1. You will get to innovate. Things move fast in startup land. A young company can change its entire focus overnight (which is elegantly referred to as a “pivot”). Most of the time, though, changes are small but pronounced, tweaks in branding and efficiency that when added up make the difference between a long run success and short-term black hole for friend and family money. Nowhere else in big-company grown-up world will you be able to wake up with a brilliant idea and make it happen before the day’s second Starbucks run. And if you spot a wrench in whatever grand scheme the company is trying to accomplish, you’ll actually be able to do something about it, so nothing feels like wasted time (except all the Starbucks runs). 2. But you will also be required to innovate. Wake-up epiphanies are excellent, but they come along pretty rarely. Most of the time, ideas don’t come so easy, but they’re still vital to a startup’s success. If you’re hired by a startup — and especially if you start the darn thing yourself — you’ll be expected to make things work better. When the ideas come hard, you’ll start looking for inspiration anywhere and everywhere: competitors, Thursday night comedies, the murderous blue eyes of a neighborhood cat. Eventually, you’ll form all kinds of systems to over-clock your cortex into creative nirvana. But expect some literal headache along the way. 3. You’ll learn a lot about a particular field. Most if not all startups are out to “disrupt a space,” meaning they want to provide a product or service that changes the way people interact with something in their everyday lives. The first step when joining a startup is to familiarize yourself with their space and all its beautiful little nooks and crannies. There’s no certificate to mark this amazing depth of knowledge, but at least you’ll be able to figure out when people are making things up about your newfound area of expertise. 4. But there’s no structure. You’ll walk into work without a middle manager peering down your neck and refilling your “to-do” list like a Chili’s Bottomless Margarita. Sounds awesome — and it is, at least for the first week. But soon you’ll discover you have to create your work. You’re not a cog anymore; you’re a recently employed machine that has to see tasks through from inception to implementation (and then follow up with your pet projects every hour until the end of time). And you’ll love the schedule flexibility, except when you put everything off until Thursday night and become your region’s largest buyer of Red Bull just to catch up. 5. Coworkers become your new best buds. People who work for startups are young, energetic minds with tolerances for caffeine and alcohol that would make Hunter S. Thompson nod in guarded approval. They’re “your kind of people,” and post-work happy hours will become an integral part of your social life before that first week is up. 6. And they’ll also become your weird new family . Bankers ain’t got nothing on startup hours. You’ll see enough of these people to qualify the office for a group civil union. 7. Get used to buzzwords. They are, in only the slightest particular order: scrappy, disruptive, crowdsourced, influential, engaged, viral, and monetized. Think of them as the seven dwarves of new commerce. 8. No one knows when it stops being a startup. Probably the most annoying part of the whole deal. Is it based on age? Success? Number of employees? First user privacy violation? Actually, it’s probably the last one. 9. Don’t do it for the money. There are many awesome things about working for a small, growing company. You’ll make connections, you’ll meet cool people who ask difficult questions, and you’ll have to solve puzzles you’d never face at a bigger operation. Work hard, and you’ll get to make a big impact on something that could potentially change the world (or more likely, the world for people who really need or want whatever you’re building). But the chances of cashing in big are very, very small, even if you’re one of the first people in the door; a later addition with rarer skills can command a higher salary and more stock, if the latter is even on the table. And you’ll never get paid what you’re really worth. So why should you work for a startup? Do it because you are passionate about what the company believes in and genuinely think you can make it work better. Do it for the unparalleled experience you’ll gain forcing yourself to learn everything there is to know about an industry you find fascinating. Do it for the new friends and borderline inappropriate office jokes that just won’t fly on Wall Street. And don’t forget that hidden among the million thoughts you’ll have every day when working at a company someone else founded, you might just find the beginning of your own great idea.