georgesequeira

Look at their investors. When interviewing, ask to speak to the investors. See what they say. When speaking with founders do they have numbers they can show or is it pure show-personship?

Idea generator and fundraising are also a couple of benefits to joining a startup before starting your own.

1. Finding ideas can be hard especially when you start from scratch. Most startups (particularly fast scaling ones) can give you ideas if you look for:

* de-prioritized ideas due to "hyper-focus"

* listening to common problems that customers [0] have that aren't necessarily solved by your company.

* product features built that many other companies would find useful (e.g. collaborative editing infra)

* internal tooling that other companies would find useful

2. Fundraising[1]

Many friends got their first checks from investors that were investors of a startup they previously worked at. And the truth is, if you choose a slow-scaling/zombie startup, you will learn a ton still but honestly, the investors of that company aren't going to be stoked to invest in you if you spin out your own thing.

A quick list of common strategies that worked for them:

* Choose founders who don't treat investors as "dumb money"

* Choose companies backed by great investors

* Join startups that are scaling fast

* Join early (< 40) so you can be part of the "success story"

* Ask to meet the investors throughout your tenure (ideally you are upfront with the founders of the company you join)

* Stay there and be a part of the solution through 2+ tough moments (ie. investors can associate you with the success of the company)

[0] Getting to know potential customers and understanding how to acquire them is also super useful.

[1] You can avoid the fundraising focus by going to YC (or equivalent) because you'll get the necessary clout to get investors knocking. If you're going to a startup anyway to get experience and find ideas, you may as well prep for fundraising.

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also interested, if you're up for it! (also email in profile)

Ah right. Yeah, reverse-engineering Airbyte's DSL and just "borrowing" their UI generation may be the move.

Would love to hear more about your experience with these platforms. Thought they were mostly plug-n-play these days. Could I email you?

At the end of the day, most business owners don't want to connect all these tools together. It just allows them to accomplish business outcomes. What makes their job hard is keeping track where all the data is and how to know if things are working.

Solutions to that problem can take shape as a CRM (and keeping it updated) or something as dumb as a dashboard of dashboards.

I think it's two things

Is the workflow automation tool big enough that subgroups of users are still a big number of users to service

Of those subgroups, does one (or more) stand to have a better product experience if someone focused on their core use-cases / workflows. (e.g. Reclaim takes a bunch of calendar automation around scheduling and makes a product that reduces the work needed to optimize your calendar).

it'd be interesting to know what kind of companies those are. Don't want to give people a false sense of hope with "Uber for x"

Also, I realized, an over-arching concern could be: Does this promote bias?

Yes.

Especially in early-stage, it's about how fast can you go and are you iterating enough. For example: Some of the advice for hiring early stage is "hire your friends/people-you-know". Instant bias.

Over time it's about taking that risk on less-clear-thinkers to help refine their thinking or more junior folks to grow them but at the start: there is very little risk in execution that you can handle.