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!