Should you work for a big company first, or stay as far away from them as possible? Read the debate and weigh in.
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As an Inc.com columnist it's my job to take a position. (Columnists who don't have opinions also don't have readers.) The result, though, is a one-sided conversation where the natural exchange of ideas between people gets lost.
Sometimes I'm right. Sometimes I'm wrong.
Mostly I'm a combination of the two, because in business for every rule there's an entrepreneur who proves the exception to that rule. My way is not your way, and neither is the right way... until we prove it works for us, as individuals.
So I'm trying something new: I'll pick a topic, pick someone smart--as you'll soon see, in this case smarter than me--and we'll trade emails.
The first is the email exchange between me and Dave Lavinsky. Dave is the founder of Growthink, a business-planning firm and investment bank that has helped over 500,000 entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses.
The premise: I think the average would-be entrepreneur should spend a few years working for a big company.
Dave disagrees.
Jeff: Maybe it's only because my first post-college job was with a Fortune 500 company, so that's all I know, but starting and running a business would have been way harder without the skill and experience I gained working in a corporate environment.
Would I want to work there today? Oh hell no.
But am I glad I once worked there? Absolutely.
Dave: Sure, you can learn some things from big companies--mainly how to run a big company. You'll learn the type of corporate structures that are needed and the key departments, etc. But most of that doesn't help you when you first start a company. For that, you need to think very differently. You need to think and act like an entrepreneur, which is the art and science of accomplishing more with less (less money, less human resources, less time, etc.)
Big companies are not great at accomplishing more with less, nor are they great innovators. So it's very easy to pick up bad habits that actually make it harder to start your own business. I, too, started my career at a big company.
The main lesson I learned? Do things very differently than they did.
If Not Big-Company Experience, Then What?
Jeff: I hear you, but there are still some basics that go begging. Say you're the archetypal college student genius who develops, I don't know, a smartphone battery that recharges itself through the normal movement of the phone. (Like a Rolex only a lot less expensive.)
Now what? You're incredibly innovative, but on the business side you have no way to know what to do next... and no way to evaluate the skills of the people you decide to do whatever's next with.
In your case you learned what to do differently. That's really valuable... instead of paying for your mistakes you got paid to learn some mistakes to avoid.
Dave: I agree that the college student genius is often ill suited to immediately start a business since they have no experience. But it would take years working at a larger company to gain the business skills you need. And as I mentioned before, many of these business skills you acquire aren't suited for a start-up.
Jeff, think back to your first job at the Fortune 500 company. Were they really letting you be a jack-of-all-trades and try new things like a start-up entrepreneur needs to do? Or did they give you one very defined role that you just performed over and over again?
My guess would be the latter, in which case you learned one or just a few key skills, which would not be nearly enough to use to launch a company.
And if you do work for the larger company for too long you will probably develop too comfortable a lifestyle. You start bringing in money. You get married. You buy a house. You have kids. And now your risk profile has changed dramatically, and starting your own company may not be a viable option.
But, back to the issue of experience... while I don't think the young graduate should work for the large company, I also don't think a young graduate should start a company alone.
Here are some options to consider; and note that these are not mutually exclusive. One option is to find a slightly older co-founder who has more managerial experience. Another option is to form a Board of Advisors consisting of several experienced entrepreneurs who lend guidance and advise. Another option is to raise funding and use it to hire several seasoned managers to help guide you.
Learning From the Best
Jeff: Crap. You're killing me. Let me whip out a (hopefully) big gun. You're right, when I started I did have one (oh my gosh was it extremely) defined role. But I did get exposed to other stuff: Evaluation processes, HR stuff, team meetings, supervisors (both good and bad ones)... so I did get at least a sense of the right way to treat people, organize processes, focus on key deliverables, etc. That at least gave me a framework, one I didn't get in college.
On the flip side I know reasonably successful entrepreneurs who were the worst example of how to run a business. Somehow they succeeded in spite of themselves, at least for a while, and some of the people who worked for them thought that was how a business should be run and worse was how people should be treated.
I've seen six people ride around in a van with the owner and his new girlfriend for hours so she could shop... a young lady that had to drive six hours to pick up a tux for an event the owner was going to attend... employees that had to play caterer's helpers at the employer's home (think "Coming to America") for an event because "customers will be there so it's work-related"... Some percentage of entrepreneurs follow the golden rule of "he who hath the gold maketh the rules," and if that's your first real job and that's who you learn from... ugh. Extreme example, sure, but I see it happen a fair bit.
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