So you have been thinking about your next career move and the thought of building, selling (or supporting/implementing) exciting stuff like AI or cybersecurity has crossed your mind. You are not sure if you want to risk a startup, or stay within the comfort zone of a big company with lots of resources…
Or maybe this is your first job out of college and you are wondering if you need big company experience before you try your hand at a startup?
Here are some characteristics of a high-growth startup that might help you decide!
#1. Rapid growth, more responsibilities for you…
Most of us want to grow in our careers. You can of course grow at a (large) established company—do your work well, keep the boss happy, and one day, when an opportunity opens up you may get more responsibility and a promotion. And, of course, you will be competing with many of your colleagues who want the same thing…
At a startup like Balbix, this works quite differently because the business is quite literally exploding. Our revenues are growing at 400%+ year/year. We are closing multi-million-dollar deals with global customers at a rapid clip, with increasing responsibility on the company towards keeping customers satisfied. There are new roles that need to be filled literally every week. This means more responsibilities for you, accelerated learning, and opportunities for fantastic personal financial outcomes.
Corollary: a startup that is not a growing business may not afford you growth opportunities.
#2. Efficiency is an intoxicant
Startups tend to be zero BS environments with efficient communication between people. Because of the smaller organization size, there is much lower overhead of decision-making and a faster paced environment. You spend less time deciding what to do and more time doing stuff.
At Balbix, you will find an environment where we measure quite literally everything that relates to company velocity, including the time that people have to spend in unnecessary meetings, or how long it takes for the company to perform activity X and at what cost, and the outcome produced. Every so often, we stare at this information and look for insights on how to make Balbix more efficient and effective.
As an employee, you will experience this piece of our culture as a strong tailwind that helps you do a lot every day and get a mental high from a job done well.
#3. Learn to innovate or risk irrelevance…
As the world changes rapidly, you probably want to stay professionally relevant. It is important to pick up new skills as the old ones are no longer needed (or needed less) by the economy.
At Balbix, you will live on the leading and bleeding edge. Our tech stack has novel AI/ML algorithms for analyzing and improving cybersecurity posture, edge computing, GraphQL, D3.js, Kubernetes, Omaha, novel AWS services, and a lot more. You will be working on a multi-tier distributed system including a sensor grid capable of analyzing 1012 time-varying signals per-second per-customer, a global-scale data layer, a googlesque Brain, a visually stimulating data-driven UI (check out www.balbix.com) that delivers an unparalleled user-experience, APIs, connectors, and more. You will SCRUM with OKRs and Playbooks to guide you.
Balbix does not just innovate in engineering: we are constantly looking for better ways to approach the market and acquire customers more quickly. We use challenger sales and marketing methods, continuously researching our customers’ needs to find new commercial insights to deliver to prospects, and new methods to deliver these insights. Our field team is laser focused on supporting the Balbix mobilizer as they make the case for AI-powered cybersecurity posture transformation to their colleagues. If you are looking to learn B2B sales and marketing skills beyond solutions selling, Balbix might be the perfect place for that.
#4. Deliver customer outcomes
The single most important thing at Balbix is delivering enduring customer satisfaction and success. This drives and guides everything that we do.
What this means is that everyone’s job at Balbix is to deliver meaningful and fantastic customer outcomes. When we build a widget, or create an ML algorithm, or extend the capability of a sensor, or everything in between, we strive hard to reason about what this means to the customer. When faced with a difficult technical challenge, we power through with grit knowing the prize in the end for our customer.
When we sell, we keep ultimate customer success at the forefront of the discussion. The last thing we want to do is to sell something to a customer which they do not need. At the same time, we strive every day to challenge our customers assumptions around the huge risk of maintaining status quo in their cybersecurity practice. We use novel techniques to communicate and facilitate change in our customer organizations.
Why is this important?
Your value to your employer and your employer’s value to the economy is directly related to the enduring customer value you help create. Your salary, bonus and the value of your stock options is directly related to this. The single most important thing you can do for your career is become very good at delivering valuable customer outcomes!.
#5. Culture
Those of us who have experience working in organizations with a great culture know what it means to say: culture is everything!
A great company culture can convert a loose group of people into a team and propel an organization forward like nothing else.
At Balbix we strive to build and nurture a culture with key values that are very important to us: ownership, customer focus, grit, innovation, honesty and velocity. Our hiring process looks for candidates who share these values. We reward and promote people who show these values.
And now for some reasons why working at Balbix might not be a good idea for you….
#1. You are not really prepared to work very hard …
Balbix is not a “9-5 with two coffee breaks in between” job—we are a startup on an extraordinary mission. The people around you will put their heart and soul into Balbix every day. There will be a mismatch between you and your colleagues if you are coming here for just a job. The free food, coffee, snacks and flexibility provided by Balbix is to enable you to be the most effective in your work, not to give you a vacation experience. You should assume that there will be numerous times each month when you will need to draw upon all your reserves of grit, to power through the large amount of work that needs to be done and cross the finish line, taking Balbix and your career to the next level.
#2. You are not prepared to own customer outcomes…
Our customers don’t really care how hard we work. They just care about the outcomes we produce for them. At Balbix this is the center of our culture— each team owns a chunk of the customer journey and outcomes. Across teams and within teams, there is no concept of “that’s not my job” or doing some project or task without relating it to customer outcomes and how the customer will feel after you finish your work. We don’t build technology for its own sake or sell to customers who we have no hope of making successful.
#3. You are not very good at teamwork and velocity…
If you are a lone wolf and don’t like to work in a team, you will not be successful here. Likewise, if you create unnecessary overhead on your colleagues because of a capabilities or attitude mismatch, you won’t be happy. It’s a little bit like your favorite special forces unit—everyone is very capable and they work as a team watching each other’s back and relying on each other. And everyone takes a lot of pride in being world-class.
If you are still here, and you want to explore working at Balbix, give us a shout…