What I’ve learnt from 12 months at an early-stage startup

This is biased toward young people joining ~10-person teams in ‘growth’ and figuring out how to become useful.

Others’ experiences will differ.

1. No one has time to manage you: Everyone has millions of things to do; they’re hiring you to give them more leverage. Their goal is to give you context, train you, make you useful fast, and stop having to manage you.
2. You are most useful in earlier-stage companies: Your job is to quickly own a part of the business, get traction, and scale it up. This is less useful as the company gets larger and they hire a specialist straight away. In growth, that looks like owning or finding a new channel, proving it works, building a system around it, and bringing in a specialist to own it.
3. The most useful people aren’t necessarily the best: Often, it’s because they have the most context from being around the longest. They helped build systems in ops, product, etc., and are the go-to when things break. These people have a lot of leverage, but also create key man risk.
4. You want to become a systems builder: Probably the most useful skill is to build the workflows, the team’s code, etc., to run processes smoothly, then jump onto the next project. This assumes you don’t want to specialise.
5. Your range of tasks narrows with time: When I first joined, I was doing all sorts of things—from growth to product to ops. Now it’s narrowed to three main things within growth.
6. The later you join, the smaller the things you’ll own: I own specific growth channels; today’s growth hires own smaller, more specific pieces.
7. The founders don’t care how you do it: They care about outcomes, not methods. Whether you do it or delegate it doesn’t matter, as long as it gets done. It’s on you to figure out the best way.
8. You need to own something fast: The best advice I can give is to go from “intern” to being fully responsible for something as fast as possible; then you own the outcomes.
9. Most early hires are friendly: Most of our team were poached from previous companies the team worked for, or are people they’ve known for a long time. It’s important to find people early in your career and build long-term, non-transactional relationships.
10. People from consulting are actually useful: Especially for ops/product-related roles, they have attention to detail and overall rigour a step above everyone else. But in growth, a young person who ships shit is more useful.
11. Learn to ship shit: The most useful thing in growth is the ability to go live with the crappiest version and iterate. Have a low yap : ship ratio. This is less useful as projects mature.
12. Planning is useless (at the start): Any plans we made early on expired within a week. It’s easier now, but when you’re in the figure-out-growth-channels stage, spend less time yapping and more time shipping.
13. Get involved in different parts of the business: This gives you better context and makes you more useful.
14. But avoid key-person risk: I used to think being indispensable = useful; now I realise you want to be replaceable. Aim to design systems so that if you’re removed, everything runs smoothly without you. It’s on you to figure out how.
15. Be an executor: Start by executing to a high standard; then initiate; then own planning through delivery; build systems; delegate ownership; move on to the next thing.
16. Boring marketing engines are cool: Virality is great, but performance marketing gives you reliable month-on-month growth, and, when the business is ops-constrained, you can limit demand.
17. Company mistakes become more costly: At the start, no one cares who you are, but as more people start watching, a typo can cost a lot of money and brand equity.