If you’ve read the news over the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen the article on Walmart buying Jet.com for $3B. While it remains to be seen if the “marriage” will work, we are starting to see a shift in the way middle and major corporates see ups, maybe not as rivals, but as partners.
OK so you are fed-up with your day job and are thinking about leaving to join a startup or starting your own startup. Good for you.
Of course, it’s scary. In fact, its freaking you out. How will you know if it will be successful? How will you know if its right for you? How will you know that you can make a living from it?
Let me know if this sounds familiar. You, or someone like you, or friends you know, have worked for large companies for most of your working life, whether its 10, 20 or 30 years. You’ve gone from one major corporation to another major corporation, or even medium sized corporations, climbing the corporate ladder, so to speak. Everywhere you’ve been, you were usually assured of a very stable job, good to excellent benefits and no constant fear of losing your job, mergers etc. You felt safe, cocooned in this large, mostly happy corporation.
One of the coolest jobs I’ve ever had in my life was when I used to work for an innovative department within a large company. A number of years ago, I worked for a large cable company in Canada, basically doing IT work – managing networks, computers, email etc. It was IT admin work, and not very exciting. A new group had just been formed within the company to look at possibly developing a new form of internet connectivity: high speed connection to the internet, using the cable TV plant as the medium. This was all pretty new stuff, and the company that I was working with understood that it was going to be huge (Netscape had just had their IPO and everything “internet” was blowing up). In those days, the only way you could access the internet was via a dial up connection – a very slow process which involved you being fairly technical already – a lot of people at the time used things like AOL in order to access the internet.
Looking to build your own billion dollar business? Chris outlines 5 ways in which billion dollar businesses leverage traits inherit in humanity in order to provide services that appeal to everyone.
We live in an awesome time, don’t we? As little as 5 years ago, we barely had the tools, frameworks, and platforms that we have today in order to build a startup to do almost anything.
Do you know what the most interesting thing to me is about the on-demand, sharing economy? It’s not because of the crazy valuations (even though they are crazy), it’s because I personally feel that one aspect of those businesses touched a chord, deep inside humanity. The desire to help each other.
There are plenty of motivational speakers out there who speak about being successful and purport to have the magic formula for success in their back pocket, all you need is to throw them a mere $97 (A $400 savings off of the regular price of $497) and they will show you exactly what you need to do in order to ensure your success.
Been pouring over list after list of interesting startups to invest in and I’m finding that a lot of their elevator pitches sound like this:
[insert established company name here] for [something they aren’t doing – now or ever or yet]
Lately, I’ve been interviewing some really, really sharp recent grads from all sorts of great schools. Smart, insightful, quick, proactive, creative, energetic. All awesome characteristics, all currently stuck working as a cog in the machine for some major corporate. So I wonder, why? Why are all these sharp, super-competent people working at a place which is bound to grind out all the good stuff still in their veins after a few years?
Great rundown from Fast Company on the upside of taking a job at a startup instead of a corporate job. Wish that these kinds of jobs were around back when I graduated from college.
He’s right. If you can, while you can – take the job at the p – even if its long hours and not as much money as you could be getting at some corporate gig, now is the time to take the risk – now is the time to pour your energies into this. You can always get that corporate gig later on – you may not even need to if one of you r startups hits it big.