Moving from startup CTO to FTE at big-co?

Question

I'm in a bit of a dilemna and would love to hear from anyone that's done this. I'm in the UK for refernece. I did a full time CTO role for a startup that had a modest exit from 2015-2020 (grew to 50 ppl and millions in revenue) and since then have worked as consulting and fractional CTO at a few startups. I've been good at working on building products and teams from scratch and I really do enjoy it. I've also been working on building a bunch of products in the days where I'm not consulting (mostly in the crypto space, I know: boo!). You can see my history at: https://linkedin.com/in/krishan711I'm at a stage now where I'm wondering if it's worth it and wether I should just join a big co to get a big paycheck and get back into the grind of being a FTE. I'd love to hear from people that have done this as almost all the people I know who have been through my path are still there and working on their companies.Advice on how to make the transition and if there is anything I should be particularly looking for / avoiding would be greatly appreciated. Thanks :)

sf4lifer · Accepted Answer

I've done this twice. Here are lessons from my experience:
* At a startup, I made decisions fast. At a large company I had to build consensus for everything. This meant a LOT of meetings to discuss the same thing over and over. * At a startup, I interacted directly with customers. At a large company, there were layers of customer success, sales, that I had to coordinate with (pre/post meetings). It felt like more hassle than it was worth. * At a startup, mission is clear, payday is company success. At a large company, lets face it, everyone's mission is to get promoted. * At a startup, there were no restrictions on what we could try. At a large company, there is so many protocols, security, data handling, release notes. * At a startup risk is rewarded. At a big company, everyone talks about taking risks but no one gets promoted for taking one and failing (at least in my experience). * At a startup I hired and fired fast. At a big company, 90 days minimum to let a bad apple go. Everyone knows how to milk it.
All that said the corporate life was really good to me when I had young kids. Minimal work/stress, great benefits. Different priorities for different points in life.

iamflimflam1 · Answer

This probably comes down to what are you really looking for. You describe it as the "the grind of being a FTE". That gives me the impression that you are looking for more of a hands on engineering role and less of a leadership type thing.Would that be accurate?

tinktank · Answer

Any chance I could talk to you 1:1? Your history intrigues me. It'd be mostly me benefitting though, from your experience.