I'm not saying it's an invalid question, but it's not one I've ever asked going into a startup. Why? Because the reason I joined a startup is for the direct r

I'm not saying it's an invalid question, but it's not one I've ever asked going into a startup. Why? Because the reason I joined a startup is for the direct responsibility to ship code and grow a product from zero to millions of users. To do this I sacrificed joining a hugely successful company with many more resources where I could potentially climb quite quickly and make a huge salary without having to personally make a quantitative difference to the business. Maybe I'm just more of an early-stage guy than you, but I assume that I'll learn and progress my career based on the opportunities that come up. I would be highly skeptical of management laying out a 3 year plan and how my job would evolve since by definition a startup does not know how they will find product-market fit. The questions I would ask of a big company to vet the culture would be moot because I would assume that I will be shaping the culture. If that turned out not to be true then I would be leaving.