I don’t think you can do a diff as there so many factors that you can miss without having a complete bird-eye view of the business or the org. But nevertheless

I don’t think you can do a diff as there so many factors that you can miss without having a complete bird-eye view of the business or the org. But nevertheless, this is a great advice in that it still would give you a good example of a functional business/org and increase your chances of success significantly. I think better to go for an earliest stage but established startup, like series A-B, where they just validated their product-market-distribution fit and are on track to scale, but you still can get a sense of how it feels to have this early PMD fit. On the other hand, you still will miss on the 0-1 stage and if you want to learn how to do that too, may be worth joining a very experienced serial founder at a 0 stage. They usually have enough resources to iterate till they find one. Edit: typos.