Why Every Young Person Should Join (Or Start) a Startup
Lessons on early careers, taking risks, and leveraging your advantages
The standard advice people give about investing is simple: when you’re young, you should buy aggressive, high-growth, risky assets. As you get older, you move into safer bets like bonds, index funds, and mutual funds. The logic is that young people can tolerate risk. Time is on your side. If you lose, you can recover. Losing later in life is more costly because you have less time to make it back.
I’ve been thinking about this exact framework in terms of careers. This essay is about why young people should work at startups, or at the very least put themselves in startup environments early on. Careers, like portfolios, should start risky and become more stable over time. When you’re young, risk is both tolerable and optimal. The upside of learning fast, owning outcomes, and building something real far outweighs the downside. Playing it safe too early can actually be the biggest risk of all, because you give up the chance to compound experience, judgment, and skill.
Young people are uniquely positioned to take these risks because they have three things that rarely exist together later in life:
More energy,
More time,
Less responsibility.
That combination creates leverage. You can afford long hours. You can afford uncertainty. You can afford to focus deeply on one thing without a hundred external obligations pulling you in different directions. This makes the risk of a startup far more survivable, and far more valuable.
Startups demand intensity. They require you to learn fast, adapt constantly, and make decisions without complete information. These demands are brutal if you’re older, risk-averse, or locked into fixed responsibilities. But when you’re young, they’re an advantage.
One of the most underrated benefits of working at a startup early is how quickly you learn. The feedback loops are compressed. If something works, you see it immediately. If something fails, there’s no hiding. This forces clarity, responsibility, and rapid improvement.
This is what makes startups such powerful learning machines. Skills are learned in real conditions, not simulated ones. There’s no syllabus. There’s no safety net. You learn because you have to in order for your company to survive. And those skills compound over time. Skill acquisition always precedes financial success. The people who earn the most later are almost always the ones who learned the fastest earlier.
In simple terms, here’s what startups teach you that large companies rarely do:
You experience accelerated feedback loops that dramatically increase learning speed.
You take ownership early because small teams mean your actions matter.
You’re forced to adapt to problems that don’t yet have names, frameworks, or solutions.
I know this firsthand from both founding Bruin AI and working at WorkWhile. Building Bruin AI from nothing felt like a compressed business degree. There was no structure unless we built it. No momentum unless we created it. Every problem was ours, and every success was earned through action. That environment taught me more than any class ever could. Building something under real conditions is the best way to learn anything.
I want to be clear that this isn’t an argument against stability, structure, or large companies, but rather, about timing. There is a right time to reduce risk. There is a right time to specialize. But that time usually comes after you’ve built judgment, confidence, and a track record of doing hard things. Startups are one of the fastest ways to build that foundation.
This also isn’t meant to exclude anyone based on age or background. Anyone can join a startup or help build something new. I’m writing this specifically as encouragement for people early in their careers to not limit themselves before they’ve explored what they’re capable of. Too many people play it safe before they’ve ever taken a real swing.
Society depends on young people being willing to experiment. Innovation comes from recombining old ideas into new forms. New ideas create new experiments. Experiments create progress across science, art, philosophy, and technology all at once. That cycle only continues if people are willing to take risks while they still can.
If careers are portfolios, then startups are the high-growth assets of early life. They’re volatile, demanding, and uncertain, but can earn you the greatest returns.
Keep it up Jake!