I talk to job seekers all the time about what they can expect if they join a high-growth startup. Many of the folks I meet have never worked for a company that doesn’t earn profits (let alone revenues). Likewise, I often speak to groups of recent graduates without any work experience at all. I tell them the obvious stuff. The hours are long, the pay (at least initially) isn’t great, and chances are good that the company will fail within the first few years. You never know what will break from one day to the next, how your competition will react, or whether you’ve got enough cash in the bank to prove you’ve got a viable business. It’s decidedly not for everyone. There was a time when I wasn’t sure it was for me.
Before JumpStart, I’d only worked for high-growth or startup technology companies. Many of those companies no longer exist. In fact, during a brief period between the summer of 2000 and late 2004, I was laid off three times in four years. The first time was pretty straight forward. The company could not prove its business model, had burned through about $40 million in a year trying to do so (this was 2000, after all), and started shutting everything down. Ironically, that business model was very similar to the one that fuels Groupon and LivingSocial today. While I wasn’t pleased to be on the street, I had only been there for six months and I saw where the company was headed. I wasn’t surprised.
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Author:Robert Hatta
