In an AI anxious world, a startup may be your safest career choice

(approximate reading time: < 6 minutes)

I spend a lot of time thinking about how the development of artificial intelligence will affect my career. I think part of it is due to me being a senior in college. A lot of people in my network – who are much wiser than I – tell me that this is a common university student trait. That is, to think about my career and try to map out how I’m going to avoid all the roadblocks and hit all the right highways so that I can execute the perfect multi-decade career plan. While I recognize that it’s probably not advisable to try and plan out my long-term career from the armchair, it’s hard to avoid. However, over the past few months the way that I think about the next five, ten, and twenty years has changed quite dramatically.

I used to ask questions like:

• “How can I build a career with the startup I’ll be working for?”

• “If I decide I want to move to another role within the startup, how long will that take?”

• “What if I want to be a founder or a VC? When would be the right time to make that switch?”

Now my questions are more like:

• “How will AI change the world in the next year?”

• “What about the next five?”

• “What about the next ten?” 😱

My personal career questions have drastically changed, and I feel they have for many others. With a rapidly evolving tech landscape, it’s hard to avoid questions about who the winners are going to be and who will be replaceable. There are few answers, but Paul Graham seems to at least summarize the base layer of consensus:

Noone wants to be crushed. So, how can we surf this AI wave?

My answer is threefold, and I’m going to stick with the surfing analogy:

1. 🏊‍♂️ Swim out to where you can catch the wave - to give yourself a chance at surfing, you’ve got to get out there, and you’ve got to get close

2. 👀 Identify the wave - you’ll need to see the wave coming and figure out how to catch it

3. 🌊🏄‍♀️ Ride, baby, ride - to surf the wave to shore, you need the right support system

So how can you swim out to the right spot, identify the wave in the distance, and ride it all the way back to shore? Everyone’s answer may be different, but my own is pretty simple: join a startup. Obviously this is not a perfect strategy that will make you irreplaceable. Nonetheless, I feel like it’s a step in the right direction.

Swim out to where you can catch the wave

To even have a chance at surfing a technology wave, you need to put yourself in the right position. It’s the age-old idea that you need to be on the frontier or at least dabble with what’s being built. When you position yourself correctly, it’s more likely that you’ll be able to understand and play a part in things that may be nonobvious to other market participants.

In last week’s 3 tips on career security, I discussed why working at a startup helps you avoid being blindsided by new technology by getting you to the frontier. Early-adopter co-workers and well-aligned reward systems make this possible.

Identify the wave

Once you’re in position, you can now get eyes on the incoming waves. With large language models (LLMs) to a great extent being built by big tech companies, startups can provide an interesting vantage point to filter out the noise and get compensated for it.

In my opinion, big tech companies (i.e. Microsoft/OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc) have the capital to make a ton of progress in the AI/LLM space. However, as an employee of one of these organizations, there may be less opportunities to individually capitalize on the right wave due to the constraints of large organizations.

In technology revolutions of the past, lots of the work done in the cycles tends to be noise, and it’s probable that a lot of big tech teams are going to be sifting through a lot of noise. To avoid working on something that doesn’t turn out to matter – by means of raising your hand for anything AI related at a large company – you may have better luck being at a startup where you have more control over what you work on. Of course, the startup route has its disadvantages: your company may be too focused on the noise, and you probably won’t have access to big tech’s well-funded research divisions. Still, your startup’s flexibility to pivot, the equity you receive that provides upside, and the agency you have over your startup career may provide better opportunities to capitalize on the right wave and ignore others.

Ride, baby, ride

Working at a startup can help you position for the wave, see it coming, and then execute on riding it to shore. I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the way my startup has approached the AI revolution. In my first month as an intern, our engineering and product teams sprinted on newly available tech during our quarterly hackathon. One particularly notable experiment was when the team leveraged Open AI’s GPT API to improve our customers’ product experience.

Startups also love the opportunity to work with new tech in the space. My company constantly investigates novel tools and compares them to the value we get from our existing tool stack. Startups are always the first ones on the waiting list for new products – Notion AI comes to mind as a recent example. By being in an organization that is curious and open-minded about how technology is changing, I’ve found that startups can support your career much like a surfboard supports its surfer.

Concluding Thoughts

The rapid development of AI can be scary. There is a lot of uncertainty about what this technology will be able to accomplish in the near future. If it’s anything like past technology revolutions, it will disrupt the job market. Still, it’s important to remember that this is not the end of the world. Even though AI/VC Twitter will have you believing that your job will disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, it’s important to stay grounded in reality. Just have a conversation with a random college student, and you’ll find that 40% of them still don’t even know what ChatGPT is (Morning Brew).

Jokes aside, planning ahead is likely the intelligent thing to do. I think the right way to surf this AI wave is to join a small and nimble organization. Startups will push you to the frontier, enable you to be flexible in filtering out the noise, and empower you to ride the wave.

That’s all for this post, thanks for the time!

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