entrepreneurship, strategyI currently work at a corporate job, I left the university half a year ago were my buddy and I had a awesome project together. This project will take quit some time to develope into a real product but in a few (1.5-2) years it will or will not be ready for sales, when my buddy graduates his PhD. My current job is ok in terms of income, but I try to best prepare for the case that the development is a success and that we eventually start-up. In a nearby tech cluster there is a start-up which seems interesting to me and we might want to choose the tech cluster as your production and office location. Here the question: Is it beneficial to have start-up work experience as an employee if I want to start-up at a point myself? If no what else could help you prepare for a start-up?
IMO it’s not so important.
At best you’ll be working for a well established startup or one with awesome founders. The main difference with a corporation will be a faster pace, probably more work hours (or less safety) than you’ve signed up for, less benefits and take home pay unless you hit the jackpot, less bureaucracy if small enough, more autonomy, and more diversity in the tasks you do.
(In case they matter, you can get the latter two or three by working in most well run small/medium-sized businesses.)
At worst you’ll end up in a chaotic environment run by founders with little to no business sense or management experience, way more stress and hours than you’ve signed up for, much less benefits and take home pay, and no job overnight when the founders run out of cash because they’ve been throwing cash at a wall and hoping something will stick.
The least well run startups I’ve ever interacted with shared three themes:
Poor project management. Employees are involved in many more projects than they can keep up with, have unclear priorities that conflict with each other all over the place, and tend to bemoan the backlog of old projects that never passed a sensible good enough test yet got deprioritized to deal with a more urgent task.
Poor product management. This is unfortunately common even in otherwise well run startups. Good product management requires talking to your would-be buyers and your client base in order to try to figure out if what you’re developing meets client requirements and expectations.
Poor financial management and lack of accounting controls. Think “we know how much we’re making/losing by checking the bank account’s balance month over month.” Or not giving their managers a budget, for that matter.
Larger corporations occasionally suffer from varying degrees of the above too, as well as from excess bureaucracy and an inability to get anything done except at a snail’s pace. Still, you might end up trading the opportunity to see how things look like when they’re reasonably well organized for the opportunity to see what things look like when they’re probably not so well organized. You’ll get to see plenty of the latter when you create your own startup.
One point I’d raise in passing given the “will or will not be ready for sales” in your question: beware of the above-mentioned “poor product management” theme. You absolutely want to validate your idea with your would-be customers before you waste much of any time developing.
As to what to focus on, mind your people skills first and foremost: management, listening to clients, marketing, sales, how to interview, etc. And build yourself a network of contacts.
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