New Grads Face A Choice Between Big Companies And Startups
A junior from my university asked me about this, so I figured it was a good opportunity to organize my thoughts.
First, some background on me: I joined a large company as a new graduate. After eight years there, I moved to the US and joined a startup.
I’ve felt a lot of things along the way, but the short version is: “both paths are valid, though for me personally, the flow of large company → startup fit better.”
Let me go through this item by item.
Technology
You could say large companies give you more chances to touch technology beyond your station.
I deliberately wrote “beyond your station” because startups with genuinely amazing technology are everywhere. But the new graduates who get hired at those startups are probably monsters.
A new graduate whose technical level doesn’t measure up either can’t get into such a startup, or if they do get in, never gets to touch its depths.
Large companies are different. From an “education” standpoint, they let raw newcomers do things beyond their station, with veterans following up, or sometimes just letting them fail outright.
This comes down entirely to the difference in a company’s financial staying power.
This is especially pronounced in fields that can’t work without massive investment and long timeframes — semiconductors, materials development, pharmaceuticals, and the like.
In software, by contrast, the gap is small.
As a new graduate, I was basically a software person. My major was electrical and electronic engineering, so naturally I handled hardware too, but I was in a fairly comprehensive, specialized field, and it was also an era when pure hardware research alone was hard to sustain without doing something unusual on the software side.
Still, wanting to build up hardware know-how and experience, I stuck to my major and took a job as an electrical engineer. At that point, though, I had knowledge but no idea how to use it — basically an amateur. Relying on the deep pockets of a large company at that stage was, I think, the right call.
I spent eight years there and accumulated all kinds of experience. I learned not just electrical engineering but mechanical design too, spent years dealing with networking and RTOSes on the software side, at times even ventured into marketing and product planning — fields totally outside my expertise — and eventually shipped products as a project manager. That’s how I became someone who could “fight on multiple fronts” by the time I joined a startup.
Rules and common sense
I’m not talking about things like going barefoot in the office or wearing jeans in front of clients.
That stuff is fundamentally irrelevant.
What I mean is things like: When someone says “PO” (purchase order), what needs to be written on it? When negotiating price, how high a number is reasonable to push for? Quotation, order, delivery — when’s the right time to actually pay? Do you know the correct way to handle fixed assets, safety management, environmental measures, parts disposal?
These aren’t even at the level of know-how — they’re just plain “experience.” Large companies have models to follow and senpai who patiently teach you. At startups, especially early-stage ones, you’re expected to figure this stuff out yourself.
Figuring it out yourself and failing is, in a sense, good experience too, but startups often don’t have the room to laugh off that kind of failure.
When I joined a startup in Silicon Valley, a lot of people didn’t understand these things. If it had been a situation where literally not a single member understood any of this, that would be terrifying. It might make it hard for such a company to ever build a product — for a reason as trivial as that. It’s close to a basic competency, so there’s no harm in having it. That said, it’s a skill you can pick up later in life, so exactly when is the “right” time to acquire it is a bit of an open question.
A broad perspective
Large companies have all kinds of people. There are bosses you deeply respect, and there are also senpai who are, frankly, garbage. The former exist at startups too (in fact, you’d naturally gravitate toward a startup with people like that), so the real issue is the latter.
People who just slack off, people whose ability doesn’t match how big they talk, people who climb the ladder purely through cunning — and so on. When you’re young, you get worked up or angry about people like that, but if you get angry, work through it, and don’t end up in despair, you can turn it into “good experience.” The world is full of all kinds of people, and even the difficult ones have some sliver of logic to them, some motivation, some usable skill. Realizing that the real question is how you manage that is what it means to develop a broad perspective.
But if you fall into despair over it, or just get swept along, your career will probably end up sad. And the worst-case scenario emerges: “I hate this environment, I hate my colleagues, and yet I can’t imagine leaving.” At that point you’re basically dead as a working professional.
So developing a broad perspective at a large company requires a fair amount of patience.
At a startup, on the other hand, you’re surrounded by the need for a broad perspective from the moment you start — and people who can’t develop one simply can’t survive there.
The basic premise of a startup is that it’s a “motley crew.” People with different roots, different skills, completely different career histories thrown together — that’s the norm. So differences in values are a given.
How do you make that work? You have no choice but to respect the other person. If you start conversations from that premise, differences of opinion become a chance for self-reflection, and differences in skill or career become a chance to absorb new skills and knowledge.
On top of that, startup people are often constantly exposed to the outside world. This was especially true in Silicon Valley — people at startups don’t introduce themselves by saying “I’m XX from YY (company).” They say “I’m XX. Oh, and right now I work at YY (company).” The individual comes first. Naturally, that creates more chances to be exposed, firsthand, to information outside your specialty or trends in other industries. Your perspective inevitably broadens.
Also, the world around large companies is a relatively smoothed-over, “gentle world.” Startups, by contrast, are the ultimate extremes.
Sometimes a young person who was just spouting foolish-sounding fantasies rockets, within a few years, into a life of traveling by company jet. Other times, a company that raised several billion yen burns through it all within six months and its founder gets brutally torn apart. There are laughable fools, and there are admirable, respectable people who screwed up badly. This intense dynamism is, in a way, an extremely rich expression of human activity.
Going abroad
I’ve written elsewhere about how to move to the US.
Seven Ways for a Japanese Salaryman to Move to Silicon Valley
If you want a career that includes working abroad, a large company gives you a far higher probability of that.
The best option is to join a huge foreign-affiliated company. There’s no room for debate there.
Obviously, startups don’t have money. And posting employees overseas costs an enormous amount. End of story.
I myself took the bizarre career path of moving abroad when I left a large company to join a startup, but precisely because it was such a bizarre path, I was forced to endure a corresponding amount of hardship, and I honestly can’t recommend it at all. Frankly, I think the odds of it working out are very low.
Connections
The seed of any network is an encounter. What you do with it afterward is up to you, but if you never encounter anyone in the first place, nothing begins.
Opportunities for encounters break down broadly into work and personal life.
On the work side, large companies give you more chances to work with “amazing companies.” That’s where you’re more likely to build relationships with celebrities or executives at major corporations. An early-stage startup is, socially speaking, basically nothing — for a while, the outside world treats you like an insect. Even if fundraising goes well and you’re ready to launch a product, getting cooperation from a major company is difficult, and even if you do manage to negotiate, your position is extremely weak. But once you’ve joined a large company, you can borrow the company’s name and get almost anything done. Years after joining a certain company, I once talked with fellow new hires from my cohort, and one said, “If we just say our company’s name, pretty much any company will open its front gate for us” — meaning, as long as you pick the right company to join, you’ll rarely be treated with contempt externally.
Startups, on the other hand, may give you more chances to work with “amazing people.” This is my personal theory: the sharpest people tend to live out in the wild. Someone with crazy technical skill but an eccentric personality, someone with staggering depth of knowledge but no common sense, someone with an almost supernatural analytical ability whose own behavior is nonetheless irrational — people like that tend not to appear on the mainstream stage.
Large companies won’t hire people like that, and honestly, anyone whose personality seems questionable gets avoided by everyone and is hard to recommend to others. But I feel I’ve encountered more people with genuinely special skills at startups. That’s because such eccentric people eventually either start their own company or end up settling into a startup full of equally crazy people.
Now, as for personal life — meaning a personal life that spills half a step beyond work — startups are clearly richer here. What makes it richer is diversity and intensity. One advantage of a startup is being very close to the leadership. It’s hard to imagine at a large company, but at a startup, going out drinking with the CEO happens all the time. There just aren’t many people, for one thing. And the CEO is often connected to other CEOs. There are all sorts of connections spanning industries, regions, and ages. That’s just what CEOs are like. Being close to them means you can easily reap the benefits. In Japan especially, once you’ve worked at a startup, you’ve essentially bet your future career on that path. A wide, diverse network is a prerequisite for navigating those rough waters happily.
And then there’s the intensity. The people you find in and around startups tend to fall into these patterns:
- They have dreams and ambition
- They want meaningful responsibility at a small company
- They act on a vague sense that “this seems fun somehow”
- They fell for the CEO (or an executive), so what can you do
- They just don’t fit in at a normal company
That’s roughly it. Excluding pattern 5, these people are extremely interesting as human beings, because they carry an explosive “heat source” inside them. If you want to connect with people like that, being in the startup world is the way to go.
Because I switched careers midstream, I have networks from both worlds.
The trust I built with my network from my large-company days is solid. It’s reliable, and both sides know clearly how to use it.
The network I’ve built through startup life is looser, more hands-off — but it carries a vague sense of expectation I can’t quite explain.
As a middle-aged guy, I think it’s probably best to have both.
Well, I’ve rambled on quite a bit here, and I could keep writing indefinitely if I wanted to, but I wonder what the point would be, so I’ll stop here. No one can genuinely possess the answer to the future, and stating one with a knowing look on your face is a rather joy-killing act.
I have hope for young people. But an old guy’s experience isn’t something to rely on. Talking in terms of probabilities doesn’t get you anywhere. Trust your sensibility. Trust your instincts. Take responsibility for what you decide on your own. Live so that you’d have no regrets if you died tomorrow. That’s all.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2014/10/59/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.