Startups and early-stage
Career advisory for startups and early-stage
The short answer
Yes. Early-stage roles trade structure for scope, which makes titles unreliable and equity hard to evaluate. Engagements focus on assessing the opportunity honestly, defining a role that does not sprawl and modelling compensation you can actually compare.
Operators, founding-team hires and generalists at pre-seed through Series C companies.
Roles this work usually covers
- Chief of staff and business operations
- Founding account executive and go-to-market generalist
- Early product, design and engineering hires
- People and talent operations
- Finance and strategy analyst
Situations that bring people in
- An offer with a large equity component and little context
- A title that overstates or understates the real scope
- Runway risk and the timing of a move
- A return to a larger company after early-stage work
What changes by the end
- An equity model with dilution and outcome scenarios you can read
- A written scope agreement before you start, not after
- A diligence checklist for the company, not just the role
- A first-90-days plan for an organization without onboarding
Engagements built for this
Questions people ask
- How should I value an equity offer?
- As a range of scenarios, not a single number. Offer work models percentage ownership, dilution, strike price and realistic exit outcomes so the comparison against cash is explicit. This is analysis for your decision, not financial advice.
- Is early-stage experience a risk for my next move?
- Only when it is described as chaos. Described as ownership under ambiguity, it is one of the strongest positions available in the first decade of a career.