Hi, I'm just under 40 with 12 years of experience. I started my career in small dev teams in non-tech companies. For the past 6 years I've been working in my own start up. It was bootstrap with a lawyer and we grew it to 30 people with 1.8 M annual revenue. In the process we had to raise money from VC at the valuation of 17.5 M unfortunately things went south and CEO forced me out shortly after. I architect and built the application that manages billion dollars of real estate transactions and a long the way I had to manage everyone from developers to customer success team. My last year was exclusively managing development and product team. Now I'm looking to go to bigger tier 1, 2 companies. I'm Canadian and limited to moving to Seattle in US for personal reason. 1. How would bigger company like FANG, Microsoft and tier 1 look at my experience. Would they see founder/CTO role as a good thing or would it somehow goes against me? Should I down play my role to VP of engineering or something else? 2 What type of management role would I be able to get in those tier 1 company considering I have not worked in these big companies not even as a developer? 3. What about if I go for still big but not these tier 1 companies? Would that be a better career move / compensation option? Thanks for your help
1. Titles really don't matter. The work you did, and interviewing skills matter 2. You're be targetrd for an M1/L6 manager position at FB/Google manage 5-15 people. Will likely still be a huge comp jump from your startup position. 3. If you can get in, tier 1 companies are better for your long term career. There's no loophole - directors at tier 2 companies will get hired as L6 managers at Google
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I can't answer all of your questions but the first thing you need to realize is just how different these types of companies are. Big corporations require political gameplay first and foremost above skill. You need to like feeding off of the interpersonal games to get what you want in the long run else you'll be miserable. Positions are so siloed vs a "jack of all trades" startup position with autonomy that it may come as a major shock. You are there to make the person above you look good, period, while also fending off others frothing at the mouth. If you aren't already buddy buddy with someone there then you REALLY need to be prepared for the mental and political sparring. I stress this because 12 years of avoiding this all vs being a person who values purpose and vision above metrics and politics but being in a corporation is very, very different. Not everyone is capable of owning, executing and deeply caring for a vision and I'd value that more than resting and vesting in terms of happiness.