Ask HN: Moving from startup CTO to FTE at big-co?

5 points by krishan711 2 years ago | 7 comments

I'm in a bit of a dilemna and would love to hear from anyone that's done this. I'm in the UK for refernece. I did a full time CTO role for a startup that had a modest exit from 2015-2020 (grew to 50 ppl and millions in revenue) and since then have worked as consulting and fractional CTO at a few startups. I've been good at working on building products and teams from scratch and I really do enjoy it. I've also been working on building a bunch of products in the days where I'm not consulting (mostly in the crypto space, I know: boo!). You can see my history at: https://linkedin.com/in/krishan711

I'm at a stage now where I'm wondering if it's worth it and wether I should just join a big co to get a big paycheck and get back into the grind of being a FTE. I'd love to hear from people that have done this as almost all the people I know who have been through my path are still there and working on their companies.

Advice on how to make the transition and if there is anything I should be particularly looking for / avoiding would be greatly appreciated. Thanks :)

sf4lifer 2 years ago |

I've done this twice. Here are lessons from my experience:

* At a startup, I made decisions fast. At a large company I had to build consensus for everything. This meant a LOT of meetings to discuss the same thing over and over. * At a startup, I interacted directly with customers. At a large company, there were layers of customer success, sales, that I had to coordinate with (pre/post meetings). It felt like more hassle than it was worth. * At a startup, mission is clear, payday is company success. At a large company, lets face it, everyone's mission is to get promoted. * At a startup, there were no restrictions on what we could try. At a large company, there is so many protocols, security, data handling, release notes. * At a startup risk is rewarded. At a big company, everyone talks about taking risks but no one gets promoted for taking one and failing (at least in my experience). * At a startup I hired and fired fast. At a big company, 90 days minimum to let a bad apple go. Everyone knows how to milk it.

All that said the corporate life was really good to me when I had young kids. Minimal work/stress, great benefits. Different priorities for different points in life.

krishan711 2 years ago | |

Thanks for sharing, these all make complete sense. How did you find the process of applying - was your startup leadership experience seen as a positive or mostly ignored for whatever the role actually requires?

sf4lifer 2 years ago | | |

I've only ever gotten jobs through people I know, so applying was purely a formality...

iamflimflam1 2 years ago |

This probably comes down to what are you really looking for. You describe it as the "the grind of being a FTE". That gives me the impression that you are looking for more of a hands on engineering role and less of a leadership type thing.

Would that be accurate?

krishan711 2 years ago | |

I'd love to be working around loads of smart people again and honestly kinda looking forward to having larger decisions made around me more than just me making all of them cos it will take away the biggest stress I feel internally rn. Does that make sense? I would prefer hands-on I think cos that's what I know 100% I'm good at but i quite liked leadership responsibilities too so not super averse to that site either.

tinktank 2 years ago |

Any chance I could talk to you 1:1? Your history intrigues me. It'd be mostly me benefitting though, from your experience.

krishan711 2 years ago | |

Sure, I'd be happy to speak feel to DM me - my username is the same everywhere including gmail.