web-developmentI’m a developer with years of experience, but I also have a good MA design education and business knowledge. How do I find a start up project to work on as I’m keen to use as much as the full gamut of my skills as possible and I think the start up environment is one place where that might happen.
Just like your development projects start with Googling. Example results:
If you want to test drive having a startup, take a look at NovoEd courses that have projects (e.g. Technology Entrepreneurship)
It depends on whether you want to join as a founder or as an employee.
If you want to join as a founder (no salary until you get funding, and usually a low salary afterward) it’s not hard to find startups who are looking for a developer, but its hard to find a good one. The most important thing is really great people, and because it’s hard to know that unless you really know them, the best way is to look through your social connections. If you can’t find a good team that way, you might want to try to join a team whom already built startups is the past.
If you want to join as an employee its basicly the same, but you have the privilege of getting paid better and choosing between the relatively successful startups that were able to raise capital funding.
I would say that in such case, the product and vision of the startup are also very important because you don’t get to design it from the start. You want to do something that you are really passionate about and most startups want employees who are really passionate about what they do. A good way to search for such startups is just to look at crunchbase.com for companies you find intresting in your area and approach them. Most startups are eager for talented developers.
In addition to other answers, I recommend contributing to open source projects. I contributed to few, gave talks etc and startups contacted me directly with great terms. I think this carries a lot of weight than contacting someone directly for a job.
You must seek out start up events or can directly search on meetup.com to find start up oriented events near you. And then, connect to start up people in your area, you can ask for a some minutes of their time to do some informational interviews and so on. Also, Befriend some start up recruiter, you can have and find them by using LinkedIn. And target start ups directly, by looking in a local business journal or simply searching online. You have to explain why you’re interested in connecting with them and why you’d be a great fit for the company. Start up wants to hear from people who are passionate about their mission and more likely keep you on the radar for future job opening.
I would rethink your motivation for joining a startup. A startup company doesn’t say a lot about the work, the team, the people, workload etc…
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.