Deliberate Job Choices: Early-stage vs. Growth Stage Startups or Big Companies

Deliberate Job Choices: Early-stage vs. Growth Stage Startups or Big Companies

As a seasoned entrepreneur and founder of Relay.app, I'll share my insights on the pros and cons of joining a big company, growth stage startup, or early stage startup, and how deliberate decision-making can lead to personal and professional growth.

• 1. Jacob Bank is the founder and CEO of Relay.app, a workflow automation tool.
• 2. He has experience in both big companies and startups.
• 3. He encourages people to be deliberate about choosing a company that will help them learn and grow in the skills they want to develop.
• 4. He started his career pursuing a PhD in AI at Stanford but ended up dropping out to start his first company, Timeful, which was an AI powered digital calendar.
• 5. Timeful was acquired by Google in 2015, where he spent six years as a product leader responsible for Gmail, Google Calendar and other products.
• 6. He left Google in 2021 to found Relay.app.
• 7. EO has teamed up with him to offer advice to those considering starting their own company.
• 8. He believes that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of whether to join a big company, growth stage startup, early stage startup, or start your own company.
• 9. Instead, he encourages people to consider what skills they want to learn and how they want to grow in their career.
• 10. He believes that if you want to learn how to build a product from scratch, you should join an early stage startup.
• 11. If you want to learn how to hyper scale a product, you should join a growth stage company.
• 12. If you want to learn how to operate when you already have a billion users, you should join a big company like Google.
• 13. Over the first year of Relay, they built 5 or 6 different product experiments before settling on their final idea.
• 14. Their product is designed to help people save time on repetitive tasks by automating certain parts and making it easier for people to do the rest.
• 15. They have initial traction with customers who love their product, unaffiliated customers finding them and signing up, and week-over-week growth in users and revenue.
• 16. He believes that starting a company is easier now than it was ten years ago due to better tooling and resources available.
• 17. What keeps him motivated is the mission and vision of what they can create, as well as the new skills he learns from each challenge they face.

Source: EO via YouTube

❓ What do you think? What are your thoughts on the ideas shared in this video? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!