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How to deal with a startup transition

How to deal with a startup transition

A few tips to make sure the company transition fits you

Giammarco Pacifico & Federica Montrone
April 10, 2024

If you decide to join a startup, you have probably not taken it lightly, and you’ve considered why this path might be right for you compared to other options (if not, this article is for you)

One of the most overlooked aspects is growth, especially when it comes to personal growth and startup growth.

There is no doubt that startups must grow faster than large companies, especially when losing money in the process. This is key to making the most out of VC money, bringing a product to market and starting to generate revenue/profits.

What’s less obvious is that if a startup needs to grow 6% a month or 100% per year (don’t forget about compounding), everyone in the company has to grow at least 100% per year too, just to keep up.

How easy is it to grow 100% per year?

Very hard. It means being 2x better every year.

This is why successful startups leave many people behind.
Similarly to any natural selection process: only the fittest survive for the benefit of the group. This applies at every level, especially in the leadership team, where performances are crucial to achieving objectives.

The opposite case is also true. If a company is declining by 5% a month, people start lagging after the company. The best people leave, and the worst performers remain.

After 1 year of constant decline, the people remaining at a startup are on average twice as bad as the ones who were there before.

It might sound hard, but this is how it works, and that’s also one of the reasons why many people leave sinking ships.

If you stick around any startup for a while, you’ll witness and be part of a transformation. In no way the team you initially joined will stay the same for too long, and neither it should.

Usually, the timeframe for the transformation can be as short as months. Either your peers or managers change, or your work completely shifts to adapt to new necessities towards achieving goals. You need to make sure you understand what those changes mean and how they could still align with your work ethic, ambitions and life.

Here are a few key questions to ask yourself when things change around you:

How will new employees contribute to the change?

In a startup every new hire counts. Every new person adds to the picture the CEO and founders have.

Are new hires completely different from the old guard?

Well, they should because it would not be a great idea to assemble an army of identical soldiers.

However, it’s up to you to understand the motivation and past experiences of these new people and how this relates to their new role in the company. This will help you to get the bigger picture and decide whether the new version of the company is still something you fit into.

Are new people bringing a corporate-like mentality? Then be ready to transition into something that fits that.

Are they bringing in consumer-centric experiences instead of fundraising skills? Then be ready for more bottom-down decisions rather than shareholder's instructions.

Which behaviour is (literally) getting promoted?

Some of the biggest transitions begin when someone gets a promotion. Recognizing someone through a promotion is the easiest and most powerful way to set an example for the kind of behaviour that is expected from everyone.

If the newly promoted people have an attitude that is very far from your work ethic, there is little you can do. You will successfully work together only if you evolve in the same direction.

Which department is getting bigger?

If you have launched your product and the company is now deeply focused on sales and marketing, research and product development won’t probably be the main focus anymore.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and companies with a single product have to shift to commercial focus at some point but, if you were involved in such a department, you’ll feel a very different pull in priorities.

In this situation, you might consider shifting into another role within the growing department (if this fits your career ambitions) or move to another company because soon your expertise might not be as needed as it was in the past.

Whether it’s about growth or decline, transitions are a constant phenomenon in every startup and they never happen in isolation.

Anyone who has witnessed a period of intense change knows that transitions are a group activity where teams evolve inside and outside of the company. The easiest guiding principle without being stuck in the details is to make sure you end up with a group of people you’re proud to be part of.

Optimizing for the people you work with is never the wrong answer.

All in all, when you collect enough evidence to answer these questions, there is a simple thing you can do: compare them with your top, middle and bottom shelf values and see if they allow you to keep things as you want in your life.

If new hires, promotions and new opportunities are very far from your core values, you’ve probably already got (and gave) the most to this experience.

Instead, if you feel energised by the changes and can’t wait for the new reality to settle in, sticking through a transition can be one of the most rewarding experiences in your career.

If you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone going through a company transition.

This week's top scientific reads

Read the highlights of these articles here.

GLP-1s for Parkinson’s (New England Journal of Medicine)
GPT-4 Automates Annotation in Genomics (Nature Methods)
Rejuvenating Blood in Mice (Nature)
SyntheMol AI against Infections (Nature Machine Intelligence)
Achieving Sensors Ultra-Sensitivity (Science Advances)

Latest European funding rounds in health & bio

Biofidelity raised €22M for its molecular biology technology which enables local genomic analysis for cancer diagnosis 🇬🇧
Amalia Care raised €1M for their healthtech platform which helps find the right personnel to assist seniors 🇮🇹
Reduced raised €6M for its fermentation technology that uses organic surplus produces to create new foods 🇳🇱
Neurosterix closed a €58M Series A to advance the development of allosteric modulator therapeutics for neurological disorders 🇨🇭
Ironic Biotech raised €1M to develop proteins that contain iron to help individuals with iron deficiency problems 🇸🇪
XUND raised €2M for its AI platform that helps people analyse and understand their symptoms 🇦🇹