I only ever worked at startups, always one of the first employees. Different projects, from consumer stuff to enterprise computer vision tech. Most of those com

I only ever worked at startups, always one of the first employees. Different projects, from consumer stuff to enterprise computer vision tech. Most of those companies failed. One was a moderate success (~100M valuation), and when a liquidity event came I made a decent chunk of money. I love small companies, I love the chaos, I love having that bond around some crazy idea that might never work. I love being in the know about how things work and why people buy our product and all of that. I used to want to work at Google. I have a few friends that do and the common thing I hear is that it is fun at the beginning but then it gets boring. Things move slowly, people are less excited about work and there's a lot of red tape. Not saying that it's inherently bad, it's just a tradeoff. I could see myself being into that kind of work at some point in life. --- One thing that people often miss in these conversations is that if a company is failing it doesn't take a long time to figure it out. If you join a startup and it's tanking or you think the founders are incompetent, you can quit and go try another one. That's more or less what happened to me. I stayed for 2 months at one company, 8 months at another, one company I almost started with some people but quickly realized we'd fail because none of us knew the problem space. Then I worked at a successful startup for 5 years and we all made money. Another reason to work at a startup is if you ever want to start your own company. Starting a company consists of doing a lot of different things, so it helps if you have some prior experience with them. I learned a ton of random things working at startups, from interacting with lawyers to doing content marketing. I recently started a company and I talk to other founders a lot and I think people who worked at startups before are better prepared compared to people who come out of large companies.