10 Things You Should Ask Yourself Before Accepting A Job Offer From A Startup

Every job description I write starts as

 Startups are hard and they are not for weak hearted people.

It’s not easy to work in a startup. Everyone is not made for startups and you have to accept this fact. Next time if you accept a Job offer from a startup, just ask these 10 things to yourself and you will get the answer :

1. Is it okay if startup CEO tell you in a meeting that he won’t be able to pay your salary this month and story repeats itself for three months continuously ?
2. Is it okay if your girlfriend call you up to meet but you are busy shipping your work and story repeats itself for more than 10 times continuously ? (You will end up in a break up  )
3. Is it okay if you have to work till 2 AM in the morning but still start the day at 10 AM and story repeats itself for 15 days in a month ?
4. Is it okay if you will be asked to do the work that you used to think is the most suckiest job in the world ?
5. Is it okay if your MBA friends warn you continuously is that this startup idea can’t work as they haven’t seen any case study like that ?
6. Is it okay if your Parents call you up everyday and say : “Your brother is not just getting more salary than you but his company gave him a stay in hyatt for first one month” ?
7. Is it okay if your friends get a US vacation from their company and upload the pics on facebook ?
8. Is it okay if startup decides that current strategy is not working and your complete work is of almost no use ?
9. Is it okay if startup in not able to raise VC money that CEO promised in last meeting and it has to bootstrap further ?
10. Is it okay even after doing all this you can be fired ?

Haha, Sounds really tough. Actually not. It’s just that you should love what you are doing and everything will be okay to you. But yeah, there is no work life balance in a startup. Work is life, Life is work.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.