Praveen S Shastri

"Startup" implies " Starting with rise" and I think that's how you should start your career.

There are N number of reasons for why we should work with small startups. I am sharing few of them.

"Discover Your Love" -

Somebody had said 'In life we never know what we are missing until it arrives' Which holds true to our career as well .We don't know what we love until we work on that. In big organizations you will have to work on one thing. You cant work as tester if you are hired as developer even if you don't have any work on development and vice-versa. And in startups you will get the opportunity to work on many things from development to testing and marketing to sales. In the process you will have many roles to play and you may discover a role of your interest .

"Learning how to Learn" -

The art of learning is one of biggest advantage of working with startups. In your career you will have to work with many different and new technologies. In big organizations there are separate departments to train you. You will be trained and guided by the experts. Whereas in startups You don't have such facilities. You will have to learn on your own and may be even have to teach your team. That's how you will learn the "Art Of Learning". And take my word " In IT industry if you know how to learn then your boss will simply love you"

"Role of Responsibility" -

Common human tendency is to always runaway from responsibilities. Of course there are "FEW" exceptions and that's why there are "FEW" at top. Remember you'll never grow until you take more responsibility. In big organizations responsibility will be an option. It's up to you to take more responsibility and nobody will force or assign you the things other than what you are suppose to do. Where as in startups it will be an compulsion. You will be working with small team and team members have to take more responsibilities to make things happen.

So guys in IT it's always "SMALL is better than BIG"
Praveen

Labels: Startup organizations

It was the first time as a organization we decided to participate in an event organized by Silicon India.We decided to prepare few things for the event. One team was completely behind testing the product to ensure the quality. Apart from from our regular activities we had to do many things for the first time.It was interesting and I was excited. We didn't have any idea, the kind of crowd would turn up, nevertheless we decided to give some goodies for guys who show some interest in our product. We had two days to finalize the things. We did complete brainstorm to decide what the gift would be, We could not finalize.

We decided to take help of creative vendor, with his help we decided to go for a neck pen,a product voucher and a video CD containing demo videos of our product wrapped inside a bag containing our product sticker.

We had two nights and a day before the event and the major part was to prepare the demo video. None of our team member had any prior experience in making videos(Though sometimes I used to dream about film editing). We downloaded some desktop recorders and played with them. But none of them were helpful. We were running short of time. We finalized some four main features to be demonstrated in the video. We decided to use Windows Movie Maker(WMM). We took screen shots of one complete feature than made a Power Point Presentation(PPT) with some call-outs to explain the feature. Then again we took screen shots of the PPT. Used those screen shots in movie maker and added some transition effects with background music(Thanks to Mr.Kevin for his royalty free music).

At last we were ready with video demonstrating ONE feature of our product.

Still there was a long way to go.We had three more feature to be recorded. We had to finish those videos in one night because still had to burn those videos on CDs. We had to do night out to complete the things. We started at around 10:30pm, repeated the entire process. It took till 5:30 in the morning for just two videos. We were exhausted. Took rest for few hours and again got back to work to complete the remaining video.

We were done on time. Thanks to our team for their efforts!!

We went to the event next morning with our fingers crossed and hoped for the best. It was our first experience. People liked our product. It was great day and we enjoyed it a lot !!

"Efforts are always rewarded"