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.
The next “separation” was more disappointing. I was the third person to join Virgin Mobile USA and had been part of an incredible team of founding employees. Our parent, The Virgin Management Group, decided to bring in a “money guy” to run the company just as we were launching the product we’d spent the last two years building. One of his conditions was that the company move from San Francisco. Although we were able to launch a great business and see it succeed in the market place, the original team mostly evaporated and left for other opportunities instead of accepting a relocation package to New Jersey. I opted not to accept the package either and, as a result, was officially laid off. It was my choice, but I regretted that the original team was not able to grow the business in the way we had envisioned.
The third parting of the ways was a heart-breaker, one that almost convinced me that I might not be cut out for this sort of life. The company wasn’t a startup, at least not in the technical sense. Netflix had been in business for five years when I joined in 2003. They were a publicly traded, profitable business with annual revenues in the range of $272 million. They’d just added their one millionth customer. However, the pace of growth, change, and innovation, could best be described as breakneck—both then and today. (The company now boasts more than 20 million subscribers and revenues of $2.4 billion.) About a year after I joined the company, my boss invited me to move with her to London to open our first international expansion effort. My then-girlfriend/now-wife and I decided “what the hell” and were living in London full-time 90 days later. We “burned the ships.” By that I mean that we sold everything we owned, she quit grad school and we said goodbye to San Francisco, knowing that we probably wouldn’t be coming back. We were all-in.
In London, we built a team of ten people within a couple of months. We purchased over a $1 million in DVDs, leased a distribution center and beta launched our product. We were ready to roll and excited about the future. Then, we learned that Amazon was launching a competitive service in the UK. This was not about competing with Amazon in this little market of 20 million households. It was about competing with Amazon for the 100 million households in the US market, while continuing to fend off Wal-Mart and Blockbuster. The decision was quickly made to cut bait in the UK and circle the wagons around our core business in the US. Netflix initiated a price war that eventually scared Amazon out of entering the DVD side of the business altogether and broke the back of Blockbuster. However, it meant that we had to lay off our UK team, only three months after we hired them. That included the two guys that I convinced to leave their jobs to join my team. It also meant returning to the US if I wanted to keep a job with Netflix, a company that I’d come to love.
After many pints of lager with the newly jobless UK team, I started to wonder if I had the stomach for this lifestyle of constant change and uncertainty. A little drunk, I called Rob Gray, my old boss, friend and mentor from Virgin Mobile. I told him that I was coming back to the Bay Area, having failed again. Perhaps it was time for me to consider a more conventional career path. He wasn’t buying it. He told me that people tend to do things that they are good at and enjoy. I had chosen to repeatedly throw myself into situations that others would find overly risky because it was what I enjoyed doing. Failing, starting over, and coming back for more was just part of the deal. And I had accepted the terms of that deal again and again. It was in my blood. I had to accept that.
Before moving to London, my then-girlfriend/now-wife and I committed to ourselves that we’d stay at least two years and experience life together abroad. We knew the risks if we stayed in London. Along with my job, I’d be forfeiting my work visa and would be unemployed in one of the most expensive cities in the world. After my conversation with Rob, I realized that the decision had already been made. Our commitment to experience the world won out over my commitment to a great company. We chose to stay, and I was laid off yet again.
So are you cut out for working at a startup? In previous posts about Adaptive Excellence and behavioral interviewing, I’ve written about the importance of spotting repeated patterns of behavior. Unlike stocks and securities, with people, past performance is the best indicator of future returns. If you want to know what someone is like, look at what they have done previously. Look at your own background, choices and patterns. If you always seem be going against the grain, get (overly) passionate about certain things, and feel bored when life seems comfortable, you will probably enjoy working for a startup. In fact, you have probably chosen a path that reflects this, even if you have never worked at a startup before. However, if you spent the last 15+ years working in highly stable, corporate environments or have never failed in any real way, you are not likely to enjoy the dynamic (read: chaotic and risky) world of startups. And that’s OK. I have many talented, successful and happy friends that have chosen very different paths mine. What’s important is being honest with yourself and knowing what makes you happy, even if you need a little outside help. I was lucky enough to have a mentor who knew me better than I knew myself.
Robert Hatta is JumpStart's Vice President of Entrepreneurial Talent. He has worked at several startup companies in Northeast Ohio and Silicon Valley, as well as other high growth, technology companies across the U.S. and Europe. Through these experiences, Robert has gained an extensive understanding of the culture and needs of high growth companies with a particular focus on talent.