Hunter Walk is a well known investor and partner at the venture fund, Homebrew. With a Stanford MBA, Walk worked his way into the venture capital world through his success in the tech industry. He began his Silicon Valley years with Linden Lab, then moved over to Google where he worked for their contextual advertising business, AdSense, managing product and sales efforts. Walk then led consumer product management for YouTube, after it was acquired by Google.
Now, Walk is a partner at Homebrew. The main focus of the firm is supporting startups that are fueling the bottom up economy. Homebrew wants to enable an easier and more cost-effective access to technology, information, and customers for small businesses, individual consumers, and developers to drive economic growth and innovation.
Currently living in San Fransisco, Walk also runs his own blog. One of his most recent posts was aimed at recent graduates beginning their careers in the tech world. His advice? Go work at a midstage startup.
Here are the highlights of Walk's reasons why:
1. Your Work Will Matter: "You have the resources to build and launch, which means your work will see the light of day."
In new startups, it's all concept mocks and ideas. In established companies, they want things done their way. Walk argues that midstage startups are the perfect mixture. Midstage startups are in their hypergrowth stage, which is the most exciting stage.
2. Growth Creates Opportunity: "As you prove yourself you'll be able tapped to lead new teams, launch new offices, and everything else which goes into scaling a successful business."
Midstage startups are expanding, and you can be a part of that.
3. The Early Team Still There and They'll Be Your Tribe for Years: "Building a tight and high quality network early in your career is much more valuable than any fancy title or nearterm compensation."
You'll get to work with the founders and the early team because they're still there, enjoying the work. You get to become a part of that and stick with them through the company growth.
4. Your Options Very Likely Worth Something: "Midstage startups have gotten past some initial value creation milestones and likely have a much greater chance of growing 10x into a nearterm liquidity event within 2-3 years than a newly funded company would."
5. The Bias of Reputation Effect: "We tend to think more highly of the folks who were "pre IPO" or "pre acquisition" than those who might have joined the team right after."
Being associated with a high performing company and joining before it went mainstream can really work in your favor.
To get into Walk's full reasoning behind his advice, check out the full post here.