Beyond income there's 2 reasons to take any specific job: Invest in yourself or invest in the company. Both is best.
First let's acknowledge the market is tough right now. Most candidates are overqualified and companies will choose the best person they can get. This is not the market where your new job comes with a promotion. Raise yes, title bump no.
But that doesn't mean you should take the first job that comes your way. Unless it's your first ever job, some experience is better than no experience.
Your career needs a vision and the jobs you take should help you on your path. What kind of problems do you like to solve? For whom? To what end? For example I'll never work on ads
Know those answers :)
Invest in yourself
A little bit of slope beats a lot of y-intercept. Your growth rate matters.
Your career is an infinite game (great book). You're not looking to win the next set, you're looking to keep playing. The best way to keep playing is to keep getting better. You have to run just to stay put because everyone else is running. This is the red queen's race part of life.
So, when you take a job – how does this job prepare you for the next job? Or the next life chapter? What are the skills you're going to learn? Are they useful? Will those skills be relevant in 5 years? Does it put a brand-name on your resume? Does it give you huge outcomes you can talk about?
How will you brag about this job to your friends? This is a good way to see what excites you about the opportunity.
Avoid dead-ends and grinding the same old same old.
Invest in the company
We're all gamblers here that's what startups are about.
You join a company and hope the lottery tickets (equity) work out. Even if the company is public, you're hoping the stock will grow. That's where those crazy total comp numbers come from that you hear about.
I know lots of people who made great money this way.
It's mostly ~~luck~~ good fortune. They're all normal people who made bets that worked out. The secret sauce is to keep playing and aim for a positive win-rate.
The salary keeps you playing, the discretion in what you join creates a positive win-rate.
Look for companies with a business model or fast user growth. Both is best. The faster you grow, the more likely you'll reach escape velocity. A common heuristic is that a new product has to reach $1,000,000 revenue in its first year.
Those are companies you join for the growth. Coincidentally they also create the best personal growth.
What about AI startups?
Joining an AI startup in 2025 is a lot like joining a crypto startup in 2019 or a mobile app startup in 2014.
Yes there's lots of money sloshing around and they're all hiring. The large majority will fail. Some may succeed.
But AI is not the secret sauce. Most startups rent the AI from one of the big players – OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. Those will make billions. If you don't rent AI, you rent the compute. Cloud providers will win here.
So what then does the startup add? Good old fashioned product development.
The secret sauce is in
- shuttling data around
- evaluating user engagement
- figuring out user needs
- iterating on your solution
- having a unique insight into a market segment
- special access to a market
- hella good distribution
- access to capital
Unless you're a bleeding edge lab, the AI part of your AI startup is like 10% of the ingredients.
And guess what? Everyone's pouring billions and their best engineers into that other 90%. The stuff that looked like a cool startup 3 years ago is just part of the regular ChatGPT interface today. The AI is commoditized and designed to erode your moat.
So, should you join? Sure, it's gonna be a great ride. But don't expect lasting (months) success unless there's something more special than AI you can offer.
If you do want AI, your best bet is a new AI product attached to a larger company with existing distribution, unique data, and access to capital.
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: if you make another fckin summarize-your-documents thing, I will haunt you. We get it, LLMs can rephrase text.
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