Consulting vs Startup?

Jan 18, 2018 2 Comments

Heya Blind!!

I’m looking at two offers in front of me. One for building a tooling execution team in a top 4 consulting firm, and the second, a program owner/director at a fairly well established cloud startup (year 7, latest figures show it now worth 800m).

I’ve gotten mixed advice. My IT friends point towards the consulting gig- high pay, highly prestigious company, run my own team. My field friends tell me to go startup, their experiences with consulting are that it turns into a sweatshop with too much travel.

Startup wants me to work remote (they are across the country) and travel onsite sometimes, and have the potential to rep the product with the cloud platform companies, something I can easily do. Consulting would want me to build similar tooling, but start from scratch/build a team. Risks are, once the tooling is halfway decent, they throw me into standard consulting work and engagements, something I’m only hoping to do maybe 20-30% of the time due to travel.

Thoughts? Both offers are similar in pay.

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  • OP
    Extremely passionate about this particular cloud concept. I am leading the charge at MS, but it’s rife with poisonous politics and slowdowns, and the external world is hungry for it. Both companies I would be working on this specific tech. (can’t say what it is because my fanaticism about this topic would identify me easily :( ) The consulting firm has a pair of partner level people that are pursuing me to run this team because of extremely strong references given to them from some partner level MS folks- they reaaalllly want me. Which feels good, but makes it sooo hard to choose.
    Jan 18, 2018 0
  • Do you have passion for the start up’s products?

    If so, I say start up, because you can always go to consulting in the future.

    Politics will be high in consulting also most likely. Recruiting your own team will take a lot of time and then you have make your team shine in the eyes of others and invest heavily in your people. Might be hard to hit metrics without even doing customer work.
    Jan 18, 2018 0