The Start-Up Hippocampus

Whether you’re transitioning from a corporate company or simply starting off your career, accepting a role with a startup comes with an array of challenges. With that I’d like to say congratulations! Congratulations on making the bold decision to ditch the comfort and security of a scaled organization and contribute to a fast-paced, demanding, yet highly rewarding start-up entity. Some days are predictable, but others hit you like a tornado — you’re not in Kansas anymore! Remaining level-headed, adaptable, and open-minded will help you through the tough times where decision-making weighs heavy with uncertainty. When I decided to leave a large autonomous vehicle (AV) company to join a much smaller one (just under 30 people), I came into the role with no expectations and made sure to observe and absorb from those around me. Here are the discoveries I’ve made that proved to be productive approaches to work while wearing the multitude of hats that came with the role.

Think like a Generalist

Specialization can be a death sentence for an individual contributor at a start-up. Early in your tenure at a startup, tuning into your speciality can be greatly beneficial. However, you may find that it does not adequately address the needs of a smaller-scale organization or lead to profound contributions. It is necessary to leverage your unique set of skills, but also to provide in areas outside of your domain. Solving problems and getting your hands dirty outside of your speciality can be the secret sauce in what makes you invaluable for your team throughout all possible contingencies. I found this to be the case during the pandemic when on-road testing was no longer a viable testing modality, with focus and investments shifting towards simulations. Simulations allowed us to continue testing system changes without a real life testing environment. By confidently approaching this opportunity with open mindedness and versatility, I expanded upon my understanding of simulation frameworks, creations, tagging and much more. This way of thinking granted me a breadth of knowledge in industry practices that I later leveraged in my career.

Absorb and process critical feedback

Getting to know your team and the peers you will interact with on a daily basis is a must at any organization. In order to gather a better sense of team structures, priorities, workflows, and company missions, it is critical to develop a channel of communication with team leads and individual contributors at various branches. Gathering feedback from team leads across the board as it pertains to relevant projects and working areas will give you meaningful insight. Through this inquiry, you’ll discover organizational nuances and other important subtleties that would have otherwise been overlooked. During my first week at a startup, I didn’t hesitate to ask team leads and stakeholders of QA processes what their needs were. I composed their assessment on existing workflows, and explored topics and areas that they felt could be further improved upon. Gathering this information early on gave me clarity on the gaps and steered me towards the optimal path of solution cultivation.

Give your work visibility and highlight others’

At a start-up, it is typical to get caught up in the day-to-day of completing tasks, quickly planning and executing on projects, and precipitously moving on to the next impactful thing without giving it the attention and recognition it deserves. It can feel uncomfortable, at first, to put your work on display for others to see and potentially critique, but allocating time and using a platform to publicize your work on a consistent basis is the crux of establishing a well founded work reputation. Providing visibility to your work could simply be sharing a presentation, FAQ/supporting docs via slack or email. One way I’ve done this is by sending emails of metric reports I’ve made to key stakeholders. The reports typically exist in a folder on Confluence, but through this process I discovered more engagement from engineers and my peers. Actively demonstrating your work lends itself to positive feedback, which can make you feel good and motivate you for your next project, as well as critical feedback, which will drive improvements for the next round of tasks. It is equally important to highlight other team members’ work as well. One way I adopted this approach was by shouting out members from various teams on their accomplishments via slack. It felt wonderful recognizing people’s professional and personal accomplishments and I hope it solidified their value at the company.

Encourage and participate in adversarial collaboration

Adversarial collaboration is the hallmark of technical progress. It’s required for designing strategic systems susceptible to confirmation bias, and is acutely relevant when having to deal with make-or-break decisions that are accompanied by several unknown risk factors. Having an ambivalent outlook (the opposite of adversarial collaboration) on technical discussions, project planning, and other tasks is essentially stagnation. This type of tip-toeing may lead to a compounding of technical debt that culminates in disaster. An example of how adversarial collaboration may play out in a self-driving organization is when two engineers oppose each other’s methodology. Both approaches have varying pros and cons that each engineer uncovers. Some of the insights may be speculative. But it is important to be able to disagree while maintaining the goal of working towards an agreed upon solution. Seeking pitfalls of your colleagues’ strong technical and controversial approaches progresses towards a layout of agreed upon facts while simultaneously exposing what is well understood and what is disputed. The final decision makers will have the relevant information needed to push forward. Adversarial collaboration without fear of judgement or external pressures results in a harmonious and propitious work culture.

And what is it to work with love?

To work with love is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit. Most beautifully said by Khalil Gibran, these words resonate heavily with the way I view and pursue my work. The intriguing nature of start ups brings together people of diverse experience levels, backgrounds, and distinctive strengths to collaboratively tackle challenging problem spaces with very limited resources. Start-ups can either bring out the worst in you or the best — what will determine that is how well the principles above are integrated into the company’s culture. If you find there to be gaps, then take it upon yourself to begin a grassroots movement at your organization by embodying the concepts above while enlightening your colleagues in the process.