As a piece of advice, while you don't have a choice, obviously work where you can. Once choice presents itself, pick a job where you're the dumbest kid in the g

As a piece of advice, while you don't have a choice, obviously work where you can. Once choice presents itself, pick a job where you're the dumbest kid in the group. While all startups talk about how they have the smartest people, most actually don't. Really good people are in a very limited supply. In my experience they're uniformly distributed across startups and big companies, so when you pick a job, pick based on the quality of people you'll be directly working with, not based on the size of the company. Do not assume that smart people are likely to be in a startup (even if it's funded by the best investors) - it's not necessarily true.