Better to work in a few large organizations to understand how they work, become familiar with their internal and external business processes etc. Then go do a startup. Your previous experience will come in very handy as you start to set up your startup, and have to deal with bigger organizations and comply with ‘their’ processes. Startups can be a lot of fun, and sometimes rewarding as well,but its a total commitment. If you are already comitted (to a spouse, hobby, or another major commitment), be careful. There are only 16 waking hours in a day.

Hi,

I am also working in a Start up and all the comments i found here are really correlating with my job. I have a question, is it really difficult to move from a start up to a big organization after working 2-3 years in the start up. What are those barriers please reply me ???? and if i really want to join a big organization then should i leave the present company or what other i can do in order to go for a big name in future????

Hi Shekher,
Barriers are not so much external as they are internal. Meaning, you might find the working style of big organizations to be little hard to cope up with. Some examples of working style are- process oriented approach, long time cycles to take small decisions etc. So if you are ok with all these things you will definitely not find the transition to a big company much difficult.

Dear Shekhar,

In today’s world, the senior line and HR managers actually take working in a startup as a positive; This tells that the candidate is entrepreneruial in nature, willing to take risks, and has ownership traits.

I was having reasonably stable jobs with Oil Majors in India; something that I was enjoying. These were process driven companies and room for adding value at strategic level was minuscule. Then I joined start up retail venture. It was a lot of work load and was indeed stressful. But what I realized along the way was the amount of learning that I was deriving from this was amazing. I was managing complete P&L for a region, now I am holding national level profile. They surely are high risk high gain. Given a choice one should try his hands on both sides of the spectrum.

Actually i agree with the fact that in a startup u may have some early opportunities to handle a major project on your own but u must appreciate the fact ( the same which i m facing ) that most of the time u work on stupid and meaningless assignments because of non availability of a proper team and proper planning and the improper method of working on a project. Let me give u an example, when i joined the company i got two major projects which were definitely of my prime interest but just after these two, from last 4 months i am working on stupid assignments which definitely don’t have any use of my skills and i feels it is complete wastage of time. Also since the project on which i was working, i was under a senior for it but he was also having no expertise on that and i was also having no experience to that, so the project was not completed in the way it should be. I still know there will be a lot of faults in that but since we have no option and the company officials were also making us pressurize to complete the assignment as soon as possible, so it really lead us to manage somehow to complete the project even knowing that there are a lot of mistakes in that and question on the feasibility of the project. So definitely i feel that i missed lot of thing in that assignments to learn, since no one was there to tell me the process or methods or the correct way of doing that. But if u r in a Brand name then definitely once u complete the project then u have to follow the exact norms and proper paths to follow, so even u get the opportunity late but once u get the opportunity u learn it in much effective and compete way.