Considering a Startup?

[Music] it might have been john doerr kleiner perkins said if one time he said if you're trying to figure out if you're an entrepreneur you're not which i always thought was kind of interesting if you need structure there's nothing wrong with that big companies need a lot of people they're good places to work and if if that's you that's fine go big lots of big companies recruiting here lots of big companies are great places to to work for entire careers career transitions that i've watched are historically quite easy from large companies to small ones and quite hard from small ones to large ones and so if you are going to go from a big company background into the entrepreneurial world think long and hard about that because it won't be that easy to go back where you came from um i mean maybe if it's a year or two and you duck back quick or you go back to the company you work for you might be able to do it but then i would almost say you weren't really all that committed to going into the startup world in the first place if you were looking for an opportunity to go back like i said if it scares you go big um the the the failures particularly in the entrepreneurial community here are are really almost no big deal but they tend to be perceived as a much bigger deal by the bigger companies the bigger more mature companies and it's just a fact of life i think you probably many of you have probably experienced that so i think the likelihood is if you are committing to an entrepreneurial career path that's the commitment you need to make and you need to probably believe that it's a career-long commitment that that's where you're going to spend the rest of your career can you handle the risk what will you do if it fails some cultures some geographies failure's really hard it's really hard to explain or somebody said once are you going to go home and tell your mother that your company failed if you grew up around silicon valley it was like okay big deal what are you going to do next but there's some places in the country and in the world where you know that that's going to be really hard for you and if if it is and you don't feel like you're up for it maybe that's not where you ought to go are the leaders of the startup professionals or are they friends i i put up a big red flag every time i see a startup that's three college roommates that get together because they want to start a company and i'll be the ceo and so you be the marketing vp and what do you want to be okay uh engineering yeah well we got to have one okay well you're really not very good that's a bad way to get a company started and if you get into a company where where the officers are friends and they wouldn't be picked for their talent in a fair fight against other people this has a very high probability of coming out with the worst possible outcome you could imagine which is you lose the company you lose the job and you probably lose your friends uh in in in the process so i just say massive caveats on going into any startup where a bunch of your friends get together and choose upsides is the financing solid for at least a year because you don't want to be coming into something unless there's at least a year of runway there before the company needs to raise money because maybe it won't and that's and that's tough as i said if it's a tough choice say no if it's a startup you want to be focused on a couple of things and i say will you be at the table at the table means are you going to be in the group the small group of people that makes the key decisions that are in a closed room with the door closed when something big is coming down and bet the company are really important decisions have to be made if you're at that table it doesn't matter a whole lot what your job title is what your compensation is really or anything else because it'll all be taken care of if you're not at the table and you're outside looking through the keyhole trying to figure out what's going on in that room when the key decisions are being made i would say to you if to start up most of the time the risk-reward ratio for you is not right you know that that puts you in the in in the world of four box matrixes in the high risk low reward box and i don't think that's a box that you ought to be intentionally aiming yourself to that if the company is wildly successful you make a little bit of money and you weren't really part of the the team that drove it on the other hand if you're in the high risk high reward box yeah that could be great that's a mature startup that's that's not a pure startup from zero uh if if they've done a series b and they've got financing for a year or more and they're and they're growing rapidly then you might want to you might relax that because they're going to be hiring a lot of people and they're not all going to have a a seat at the um at the key table then the the question though to ask is will i have a seat at some interesting table and does the person that i'm going to be working for maybe have a seat at the big table [Music]

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Views: 327

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: stanford, stanford gsb, stanford graduate school of business, mba

Id: z-PktSuZgk0

Length: 5min 50sec (350 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021