Previous

Page - 2

If you want to make some serious money and you join a really good company (where the numbers will be 1% of Microsoft's), as the 10,000th employee or even the 1,000th employee, you are not making the right decision - the math just doesn't work in your favor. If you want to make some serious money, you have to take some risk and
join something early, at least among the first 50 employees. I'm not saying that every job you take should be at a start-up, but if you never do it, it's going to be hard to make serious money in the tech industry, unless you work for 20 years and climb to the top of a big company.

Reason #2: The right start-ups are not that risky.
What is the worst case in any start-up, if you are not the founder? The start-up goes out of business. Your downside is that you have to find a new job. Going back to my original caveat, if you are good at what you do and confident about your ability, then in India it will be relatively easy to find a job. India's overall economy is growing so fast (2nd fastest growing economy in the world in 2006), and the hi-tech industry is growing even faster, that most people seem to get a 25% pay increase when they jump from job to job anyways. If you add in to that a start-up that has a good working environment, good management, good investors, good customers, and you feel that the products are useful, then the risk is dramatically reduced. You've gone from a 5% chance that something good happens to a 35% chance that something good happens (I made those numbers up, but you get the point).

I know a number of people in Silicon Valley who have made a career of working at start-ups, and are fully aware that some will be winners, and most won't. They figure if they work at 5 start-ups over 10 years, maybe one or two will be successful and that's more financially rewarding than working at an already successful company as the 2000th employee. Crucially, for all 10 years they were excited about the work they were doing. Here is what Paul Graham, a well-known entrepreneur and writer, has to say about this: "Economically, you can think of a start-up as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."

Reason #3: Often that stable job isn't so stable.
I have seen a lot of people go to the stable company and then leave after 1 or 2 years because they just don't like the work or the company. What is the difference between joining a start-up that you like and the worst case happens in 2 years versus you join a "stable" company and in 2 years you leave because you don't like the work?

Next

* Amar Goel is the CEO and Founder of Komli, a start-up in the media and technology space trying to simplify online advertising. It has offices in Bombay, Pune and New York. It is currently hiring India's best and brightest.