You don't need to go to university to work at a startup
For lots of entry level jobs, it's not obvious to candidates or employers what the actual requirements are. Grow your talent pool with this one weird trick.
One of the cool things about working in startups is that universities haven’t worked out how to teach most of the stuff we do.1 For many roles at startups - particularly entry level ones - a relevant degree doesn’t exist!
So why do companies ask for degrees? One thing universities do well is create a standardised requirement for a role. If someone has a degree in accounting, they’re probably qualified to be an entry level accountant. For companies this takes a lot of the risk out of hiring young and inexperienced people. And for students it makes it obvious what jobs to apply for once they have their degree. Bigger or more corporate companies love to decrease risk, so this is a great structure for them. But it’s not a great long term strategy if you ask me - if every job requires a degree, then truly challenging jobs that require significant education are devalued by the rest.
In a startup there’s lots of entry level roles that don’t need a degree, but also this means it’s not clear what the requirements for the role actually are. This creates a real disadvantage for people who didn’t go to university and haven’t learned to speak the language needed to get a job. It’s a bit like trying to apply for a job without knowing how to use email.
For startups that want to hire from a bigger talent pool, these are the requirements you should use for entry level roles. Stop following the credentialist herd for jobs that just don’t need a degree.
For people who want to work at a startup, this post will give you an idea of what jobs you could apply for to get started. Many people think you can’t start working at a software company with a high school education, but that’s just not true! A cool thing about startups is that the role you start in isn’t for life, so don’t worry if it’s not the perfect role for you forever.
Sales
Common entry level roles include:
Account Executives (AE): These are the people who “close” deals, which means giving demos of the product, answering questions from customers, helping them understand how the product will solve a problem for them, and then getting a commitment to buy.
Sales Development Representatives (SDR): SDRs book meetings for AEs (this helps AEs stay more focused) and generally support the sales process.
To succeed in any sales role you need to be disciplined, good at managing your time, and great at having genuine conversations with lots of people.2 Being competitive and savvy with technology doesn’t hurt either. There’s no degree for any of this, and a high school education is plenty if you have the right attitude.
In very small companies these titles might not even exist. Our first salespeople were just “Sales”, but they were basically SDRs. The title matters less than the tasks and opportunities to progress if you do them well.
Support / Customer Success
Support is a common entry level role that involves answering customer questions and helping them use the product more successfully. It’ll be via email, chat, phone, or a combination of the three. So you should be comfortable with looking things up quickly, fine with talking on the phone while typing, and be good at understanding and explaining concepts that other people find complicated.
These aren’t things you’ll somehow be better at after spending 4 years at university. But a good attitude and willingness to work hard and learn quickly is critical.
Support roles sometimes graduate to Customer Success or Account Manager roles, which tend to do less inbound work (responding to support email) and more outbound work. This means proactively contacting customers about ways to make their experience with the product better, like alerting them about new features or helping them with projects that relate to your product.
To do this well you need very good product knowledge and troubleshooting skills, and the simplest way to develop those is by starting in support. Again, technical skills are helpful but I’ve seen so many people learn them by doing the work that I don’t worry too much about what you know beforehand, as long as you seem capable of learning quickly.
Development / Engineering
I’ve written a lot about this, but the gist is:
It’s rare to see people with only a high school education (even if they’re “self taught”) get entry level roles here, as the work is more specialised.
There’s lots of good bootcamps out there, that condense a university degree into 6-12 months. In some countries like Australia they get the same funding as degrees (so they’re “free”).
Support Engineering is a great foot-in-the-door role. The technical ability required is usually lower (still at least a bootcamp, though), and you get to learn a wider variety of skills at a more relaxed pace.
Most B2B startups3 would benefit from hiring more support engineers.
Fast learners
A common thread in all these roles is showing that you can learn things quickly. Many university degrees will beat this out of you by spreading something you could learn in a week over 13 weeks or more. If you never get forced to slow down like that, then you actually have an advantage.
I’m a pretty big believer that there’s no speed limit to how fast you can learn stuff. If I get the impression you are too that’s going to make a bigger impact than anything else you say or do during a job interview.
If in doubt, ask
There’s lots of other things that software companies do, but the ones above are the core ones. Other areas are more specialised and tend to have smaller teams, which creates less room for non-professionals.
Often hiring managers will put a university degree requirement in a job description because they copy pasted it from the internet. If you can demonstrate your skills some other way, that requirement might get ignored. If you see a job you want to do and think you can do, it costs you nothing to ask.
If someone sends me an email or LinkedIn message asking for a job, and demonstrates that they can probably do the job, I am much less likely to ever check where or what they studied. This happens super rarely, but it’s the #1 bit of advice I give jobseekers - just reach out to people you want to work for, and figure it out from there!
On the university experience
The most valuable things I got out of university were:
Meeting lifelong friends, future business partners, and my future wife, all at the bar.
Getting enough of an introduction to programming that I was hooked, and motivated to teach myself the rest.
Both of these were really worthwhile for me, but lots of people in my cohort got neither of these out of uni. None of this was on the curriculum; I was in the right place (the bar) at the right time (often) and that led to a lot of good things, and I got lucky in that I loved programming after the first class. So it’s hard for me to earnestly advise against university, but also hard to be an advocate for it.
What I can advocate for is employers not treating university as a non-negotiable requirement for entering adult life.4
That’s why I wrote this post!
Here I go, bashing universities again. Stick with me.
Or able to turn it on for 8 hours a day. Many successful salespeople are introverts on the weekend.
B2B means companies that make software and then sell it to other businesses. An example is Shopify or Xero. Contrast this with B2C, which means software sold to consumers, like Spotify or Netflix.
Much much more on this topic if you read Paper Belt on Fire by Michael Gibson, a fantastic book.