Don’t Work at a Startup to Break into FAANG

Startup Experience Won't Get You a FAANG Offer

There is a common myth in the tech industry that big companies like to hire people with startup experience. The story goes that companies like Google and Meta want to hire the best talent. One way to identify good talent is to recruit startup founders and employees that have proven their mettle shipping real products to real users. 

This logic is actually pretty good. I spent the first 7 years of my career running two of my own startups. Being a startup founder required the most skill of any job I’ve had. If you aren’t really good at what you do, you will fail fast running your own startup.

So, this logic is sound, but the problem is that working at a startup will actually hurt your chances of getting an offer from a FAANG company. The reason is that working at big companies is radically different from working at a startup. 

Here’s an example.

Back in 2014, my cofounder Scott discovered that we had a bug in our implementation of Stripe. This bug had caused us to receive no customer payments for the last week. We hadn’t noticed because at that stage, we were making so little money. But because we had so little money, the problem was existential. At the time, site traffic was so low that we decided it made sense for us to optimize for speed and test in production. That day, we pushed to prod 11 times. By late evening we had resolved the issue. It had been a trivial misunderstanding of Stripe’s integration docs.

We were quite proud of having fixed it so quickly. From discovery to fix took only 8 hours. Considering what a mess the codebase was, how many systems were involved, and how sleep-deprived we all were, it was a serious technical achievement.

But now reflect on what sort of skills that experience reinforced: hacking through a codebase quickly, adding loglines where there probably shouldn’t be any, ignoring the dev environment, and testing in real time with a payment system.

At a big company, being good at any of those skills wouldn’t just be a waste of talent, it would be actively dangerous. If an engineer in the Google Ads team decided to test a fix to a payment system in production, that could easily become a billion dollar problem. And don’t get me started on the reputational risk of doing something like that. 

Startups hire from other startups because the skills necessary to be successful in that environment are directly transferable. The same is true for midsize and FAANG companies.

And the data prove it. In the last 9 years working at large tech companies, I’ve worked directly with hundreds of people. Only about a dozen of those folks came from the startup ecosystem. The people who work on startups tend to come from other startups. The people who work for FAANG companies tend to come from other FAANG companies.

So, if you want to work for a FAANG company, the best thing you can do to gain the right skills and reputation is to work at a FAANG company. That may seem like a catch-22, but there are ways to substantially increase your odds of success. Subscribe to get my future posts and I’ll share actionable steps you can take to get a FAANG offer.

But even if you don’t subscribe, don’t make the mistake of working for a startup because you think it’s a path to getting an offer from Meta or Google. It almost certainly isn’t.