Stage Fright: The wrong company stage will crush you
You are probably better suited for one specific company stage. Yet most people overlook this critical factor when choosing their work. [Work in Progress: Part 06]
Series: Work in Progress | Part: 6 of 10 | Reading Time: 7 mins
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This is the 6th part of the series Work in Progress. Last week, I talked about being clutch at work. Subscribe to get the next part when it comes out.
Why do entrepreneurs hate working at big companies?
Why do experienced people come to startups and immediately become paralyzed?
What makes high growth companies so emotionally brutal?
The reality is you are probably better suited for one specific company stage.
Yet most people overlook this critical factor when choosing their work. They pick the title, salary, and company, yet skip the stage.
At Privia Health, I lived through multiple stages of the company's life: from a pre-product market fit startup to a $2B public company. I joined as employee #6 and left around 1,000 employees.
Through my experience and seeing hundreds of others, from veteran leaders to entry level hires, it was clear that many who were well suited for one stage, were poorly suited for another.
In a world of abundant opportunities, we need to be accurate in choosing the right work. And understanding the stage of the company is one of the most overlooked opportunities.
Late Stage People
▸ Most people fit best in Late Stage companies.
This is the world most people know and work inside. Late Stage companies can be big, but mostly they’re established and solid entities. They’ve been around and they function smoothly.
▸ The structure of the organization is in place.
Processes, playbooks, planning, team design, training, career paths, reward structures, mission, values, strategy, etc. This creates a solid foundation for people to come in and do work, at any phase in their career.
▸ The rules and parameters for success are well defined.
The path to success is more clear than in Early Stage companies. “If you do this, it will equal success.” Certainty, predictability, and clarity of focus are high. Even if success is hard, you can point to many people who have done well there before.
▸ The key is to execute the established plan, as it is laid out (fairly) clearly.
While there are always tweaks, the majority of the strategy has already been well thought out and refined (maybe many years ago). The job is more about executing the strategy, than figuring out the strategy. The difficulty is that it can be hard to change the plan or go in a different direction, which may be necessary.
▸ The predictability of a Late Stage is attractive
…because people joining know what they are getting into. While they sacrifice some leverage and must face stifling constraints, the seduction of clarity is real. Starting your career here can make sense because of the guardrails. Or if you crave certainty and stability. Or if you want a clear-defined structure for success.
▸ The conformist nature of Late Stage companies can be stifling.
Because most everything has been solidified, there’s not much space for new creativity. “Innovation” here is really just incrementalism because people don’t want to disrupt the sure-thing. Things as simple as “how to behave” are codified into the unspoken company culture. So people who behave differently, appear as outcasts and are pushed out.
▸ The primary skill to succeed in Late Stage companies is political skill.
You need to know how to “read the room” and understand your place in it. You need to know when to insert yourself (or not). Whether to be aggressive or passive in a given situation or with a given group. You need to accurately assess how things work here, and adapt to that. This is all true even of leaders. Late Stage companies require conformity to the context.
Early Stage People
▸ Few people fit best in Early Stage companies.
Here, everything, and I mean everything, is unclear. For people who are used to Late Stage companies, Early Stage companies feel like the ground is missing. All the certainty of Late Stage companies… is nowhere to be found.
▸ Questions are everywhere.
Who is the customer? What is the product? Will customers buy the product? Will the company survive? How long will it survive? Who is the team? Will the team survive? And on and on. The sheer volume of basic questions can be debilitating.
▸ Everything is chaotic in the Early Stage,
…because everything is uncertain. The whiteboard is blank and it’s on you to start drawing. It’s hard to even know where to start. Plus, there’s little margin for error. There’s no time, money, or room to make too many mistakes. Not only does the wrong answer to a question have the potential to sink the company, but also focusing on the wrong question at the wrong time, can sink you as well.
▸ Most people do not have the emotional makeup to handle this uncertainty.
The wide-open nature of Early Stage companies means that the company, team, or even people may become irrelevant overnight. Many Late Stage people think they’d prefer Early Stage because it sounds exciting! But rarely do they have the flexibility to evolve their Late Stage thinking to an Early Stage world. In the face of uncertainty, the commitment level must ratchet up to such an intense fervor that it may even appear insane to most other people.
▸ The chaos and openness is also a huge appeal for the right person.
The conformity required in Late Stage companies appears insane to the Early Stage person. They hate being stifled or put into a box. They thrive in disorderly and risky environments that change constantly. In Late Stage companies, these people are unhinged. In Early Stage companies, they’re underrated.
▸ The primary skill to succeed in Early Stage companies is creative resourcefulness.
You constantly need to figure things out, without the luxury of money, time, data, or experts. Decisions are everywhere, but you can’t comprehensively think around every point and get consensus from every person. And as Michael Karnjanaprakorn says well: “you won’t know if those decisions will work, for years down the road.”
Scale Stage People
▸ The Scale Stage is the most confusing stage
…because everything is simultaneously great (“we’re growing!”) and terrifying (“we’re gonna fail!”). It’s the push-and-pull between emotions that is hardest to process. It’s difficult to gauge what success looks like here. The company might externally look successful, but internally it feels like a disgraceful mess.
▸ You live in the middle of a battle royale between worlds
…oscillating back-and-forth between Early and Late Stages decisions. You must constantly decide which direction to lean. Do you use Early Stage principles like flexibility and gut decision-making? Or do you use Late Stage principles like process and controls? It’s hard to know and the stakes are still extraordinarily high.
▸ People underestimate how much the business still hasn’t been figured out.
People come in expecting to see a smooth, growing company. Instead, they walk into a continuous fire drill, with simple things in total disarray. Every crisis is magnified. While in Early Stage, you could just solve the issue quickly and resourcefully. But solving problems is harder now, as you must scale that solution across an unstable, growing base of customers and employees.
▸ Scale Stage teams become a cocktail of divergent people thrown together.
Early Stage team members may not always align with their Late Stage counterparts, and vice versa. So it becomes increasingly hard to discern who is the right fit for the company. Are the Early Stage people now irrelevant? Are the Late Stage people here too early?
▸ Many people mistakenly think the solution is to jump from Early to Late Stage
…as quickly as possible. People crave the certainty that Late Stage offers (especially the Late Stage people you are hiring), so they start adding processes. But you need to implement just the right amount of process - not too little, not too much - or you slow the Scale down. The delicate balance makes this stage so incredibly hard.
▸ While Early Stage has disorder and Late Stage has order, Scale Stage is defined by its transience.
It is “in transition” from one place to another. It’s like living through an identity crisis. It’s neither here nor there. It can feel like the worst of both worlds: you no longer have the freedom of before, nor the stability of later. The company is moving and you must move with it.
▸ The primary skill to succeed in Scale Stage companies is composed prioritization and implementation.
You’re playing a game of whack-a-mole, with impossible odds and sirens blaring in your ears. All things demand your attention, but many must be ignored. You will let a lot of people down (and you must live with their disappointment). But you choose as wisely as you can, and exert all of your attention to solving the chosen problems. And those problems must be fixed for good.
(Side note: Scale Stage is where I had the most comparative advantage, but least enjoyment. A short memory helped.)
Know Thyself
▸ The only solution is to know yourself deeply.
Do you need structure and order to succeed? Or do you thrive during uncertainty and chaos? Be honest: it’s less about what you wish you want, and more about knowing what you need.
▸ If you don’t know or are curious, go ahead and experiment.
Maybe you wonder what the other side is like. Go for it. It’s worth trying out different stages at some point in your career. You can guess what other stages are like, but they must be experienced to really know.
▸ Don’t over index on your prior experience.
What you thought you knew worked before, may not work in a new environment. Many pieces may still work, but you must separate out the irrelevant. A simple example is that almost every business tactic doesn't work in another company stage (e.g. 1:1s, OKRs, hire slow/fire fast, etc.).
▸ Resilience is required, across all.
Resilience looks different depending on the stage. In the Early Stage, you must survive the uncertainty and fragility of the blank page. In the Scale Stage, you must survive the paradoxical push-and-pull of demands. And in the Late Stage, you must survive the bureaucracy. Which resilience are you willing to stomach?
▸ Try, but don’t force it.
Or reinvent yourself quickly.
Next up, I’m going to talk about innovation and what I think people get wrong about it.
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Note: views are my own and do not represent the views of any companies or people referenced within.
Hmmm. I enjoy creating order from disorder, establishing new processes that will enable the organization to scale, streamlining existing processes, recognizing new opportunities to grow.
FWIW, I’ve found my involvement in scaling and optimization reassuring rather than frightening, as I’ve seen it as providing a better base for future operations.
But when operations become too predictable, I start to get bored.
So: what stage am I? Scale Stage? The more innovative part of Late Stage?