How Startups Differ: Dreams of an Employee

The other day I was thinking about what separates us humans from animals. I won't go through the whole discussion that happened inside my head, but only the result: dreams. Animals have needs: eat, sleep, reproduce. Repeat ad infinitum, or at least until you die. We are a bit more complex in this respect. We have dreams and thereby goals which are ends in themselves. Someone might claim that all the wants and goals we have eventually collapse into the previously mentioned biological goals. I'm not so sure - I can't see somebody looking for a career in formal logic reduced to his biology. At face value it makes more sense to accept his want to understand logic as an end, not as a means to impress the ladies.

As the previous anecdote shows, dreams can play an important part in our careers. It’s not just the normal professions of a doctor, firefighter or a police officer that have dreams as their fuel. I’m very confident that any profession or job can have the same quality. This does not necessarily mean that the sales clerk has a dream of being a sales clerk, but he or she may dream of being a respected, trustworthy individual who eventually progresses at the workplace and then ending up as a sales manager in another company. Who you want to be is everything to who you are today.

If I think about the stereotypical large company or organization, dreams don’t seem to be of exactly very high importance there. You have a job, and your development goals are to be linked to your proficiency in that task. What, you want to improve, only to leave your post here? Not going to happen! Now, companies have training programs. Some of them even ask about your career goals. But this is not enough. A person is not just a career. Career goals cannot operate in isolation of all your other goals. I say it’s time to move from a paradigm, in which the employee is a repository of skills and knowledge, to a paradigm, in which he is a holistic person with dreams outside his career, too.

This is something at which startups excel. Everybody has heard the standard comments about the dynamic nature of startups and how they penetrate even the tiniest niches in the market. Well, sure, the Titanic hardly maneuvers in the same way as a speedboat – they are very unlike in size. But it still doesn’t mean you can’t feel good and whole in both.

What I’ve gathered from the startup experiences of my friends is that the startup culture is very multifaceted and you’re generally approached with interest. People are keen about stories or narratives, which explain who you are, what you want and why. In a large corporation gatherings can at worst be at the “I’m Jack, an accountant” –level. I mean, defining yourself by your position or profession is hardly the best way. I’d guess this has a lot to do with the fact startups rarely have very strongly identified or differentiated employees- everybody does everything. There’s no chance to identify with a role you don’t have. But still, even though we have roles in larger organizations, we don’t have to identify ourselves primarily through those. It would make sense to define ourselves through ourselves. And to do that, we need to make room for dreams.

The career pyramid

The conventional way to think about one’s future career usually is to simulate the career as

1.       Learn basic skills

2.       Specialize

3.       Profit

This is a very intuitive way to think, as everyone agrees that advanced skills are based on more basic skills. Therefore, a career is like building a pyramid – you have to start from the foundations and gradually work your way up. So your career might look like this:

A common implicit derivation from this is that you have to commit to your chosen career in the early stages. After all, you can’t build a pyramid by chance – you have to know what you’re doing! This leads into the idea that the sooner you know what your thing is, the better you’ll be. This is a useful, yet a potentially very dangerous thought. How so?

To look at usefulness first, it is obvious that you need certain skills to succeed in a given profession. If you want to become a physicist, learning proper math skills is highly recommended. On the other hand, wanting to be a cook hardly requires any understanding in the subtleties of Laplace transformations. Building a large enough toolbox – yet one with enough punch per tool – is a necessary requirement for success. It doesn’t matter if you’re the brightest person in the field if you’re missing the necessary tools to solve the problems (although being smart admittedly makes it easier to learn stuff as you need it and make ad hoc solutions on the go). Still, often you simply don’t have the extra three months to learn a new methodology, but you must solve the problem with your hammer and screwdriver – even if a chainsaw was the perfect option. So, it is a rather good idea to think about the tools you’re going to need in the future.

The dangerousness of “the sooner the better” view is that it implicitly assumes that your interests cause the need for tools, and that the relationship never works the other way. This is, according to my experience, simply not true. There are two reasons for this: firstly, we humans have an uncanny ability to increase our interest in whatever we are focusing on. Personally, I’ve often only gotten really into something as I’ve started doing it. Keeping this blog would be a prime example of that effect. Secondly, sometimes you need to master a set of tools before you can even answer why you need them in the first place. Thinking about examples, I believe quantum mechanics would qualify for this (even though I’m not a physicist and possess hardly any knowledge in the quantum field).

In university everybody is taught the basic toolkit for a field. If we never recognize the existence of non-standard career paths most people are just going to aim for the standard track with the standard toolkit. Definitely a good way to suppress innovation! To exaggerate a bit: how are we ever going to think outside the box in other contexts, if we can't do it even in the context of our own career future?

As such, this issue is not really a hard problem. A lot could be done with simple cross-scientific socialization (to realize there are actual people outside one’s own field), mentoring (to exemplify out-of-the-box careers) and other methods that promote the existence of a non-standard toolkit.

So what is the grand realization, in reality? Depending on the person it could be anything from a simple “not every business student works in banking or a consulting” to a good understanding of possible problems outside the basic university skill set, finding them as interesting – or even more! Whatever the exact formulation, it could be characterized as an insight that not every career is like a pyramid. Nor should it be. To sum up graphically, your career pyramid might in the end instead look something like this:

Maybe the specialization helped you discover something even more important than before and you ended up doing something outside the standard track. With life, that’s actually quite likely to happen. I’m looking forward to it.