Ambitious People, Startups, and Big Companies!
Are big companies always slow? Are startups always fast? Is impact easy to guarantee based on the company profile? We'll discuss all of that and more.
A common misconception is that startups are where you have freedom and can move fast, but large companies, with their bureaucracy and red tape, are where dreams go to die. If you are a capable / ambitious / high-agency individual, it almost seems obvious where you should go and build your career. Is this generalization accurate, though? Let’s dive into that in this post.
Freedom and Impact
In my years of interviewing talented and highly motivated individuals, there are two things they always highlight as their top motivators for choosing where to work:
Freedom in being able to do their best work
Having their work make an impact
Let’s say that you are this LEGO figurine:
We can represent freedom as this box that wraps your work persona at all times:
The size of this box determines the amount of freedom you have in accomplishing your job. The bigger the box, the less constraints you have. The smaller the box, the more constraints and restrictions you have:
Now, freedom by itself isn’t enough. You can be free to do whatever you want if nobody cares what you do. Otherwise, everybody would just be a founder! The important related question is this:
Does this freedom have an impact on the things you care about?
Within our constraints, we can visualize impact as arrows, and the size determines the amount of impact:
A detail to emphasize is that impact and freedom aren’t directly correlated. You can have a lot of personal freedom but be in a job where your work has little impact to the overall team or business. This could be you working very successfully in a role that is not critical to what your company is focusing on. On the flip side, you can be heavily constrained but have a tremendous amount of impact. An example of this is you working in a heavily regulated company with a large customer base where small improvements can lead to outsized positive results.
Of Startups and Big Companies
Tying all of this together, conventional wisdom is that if you want freedom and impact, you go to a startup. If you want stability with more constraints, big companies are where the action is at. On average, this observation is likely true. The problem with averages is that it also assumes we are talking about an average individual. Capable, ambitious, and high-agency people are far from average. For these individuals, they can get exactly what they are looking for in any environment.
Further making generalizations tough is that every organization (big / small / fast / slow) is a collection of multiple working cultures. You can have fast teams in a slow company. You can have slow teams in a fast company.
Impact is equally hard to bucket into a consistent set of heuristics. The only thing that is easier to predict are the outcomes of high-agency individuals. They will almost always find (or engineer!) themselves in a situation that matches exactly what they are looking for. This is true even if that situation isn’t the norm for the type of organization they are in. They will always find a way.
Till Next Time
I hope you found this post helpful, especially if you are looking for your next role and are unsure what company or industry to focus on.
As always, I like to hear from you on what you like or don’t like. To discuss this further or to contact me, feel free to continue the conversation on my Twitter / X or on the forums.
Cheers,
Kirupa 😀