup phase and is now a “got up.” He is currently working on an interesting service for people using social networks.
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