> It still represents many tens of thousands of opportunities. With hundreds of thousands of candidates vying for them, and more qualified than there are slots

> It still represents many tens of thousands of opportunities. With hundreds of thousands of candidates vying for them, and more qualified than there are slots available. > More importantly though, I would argue that the skill level required in its employees for a startup to not go out of business is at least as high as that at these top companies. I disagree with this one. First off, the skills required to help a small, rapidly-growing company be successful are very different than the skills required to help make a similarly-sized project within a large company successful. Second, I think most startups overestimate the quality of the people they need to successfully execute, partly due to the first point, partly due to not understanding the actual business risks, and partly due to overestimating the difficulty due to an inflated sense of self-importance WRT the company.