About Startup

How to distinguish a startup newbie from a startup veteran?

Startup newbie: "I get an offer from a unicorn. I will be rich!"

Startup veteran: "I need to pay $20K AMT, again?"

How to tell if you joined a startup early enough?

• You have a firstname only email.
• You can merge pull requests without code review.
• You push to main branch and deploy to production directly.
• Fix a UI bug takes 10 minutes, including CI and deployment.
• Even better, you are a GitHub admin.
• You have a company credit card from Ramp or Brex.
• There is no daily standup.
• You reports to CXO.
• No one writes unit tests.

How to tell if you joined a startup too late?

• Your company uses JIRA. (Loading the backlog page takes 10 seconds.)
• The HR system is migrated from Gusto to Workday.
• The company knowledge base is migrated from Notion to Confluence.
• Twice a year, you spend five hours writing 360 reviews on Lattice. (Fact: no one reads them.)
• You have the full set of Agile meetings: grooming, planning, review, and retro. (The meetings collectively take a full workday.)
• You need to write a five-page design doc for every project.
• Fix a UI bug takes a week, excluding code review time.
• Your company is SOC2 compliant.
• You need to do GDPR training every year.
• To use a new S3 bucket, you spend two days to write the correct Terraform config.
• You are bugged by k8s every week.