Push a Button and Watch it Work vs. Just Work Hard

Going back to a startup environment from a large corporate environment definitely has it’s upsides and downsides. The good part is the upside for those who aren’t afraid to work hard is typically worthwhile.

The upside is that at a large corporation you have a huge support team. For the morale support (drink the kool aid, corp culture), for the financial support of a reliable large paycheck every two weeks, and the physical support of thousands of co-workers (though they sometimes seem inefficient) end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting based on your strategic decisions.

This can be good and bad. Good because you get paid for being smart. You are valued for the work you have done in the past, and the resume you have built. Your life becomes a series of meetings and you steam roll forward on a large complex agenda. Your valued for what you know and your experience and you don’t have to mess with spreadsheets and computer code and the physical headaches that come with…….well hard work.

That said, some of us aren’t cut out for the large personal office job with the assistant on the 23rd floor of a San Francisco high rise over-looking North Beach. Some people are meant to do the busy work and gravitate to being stressed out. They create tight deadlines biting off more than they can chew and they are okay with not being paid much in the short term in hopes of a slight chance at a large payoff in the distant future.

Here’s the upside. As it turns out doing the hard work is where the ideas come from. Talking about something strategically like “Well yea, of course you can model out attribution and track it to the impression level and bid on it in realtime with an automatic machine learning algorithm and display it in realtime in a slick web interface.” But then you sit down and you try to do it and you realize it’s a massive undertaking and there are thousands of details that need to be thought through, calculated out, and coded and all the top level dynamic language frameworks and NOsql databases in the world can make a plan like that come together easily.

Also, at a large company when you manage through a major deal or a major product launch the emotional payoff just isn’t that great. All you really did was state the vision and work through the politics and clear internal barriers so that other people could do the work. On launch day, it’s just not that exciting and often times the final product really doesn’t have a place for you anymore anyway.

The flip side of that is when you hack though the most minuscule detail of a small corner of your larger idea on your own at a startup it just feels better. Something as simple as the first impression displays in the reporting, you’re ready to throw a office wide party and stand on your desk and announce VICTORY!

After being on the outside for about a month, my eyes have been opened in ways I can’t even explain. I go home with a headache each day and find my mind racing at night instead of sleeping but the thing is, it just feels better knowing that I’m doing the work.