Would you rather work for Steve Jobs in the garage? Or in the big Cupertino office?

What kind of start-up person are you?

I have *only* ever worked at a start-up, in earnest. (Internships don’t count as a job if you’re over 23.) They’ve been different sizes and stages, and each one has felt like it’s own crash course/mini MBA. (I don’t believe in MBAs and we can talk about that at another time.)

I also grew up in start-up— I’ve written before about how I used to sleep under my mom’s desk while she took board calls. My parents are serial entrepreneurs on their 3rd start-up together. Those start-ups were my playground as a kid, and as an only child with parents who worked together, I often felt like an 8 year old employee at a staff meeting.

I realize this is a unique situation, the older I get, and it’s almost bizarre that I just keep on working at start-ups. I’ve tried to diversify for sure, but only working at start-ups also keeps me in a niche— since I only have worked at start-ups, only start-ups are interested in hiring me. In recent years, I have started to own this niche and rebrand myself, and also am sort of accepting that I may be too growth, power, and novelty oriented (a nice way of saying Machiavellian) to work at IBM or Meta.

My personal branding as a start-up person looks something like this in action on LinkedIn or other semi-biz settings: