Why Your First Job Out of College Should Be At A Startup

You Probably Don’t Know Much About Business

If your college education was anything like mine, you learned very little about the actual inner workings of a company.

Sure, you might’ve taken economics courses and learned about supply and demand, you might’ve even taken a few marketing courses.

But what you probably didn’t learn in school is what makes a company really tick. How, specifically, each and every cog in the machine work together to form one cohesive unit: a company.

What you didn’t learn in school is what makes a company really tick.

Why Work For A Startup vs. An Older Company?

Startups are wonderfully chaotic and, of course, come with their upsides and downsides. But one thing that most have in common is that, because of their size and generally more progressive processes, they tend to be more transparent organizations than traditional corporate America.

As a soon-to-be college graduate, one of the most difficult decisions you can make is what type of job you’d like to pursue. But for many, the answer to that question is not made with very much actual knowledge about what goes on behind the curtain of a company.

When I graduated, I didn’t know what types of roles existed in Operations, Logistics, Supply Chain, Product Management, etc.

Heck, I hadn’t even heard of half of those disciplines.

Not to mention, I had no idea how each worked with the other or how, for example, Engineering collaborated with Product or Marketing, or what the difference between Customer Success and Customer Support was.

My first job out of college was at Blue Apron, a super-fast growing, quick-to-be-crowned Unicorn, that eventually had a bit of an unceremonious fall from grace after a less-than-rainbowy IPO. I wrote a bit about that below.

So You Want To Work at a Startup? Hone These 11 Soft Skills First.*“How do I get a job at a startup? What skills do they look for in an employee?”*theascent.pubHowever, despite its eventual woes, Blue Apron provided me with more experience and education about how all of the various parts of a business work together than any class in my entire college course load.

You Learn How The Sausage Gets Made

Startups have a wonderful way of showcasing, both intentionally and unintentionally, the symbiosis between different departments within an organization.

I learned why Marketing needed to sync with Customer Experience teams to ensure that messaging was consistent across our channels.

I learned that the Email team needed to align with the Product Development folks to ensure that the proper announcements and promotions aligned with their roadmaps.

I learned that Logistics, especially at a D2C meal-kit company, is so complex (with truck route permutations, potential weather complications, SKU rearrangements, etc.) that it takes a massive team and incredible organization and coordination just to keep the lights on.

At a startup, it’s small enough where if you are wondering why something is made a certain way or what it takes to achieve a certain goal, you have the power to ask those individuals or leaders who connect those dots.

So What’s The Point?

The point of it all is this: if you are a senior in college—or even a bit younger—I strongly urge you to find your way into a startup right out of college.

Regardless of the eventual success or downfall of that business, as long as you take the initiative, ask questions, and are comfortable with chaos, the reward you’ll reap from the experience will be a much greater understanding of how the sausage gets made in a company—and for that, you’ll be better off down the line.

Plus, if you’re looking for startups to work for in New York, come check out the FirstMark family of companies like Pinterest, Shopify, InVision, Airbnb, and more.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you tomorrow.