Smart people join bad start-ups all the time. Competent people work for a stressed-out founder in a start-up without real growth for a few years. Eventually they get frustrated and leave, and often go on to have very successful careers in other companies. I have done this myself. How could competent people get it so wrong? It happens because many instincts we have about finding a job come from a world before start-ups. At best, these instincts do not apply to a start-up job search. At worst, they hinder it.

Why would you want to join a start-up? Ambitious people generally give similar answers: They want to work on exciting new projects. They want to manage teams and get promoted quickly. They want to get rich, have a large impact on the world and be able to progress to an even better job on the back of the current one.

In the traditional world outside fast-growing companies, your job offer has all the information you need to evaluate whether a job allows you to hit these goals: Your compensation, your job title, your manager, the team you are working on. In the traditional world, doing well at finding a job means succeeding in as many parallel hiring processes as possible, and then picking the best job available.

Our intuitions about finding a job have evolved in this world. So, it is no surprise that most general job search advice is about how to land a job offer. There is endless content on how to hone a CV or ace some interview or application process. There is also a lot of shared intuition about being polite and deferential to your future bosses, all in the aim of getting as many job offers as possible.

In the start-up world¹, your job offer has little of the information you need you need to evaluate a job. Instead, your wealth, ability to work on exciting projects and personal progress both within the company and in your career later are determined not by what is in the job offer, but by how good the company you choose is.

This is surprising, but it is true. Imagine you join the next AirBnB or Google. You will profit from ever-rising salaries as the company goes from janky start-up to multi-national behemoth. Your one-person department will become a team of hundreds of employees, some or all of whom you’ll get to manage if you choose to. There will be endless new problems to solve on all fronts, and you get to pick what problem interests you. Your equity may make you seriously rich. If you ever leave, you can spend the rest of your career giving lectures about being the person that built AirBnB’s first check-out flow or Google’s first data center. Even the impact you have by working at a start-up is mainly determined by how big the start-up gets: A start-up that doesn’t become big is forever limited in its impact on the world, no matter how positive that impact is.

This dynamic is made more extreme by the fact that the best start-ups don’t end up being a few times bigger than the worst start-ups. They end up 1,000x or 10,000x bigger. The upside of joining a start-up that ends up very large is much larger than you intuitively imagine.

So, finding a job in the start-up world is a totally different task from a normal job search: You need to screen for the right company to work for, not try to game some application system to get as many competing offers as possible.

This difference is why competent people end up in bad start-ups. They amass and evaluate job offers, not companies. In doing so, they miss the forest for the trees.

This begs the question: If finding a start-up job is about picking a company that will grow large, how does one do that? Once you are aware of the question and willing to change your approach, it’s not as hard as it sounds.

The first thing to establish is how companies get big. The answer to that is that they make a lot of revenue. What’s predictive of a company one day making a lot of revenue? They should already have some revenue, and that revenue should be growing quickly².

So our question is now: How can you identify a list of start-ups with fast-growing revenue?

To really find out, you’ll have to talk to the start-up and ask the right question. But, there are too many start-ups to talk to all of them, so you’ll need to find a filter to come up with a list of start-ups that may have fast-growing revenue.

I suggest you do two things.

First, try to shake the tree of your personal network. There are clear signs of a start-up going through high growth. Two examples are founders drowning in customer support tickets or exploding server costs. When you hear these about companies in your extended network, pay attention. Don’t be discouraged if these companies have zero external presence: Start-ups often only do PR around fundraises, and sometimes only months after a fundraise. Trust the internal sign of revenue growth, not the external validation. Any companies that fit this description should go on your list.

Secondly, you can piggy-back off of VC research. The key insight here is that the top VCs³ have evaluated nearly all start-ups that have raised a Series A or later-stage funding round. This means that if a company raises such a funding round from a lesser-known VC, almost certainly some of the more prestigious VCs will have looked in some detail first (at least more detail than you can see from the outside), and passed. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but on average, it probably is. Given you have a whole universe of start-ups to filter through you may as well focus on the companies raising from the top VCs. So, go through their portfolios, check for recent funding announcements, and add them to the list.

Now that you have a list of potential high-growth start-ups, you need to find out which companies are actually high-growth. To do that, you’ll need to speak to the companies. If you can network your way to someone working at the company, that’s great. If not, there’s some good news: Successful founders all read their emails, and their emails are almost always firstname@companydomain. This means you get a free shot at getting the attention of the company’s founder for a few seconds - make it good⁴.

Now, you’re in touch with companies that at least may be fast-growing. How do you make sure of it?

The best way is to straight-up ask in the first interview.

First, establish the key metric by which the company measures itself. For nearly all companies at this stage, it should be some measure of revenue, potentially combined with gross margin. Anything but a concise answer to your question is telling: If no such set of metrics exists, you already know everything you need to know.

Second, you have to understand how this metric has been moving recently, ideally in the last three months. It’s ok if people don’t want to share specific numbers, but you should be able to at least learn percentage growth⁵. Great start-ups grow consistently at 10-20% per month, outstanding start-ups may be growing as much as 30-40% each month.

This is a moment where our normal operating procedure for finding a job actively hurts us. We have an instinct not to ask uncomfortable questions, because we’re conditioned to want to please the interviewer, trying to accumulate as many job offers as possible. This is not the goal here! We actively want to screen out certain companies and not get an offer from them.

If this accidentally screens out some good companies, it may still be worth doing. However, I think it’s unlikely that it will. If someone gets annoyed enough at this question to count it against you, you’re almost certainly avoiding a terrible company.

Having gone through this process, you should have identified a few companies that are truly fast-growing. There is one last hurdle to jump: To harvest all the potential benefits of working for a fast-growing company, you’ll need to enjoy working there enough to stay for a few years.

The hard thing about this is that you will struggle to find out much with direct questions. Especially the type of founder that you don’t want to work for will be amazing at obfuscating the truth about what day-to-day life is really like at their company. This skill of obfuscation is exactly how they can be both bad to work with and run a company with some success at the same time.

There are two ways to find out: Spend time with the company and observe, and talk to people who have left.

The former can be done in the interview process, or by joining a company outing. You can trust your normal human intuitions here: If things are weird in a way you wouldn’t appreciate in your personal social life, trust that instinct.

The latter is a bit harder, but powerful: The sheer presence of too many former employees (use LinkedIn Search!) is a bad sign in itself. Some churn is normal, but there shouldn’t be constant turn-over, especially if the company actually is fast-growing.

Former employees will likely respond to your messages. How open and positive they are about their experience, and specifically what happened to them around the time they were leaving is indicative of what the company is like on the inside. Great founders take responsibility for employees leaving, and try to find these employees a good next opportunity.

Again, fight your instincts that suggest that this is too intrusive: Good companies won’t get mad if you do your due diligence, as long as you do it politely. Companies that have stuff to hide definitely will, and so, as an added bonus, you get to screen those out for free.

That’s it - you should have arrived at a few companies that are fast-growing and good places to work!

You may have noticed that there are two things we did not talk about, that you may have been expecting: Will they hire me, and what’s my role going to be?

We haven’t discussed the former, because once you have identified a fast-growing start-up, being hired will be easier than you think. A small company breaking at the seams is desperate for people to help. They won’t hire everyone, but it will be much easier to get a job than what you’re used to from Consulting, Banking or Big Tech.

The role also matters less in a start-up: If a company is fast-growing, there is so much new work all the time that good people will soon end up with important tasks. If they do those tasks well, they will get compensated for it. If you can jump on a rocketship, jump.

Finding a good start-up job can be transformative for your career, but it requires stepping out of established thought patterns and doing some uncomfortable things. Coincidentally, if you do end up joining a fast-growing company, it won’t be the last time that you have to do that.