I love working for startups. No place for politics and all place for results. Working in startups means you have to work as hard as you can to move the whole team forward. And needless to say, you can learn a lots as well. When I was working for a food startup, I got to involve in every tasks, small or big, manual to brain, with people who have different backgrounds. It was also the time I just got out of college and it teared me up to question why would I have to work with folks who are completely different to me, they don’t speak academically and they are very down to earth. To them, I was just a little kid who came there to learn, it felt so hard to influence them. But then through that challenging situation, I learned to spend more time with them, to use all my heart and all my dedication to my work to show them that I care. Food production and operation is very tough and intense, one step wrong or delayed, the whole could become a mess. Believe it or not, it turned out that I got connected to kitchen team than to office team. I encouraged them, brought them together and went to work on the same car with them, I understood their struggles and their aspiration, I felt their life. Sometimes, coming into office, I supported the intern team there to label containers in the dungeon. Life was meaningful and fun everyday, every moment we ran into problems needed to be solved. I also remembered I cried so much when witnessing a person I brought to the team left. It felt terrible, I thought I just destroyed someone else’s life. I still keep in touch with some people in the team till now. Leaving that startup, later on I joined a Japanese startup to help them build a minimum viable product (MVP) relating to blockchain. The team literally includes only the founder right now and he is so committed. That’s what I like about startups, watching the founder put all himself into the thing he is working on, does not matter how many obstacles are against him. I and the founder, we just worked and figured out and worked and made something happen. There was no time to step back, only to learn and move forward. 3 months in startup feels like 3 years in corporate. Things move pretty fast and so do you, you grow exponentially through challenges. Plus, being in a startup, you always have to be very resourceful, there aren’t much resource for you, or it’s not easy to get it. Starting up is a small, humbling yet very meaningful journey, from zero to one. To me, there is no greater opportunity than laying down a strong foundation for something that lasts. And it’s guaranteed that every day you wake up with full of energy that “I am ready for any problems”. No benefit is better than the moment of celebrating “we won”, “we did it” as a team. Startup is about being together and working together for something that has not existed yet. Even when I was joining a marketing competition, working with 2 other friends intensively in a month for a marketing campaign could be considered as a startup experience, to me. I used to tell a friend that “once in a life, you should at least work for startup or start something up”. That still holds true to me now and if I have a chance to keep working in startup, I would never say No, ever.
