Why Joining a Startup Turned Out to Be a Reward, Not a Risk

“Joining a young startup is a huge risk. You know 75% of startups are projected to fail, right?”

That was the advice I ignored when I joined what was, at the time, the 10-person team at WayUp. I had already bought into the mission: helping job-seeking college students and recent grads to gain valuable experience and pay off their tuition. What I didn’t realize was the impact it would have on me as a recent grad. It was the type of role, which, at age 24, pushed me out of my comfort zone in a way that was sometimes painful, but extremely rewarding.

Now, I strongly encourage recent grads to join a startup early on in their career. Here’s why.

Startups aren’t too big for their customers.

One of the most important lessons you can learn as a recent grad is that your customers, clients and users can make or break your business: If you don’t connect with them on a regular basis to figure out how to improve your product or service, you won’t be able to keep going. Because our company is so young, we know that customer feedback is vital to our growth and our future, so we go the extra mile to speak with our students: conducting user surveys over the phone, having lunches with our users in our headquarters, visiting students on campus, etc. Our head of the Campus Rep Program, Elana, regularly has one-on-one’s with our 600+ (and counting) campus reps to hear about their experience and see how we can improve our business for students.

Because we’re small, we’re able to get in front of our customers and have real, personal interactions with them rather than hiding behind a chat screen to connect with our users – and because of that, we are able to make strong connections with our users and get genuine, valuable feedback.

Less hierarchy to slow you down.

Millennials are the “I don’t have time for this” generation. If we click on a cool article we see on Facebook and it loads too slowly, we give up after 5 seconds (wasn’t worth it anyway), but despite our impatience, we’re also a generation of innovative momentum — something many companies desperately need and most startups encourage.

Having worked in startups since my senior year of college, I’ve found that you’re less likely to run into hierarchical structures that will slow you down: Gone are the hoops of approval you have to jump through in a corporate environment. If I think I have a good idea, I swivel my chair around and ask our CEO Liz, who sits right behind me. If I want to coordinate with sales on featuring a cool job on our blog, I walk 10 steps over and say, “Hey, got a minute?” It’s incredibly empowering to be in a supportive, collaborative and fast-paced environment where you can get input on a great idea and, with the right planning, run with it.

Your tasks are your own.

Startups are known for putting a lot of faith in their young employees. Some days aren’t easy, and you’re left feeling like you have no idea what you’re doing at the exact moment your team is expecting you to deliver, but there is nothing more rewarding than owning a project or responsibility from ideation to implementation — nothing more empowering than having a tangible product or result that you can point to and say, “I made that happen.” As a recent grad, it gives you confidence in your own abilities early on — something which wouldn’t have otherwise happened if you hadn’t been trusted with the responsibilities and tested in your role.

Startups rarely lock an employee into a single role.

Our generation is projected to have around 15-20 jobs in our lifetime, so it’s safe to say that we get restless fast. Because there’s so much work to be done at a startup, it’s rare to be bored or restless. I’m often handed tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with my role, which not only allows me to expand my skill set, but also allows me to constantly learn, grow and adapt because the startup environment and its demands have kept me on my toes in the best way possible.

No recent grad should be a paper pusher, so I encourage every young candidate to look into startups that will invest in their potential. Think about which opportunities will test your abilities and allow you to make an impact so that you can quickly develop the professional skills that will propel your career forward.