Career trajectories are non-linear.

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

So this question is: What is the best advice you've ever received?

Career trajectories are not linear. Especially if you start a company, you might actually bypass a bunch of things, but it might not feel that in the moment. A lot of people that start startups feel like they're getting behind in their career trajectory because other people are getting well-paid jobs, advancing, getting fancy titles, and you are not, because you're solving something that is tremendously hard.

The truth is, um, you are doing a lot of things, which means you're learning a lot of things at the same time. Many of these things are tremendously valuable in other companies.

So, I worked in a bunch of startups, and when I joined EDBB in 2012, I was one of the first five or six product managers. It turned out that most of us actually are former founders, because we really valued that. And that was unknown to me, sort of like when I became a founder, that being a founder is actually a really valuable thing when you join another company.

So I think my best advice here is: career trajectories are not linear.

The Japanese Have it Figured Out

Money personalities | Financial goals | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy

View All

Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing)

For hundreds of years, analog computers were the most powerful computers on Earth, predicting eclipses, tides, and guiding anti-aircraft guns. Then, with the advent of solid-state transistors, digital computers took off. Now, virtually every computer we u…

Don’t Buy The Dip | The Stock Market Is Broken

What’s up guys, it’s Graham here. So today, let’s try to answer one of the most puzzling questions of the market that some people spend their entire lives trying to decipher, and that would be: why did the market just go up? Is this the feared dead cat bo…

Inflection points (graphical) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

We’re told let G be a differentiable function defined over the closed interval from 4 to 4. The graph of G is given right over here, given below. How many inflection points does the graph of G have? So let’s just remind ourselves what are inflection poin…

Athlane (S19) - YC Tech Talks, Gaming 2020 (November 9, 2020)

Uh yeah, so like I said, I’m the co-founder of Athlane. And so if you’re at this talk, you’ve probably watched a live stream before. Oftentimes, what’s not captured in that stream is what these creators endure to deliver that viewership experience. Wheth…

Tracking users on the Internet | Internet safety | Khan Academy

So there’s a bunch of reasons why a website might want to track you, and depending on your opinion, you might think some of these are reasonable and you might think some of them are unreasonable. Just to understand, imagine if you were to go to, say, Khan…

Return on capital and economic growth

One of the core ideas of “Capital in the 21st Century” is comparing the after-tax return on capital, let me write that a little bit neater: return on capital, to economic growth. The contention is that if the return on capital ® is greater than economic g…

Career trajectories are non-linear.

More Articles