Could you cut it at a start-up?

Not everyone is suited for the pace and unpredictability of start-up life. Two experts ­describe what it takes to thrive in start-up land.

Anna (Mongayt) Counselman (BSBA’03): “You need a tremendous amount of self-confidence. At a big company, there are lots of people who do your job at a more senior level, so you can see how they’ve tackled a project and can ask them questions. In a start-up, there are times when you need to be willing to bet on yourself—to say, ‘I don’t know how to do this, and there’s nobody here who can tell me how to do this, so I’m going to go figure it out.’”

Cindy Chin Smith (BSBA’05): “The main thing is having multiple and various interests. You have to be interested in learning everything from operations, to finance, to product, to testing, to vision and strategy. I tend to get bored with things I do over and over, so I like to learn different fields and push the limits of what I know.”

Counselman and Smith both left Google to join a Silicon Valley start-up, Upstart. Find out how they used lessons from the search giant in Think Like a Googler.