Your Parents Gave You Bad Advice
They love you, but their wisdom was from a different era
“The greatest rewards come from working on something that nobody has a name for. If you possibly can, work where there are no words for what you do.” -Kevin Kelly
I was talking to a software engineer who joined a startup several years ago. The startup failed. He wanted to join another startup, but also had an offer to join Google. He told me “maybe my parents were right years ago when they told me to get a job at big-tech and give up on startup dreams.”
Drawing this conclusion from one startup’s failure isn’t helpful.
His parents had the best intentions for him. They were trying to give him good advice. But his parents’ advice came from experience growing up in a different world. They shaped their views at a time when men wore suits and women wore skirts to work. Phones were fixed to the wall and long distance calls were expensive. A 30 year career at a single Fortune 500 company was admired as an ideal career path. The promise of pensions and social security felt sacred.
The world has moved on from these patterns of stability, but common wisdom takes some time to catch up. How can you know where it’s going? You can’t know for sure. But, there’s one thing I’m certain you can bet your career on.
It’s this: increasing volatility. The world will change faster in the next 20 years than it did in the last 20 years. The pace of technological development will accelerate and compound faster than anything we’ve seen yet. This is due in large part to the fact that we now have a globally connected human brain called the Internet. You can jump in and be part of the wild growth or you can sit on the sidelines in relative “safety”. But the relative "safety" exposes you to a different kind of risk — a lack of exposure to the upside volatility.
So how do you position yourself for this future?
Expose yourself to upside volatility. When things work, they work in surprisingly big ways (e.g. OpenAI, Starlink, bitcoin). When something is growing really fast it’s not too late to join. There’s often huge running room ahead.
Protect yourself from downside volatility. Lots of ideas don’t end up working out. The best downside protection is in curating the people around you. Build a personal network of startup-minded people who are all seeking the next big things. "Whisper networks” of talent are great at sharing this knowledge. You’ll rarely hear about it as early in pop tech media or podcasts.
Avoid the illusion of safety (e.g. “big-company-X will pay me a ‘good’ salary”). This feels safe, but is actually a limitation of exposure to upside volatility.
Think of joining a startup as a step in building a portfolio of bets over time. Venture capitalists build a portfolio in parallel by contributing capital for ownership. As an employee, you join things serially but you build your portfolio through a sequence of steps. Surprisingly, you have a massive advantage over venture capitalists. True outlier companies will always be hiring talented engineers. And talented engineers can get valuable company equity. But few venture capitalists get to invest in outlier companies. Your career is a moving target. Navigate from opportunity to opportunity using better information at each step. Be a heat seeking missile. Along the way, generate signal from smart people around you until you find a thing that really works. Then strap in and ride the wave!
Your parents will describe you as very lucky, but you’ll know there was more to it than just luck.