As the co-founder of a startup, I’ve been constantly reminded of the approaching graduation season by the steady stream of job application emails flooding my inbox.
Over these three years of entrepreneurship, after reviewing hundreds of applications for internships, part-time positions, and full-time roles, I’ve gradually noticed that the proportion of fresh graduates — people who’ve just finished university or graduate school — applying to our company has been increasing year over year. Perhaps driven by the growing entrepreneurial culture in recent years and the significant increase in “Innovation & Entrepreneurship” courses and competitions at colleges and universities, more and more graduates are considering positions at internet startups as their very first job.
A free and open environment, small and flat teams, and the ability to see the results of your work quickly — these are some of the main reasons startups appeal to fresh graduates. But at the same time, the proportion of fresh graduates who join startups only to leave because “reality didn’t match expectations” has also been rising.
After reading Gao Erfen’s “Should Fresh Graduates Join Big Companies or Startups?” and Chen Yalin’s “Igniting the Entrepreneurial Spirit: Three Traits Fresh Graduates Should Have Before Joining a Startup,” I’ve compiled the following seven questions. These will help you think carefully before submitting your resume to a startup about whether you’re truly suited for the startup environment.
1. “Why am I choosing this company?”
To avoid creating too many misconceptions about startups, let me first make one thing clear: for earlier-stage teams, “salary” and “working hours” are unlikely to compete with those at larger companies. As the common saying goes, joining a startup is not a high-ROI decision. Less money, more work, higher risk. What a startup can offer you is a flexible work schedule, a highly motivated team, and room to experiment freely — things that fresh graduates at this stage of their lives typically have enough opportunity cost to afford.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If what you’re pursuing are the advantages that a startup can offer, you need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario in other areas. I’ve always believed that the years before 30 are the golden period for trying as many things as possible. Every experience you work hard for and accumulate during this time will profoundly shape who you become after 30.
So what matters most to you right now?
2. “What kind of company is this?”
If you can, try introducing the company you want to join to your friends and family over dinner. Tell them why you want to join. People are biased — we tend to be especially forgiving of choices we’re excited about. You might think this company is your dream destination, but objectively speaking, do you really understand what they do? Especially for friends who are less familiar with the tech startup world, you should try to explain it in the simplest, most straightforward terms possible.
If you keep using phrases like “roughly,” “probably,” and “something like that…” in your description, it means you don’t understand the company well enough yet. If you’ve already exhausted every effort to learn about them and still can’t figure out what they do — I’m sorry to say, this means either you fundamentally don’t understand this company, or the company doesn’t fully understand what it’s doing either.
Either way, the outlook doesn’t seem great, does it?
3. “If they pivot, would I still want to stay?”
Here’s something you need to understand: 99% of the teams that appear successful today took quite a few detours along the way. We call these detours “pivots.” Even a company like ours, which has been bobbing up and down for three years, went through four major pivots before gradually becoming what we are today.
As a startup, “change” is both natural and essential. Many angel investors have said that early-stage investing is about the team, because the business model will inevitably end up looking different from how it started. Honestly, you’re an early-stage investor too. The difference is that they invest money and resources, while you invest your youth. So the earlier-stage the startup you’re planning to join, the more seriously you should ask yourself this question.
If today you’re building a dating app and tomorrow you pivot to chatbots, would you still be willing to stay and fight for this team? The point isn’t to accept everything blindly — it’s to help you understand where your expectations and your personal boundaries lie with this company.
4. “What can I learn here?”
You often hear interviewers say, “We value employee growth.” But you also frequently hear, “The company isn’t paying you to learn.” So does the company actually care about your learning and growth?
The answer is definitely yes, but we need to define what “learning” at a company actually means. Let’s roughly divide workplace learning for fresh graduates into two categories: learning methods and accumulating experience. Compared to larger companies with more people and complex hierarchies, the biggest advantage of smaller, flatter startups is the “freedom to experiment.” This space allows you to accumulate experience quickly, but it’s hard to learn structured, systematic ways of doing things through formal training.
When you’re a fresh graduate and become the company’s very first marketing hire, what exactly are you expecting them to teach you? So let me re-translate what startup interviewers really mean: “We’ll give you plenty of room to experiment and accumulate experience, but we’re not paying you to teach you how to do things.” Does that make more sense now?
5. “What can I bring to them?”
Before answering this question, make sure you can articulate a reason beyond “low salary expectations” and “eagerness to learn.”
For startup teams where role divisions tend to be blurry, it’s often hard to clearly define what “position” they need to fill. The “job title” they post may not fully represent the “capabilities” they actually need. In these situations, understanding what kind of talent the company needs becomes essential homework before applying to a startup. Beyond learning about the internal situation through people you know, reading interview articles in publications or attending public talks by team members are also good ways to get a preliminary sense of their needs. The more clearly you understand what kind of person they’re looking for, the more certain you’ll be about whether you’re the right fit for the role.
Honestly, during the first two years of my startup, the thing I hated most was writing “job titles,” because it was genuinely hard to articulate which position at another company would be the equivalent of what we needed. So thinking about what capabilities you can contribute to the team is far more important than simply browsing job listings on various platforms.
6. “Can you endure never-ending setbacks?”
On this question, I’m guessing 99% of applicants would answer without hesitation: “Yes, I can.”
The greatest advantage of joining a startup is having enormous room to experiment and try new things. But because you’ll spend much of your time doing things where “nobody knows how it’ll turn out,” no one can tell you how to do something well or how to do it right. Beyond getting rejected by prospects, having phone calls hung up on, and sending partnership requests that never get replies, you might just close a deal only to have the team suddenly change direction. Are these kinds of dramatic changes and setbacks really something you can handle?
During my three years of entrepreneurship — a period that’s not long but not short either — what worried me most was letting new team members face their first setback alone, because those are always especially tough to endure. Many teammates start out brimming with confidence, only to walk out of a meeting room completely deflated. We always invested extra effort into supporting these teammates, helping them develop the habit of thinking about the next step after a failure. If there’s no one around to walk you through that moment, can you still bounce back and maintain your passion for the next attempt?
Getting burned is inevitable during the exploratory process. My advice: find the motivation that keeps you pushing forward as quickly as you can.
7. “The hardest question: Can you endure the loneliness of success?”
We’ve talked a lot about how tough and difficult startup life is. There’s a Chinese saying: “After hardship comes sweetness.” But the truly sad part is that even after enduring all that hardship, all you get is more hardship.
I remember about two years ago, team members would constantly tell me, “I’m so anxious — when will things finally get smoother?” The truth is, even now that we’ve gotten past those particular hurdles, we’ve never truly escaped anxiety or embraced smoothness, because there are thousands upon thousands of hurdles waiting behind each one. For members of an early-stage startup, your setbacks are truly never-ending. They don’t conclude just because you accomplished something. In fact, reaching a goal only extends into even bigger and harder challenges. Even when you clear the obstacle right in front of you, there’s nothing much to celebrate, because there’s always a bigger, tougher challenge right behind it.
Even if you successfully weather the storm and gradually become a leader on the team, you’ll discover that the loneliest kind of setback is when “nobody” celebrates your achievements. Are you someone who can endure that?
So once you choose to step into a startup, you’re choosing a lonely and difficult path. On this journey from 0 to 1, if you can’t find joy in the never-ending challenges, it’s very hard to withstand the setbacks of failure and the loneliness of success.
These seven questions aren’t just for fresh graduates to assess whether a particular startup is right for them. They’re also the key questions I ask every time I interview fresh graduates, helping us confirm whether the candidate in front of us is suited for startup life — and suited for our company. Entrepreneurship is incredibly hard. It’s a process even harder than “hard,” which is why we’re especially careful with every teammate. If you’ve honestly assessed yourself on all seven questions above and feel satisfied with your answers, congratulations — you can confidently submit your resume!
Finally, our company Addweup is currently hiring for full-time, part-time, and internship positions (link). If you’re interested in solving the problem of leftover foreign coins at airports around the world (link), and you’d like to help develop products tailored to Southeast Asian market user needs, we’d welcome you to consider us as a potential employer as well.