Wouldnt it be nice to join Google in 00, eBay in 98, Yahoo in 95, Dell in 92, or even Myspace in 2003? Not having to deal with the startup risk while gaining all the upside is one of the best bets you can make in your career - monetarily but even more so, for career progression (everyone loves a winner). Joining a startup with only 10 people is way too risky if you dont have over 5% of the equity. Joining big company after the hypergrowth means that you are stuck in a Corolla while everyone else at work has a M5 at home (and a Prius at work). My advise is to be like a VC and do due diligence on the new prospect like they do. Investing in your career is actually a bigger bet than the $4-5M in investment the average VC’s make in any round. This is not as hard as seed stage investing cause you dont want to be betting on a idea. This is much more similar to late stage investing where the financials/metrics can tell 70% of the story.

Not trying to say its a fool proof (or even a good way . . . time will tell) methodology or that its the only way. . . this is the process I came up with and went through as I hunted for my next adventure.

The key is to understand if COMPOUNDED growth can take place in the company and how close the company/startup is to reaching that stage. Geoffery Moore calls it the tornado, bankers call it hockey stick, VC’s call it traction, I just call it 100%+ growth year over year in REVENUE with a customer base over 500K. (law of small numbers can fool people into thinking the growth is large when its not sustainable).

1) First, I try to understand the buinses model well enough that I can identify the main levers that moves the business. The key is to have a water fall of metrics that starts at acquisition (or awareness) and all the way to revenue (profit is even better but too hard to measure in a startup cause you are sacrifising profitablility for growth)

Example here might be eBay in 1999

- new registration per month
- active customers per new registration
- # purchases per month per active customer
- average purchases per active customer

2) The basic requirement is that atleast one or two of these metrics has to ALREADY be growing at 15% - 30% year over year

3) Understand what needs to happen to make the other metrics grow 15% - 20% as well. Has anyone been trying to move these metrics? what tactics/programs/strategies has been tried? The answer I want to hear is actually that no one has been looking at it too carefully because the other metrics are already driving enough growth for the company. (And I think these needles can be moved)

4) #2 gives me proof of success, #3 shows me potential for even faster growth.

5) If EACH of these metrics can grow independently @ 20% a Year over Year, you have a blockbuster on your hand . . .

No company can grow at 80-100% year over year without multiple underlying factors growing at a reasonable 20% a year. It is often not sustainable if only one metric is growing at an incredible rate while the rest is stagnating. (quick example, retail companies relying soley on store expansion to drive growth . . . ie GAP in 2000)

So there you go, happy hunting . . .