Episode 21: Why You Should Consider Working For A Growing Tech Company

I’m a HUGE proponent of working for an early stage startup, having already done it three times in my career.

I even did a series a couple years ago to showcase the benefits of being an early stage startup employee, which you can watch here.

However, early stage isn’t the only stage.

It would be unfair of me to or anyone else to lead you astray based on what has worked for us.

You’ve got to find a stage that fits your needs.

To help you out, in today’s episode, I’ve invited a guest who has oodles of experience working at growth stage technology companies, Pedram Keyani.

Pedram is currently the Director of Global Growth Engineering at Uber. He’s grown the engineering team from around 20 to 250 engineers in the past couple of years. Prior to Uber, Pedram was the director at Facebook and began working there when it was a 200 person company, and was there during the IPO. Pedram began his career working at Google as a software engineer right around the time it was IPO’ing.

This was a really fun episode to do with Pedram because of his fun, goofy, and creative energy, but it’s also super valuable. No matter what stage company you decide to work at, in the episode you’ll learn the following from Pedram:

• What to do if you can’t convince other people to pursue your project idea
• How he dealt with the challenge of having to build a lot of infrastructure even though he didn’t know how to
• Why growth is a delicate balance of developing your employees and building product
• Why his preferred coaching style is the “dumb manager”
• How to handle the communication overhead as your team and company grow
• Why his goal is to hire as slowly as possible
• Why he prefer to cultivate talent that’s been around longer, rather than always hiring experienced people from the outside
• How he manages his time between work, staying healthy and his growing family and encourages his employee to as well