A College Student's Perspective of Startup Buzz

I know that as a college student, I’m subject to a lot of selection bias in my media and social groups. So what I’m about to write may come out of left field to many people, but I’d like to think that it may ring true to some students and professionals in the field of software engineering.

Both online and in my day-to-day life, I’ve noticed a lot of heavy emphasis on startups coming from other programmers and students. I have heard more than one classmate say that they want to graduate and move to the Bay Area to work at a startup. There’s even a “startup incubator” house (IncubatorCLE) for a few computer science majors at my school to live at (which is, admittedly, pretty awesome). Online, I’m a regular reader of Hacker News, which is run by another startup incubator called Y Combinator. It’s a community-driven site that focuses on technology news, but it definitely has a regular batch of “startup oriented” content in it.

In particular, what I’ve noticed isn’t the amount of buzz about startups. Like I said, I’ve put myself in an environment to hear a lot of it. What strikes me is that a lot of the buzz around them is, as I would phrase it, “startups for the sake of startups.” It seems like many people are more concerned about being part of (or founding) a startup than they are about the type of problems they’ll solve at work, or the people they’ll work with.

Maybe it’s the money that flows around investors and startups. Maybe it’s the lottery aspect of having a chance to be high up in the next billion dollar company. Or maybe it’s the romance of getting in early and really making your mark on a company and product. All of these are pretty decent reasons to be excited about startups. But for me personally, those things aren’t the drivers for getting me excited about a job.

I’m excited about a job when I meet the team and see that it’s an environment I feel comfortable in. I’m excited when I solve problems with their engineers (even interview problems), and I feel like we can communicate at a high level. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of working with that group of smart people, when all the communication lines up, and as a group you tackle huge problems that you may not have been able to handle separately. I want that in my job. In short, I want to work at a place where I’m surrounded by the same sorts of that people I surround myself with in my classes here at school. The kind of group that can have fun with each other, but when they work together on something, they are a force to be reckoned with.

If I find that at a startup, great! I don’t know much about startups, but if I find one with that sort of team, I think the chances are it’ll go pretty far. On the other hand, if I find that team at a company that’s been around since before there were computers, that’s fine too.

I’m not going to end this by saying my attitude is better than those who are passionate about startups. Because it’s not. We all have our passions; they make us unique and drive us to different goals. Without the people driven to join startups, there wouldn’t be the teams I want to work with. So instead I’ll just say that I hope one day I’ll find that sort of team and make a career out of solving problems with them.

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