I have worked at several Fortune 1000 companies and several startups.
One of the cons I see in even very small startups is trying to be like Fortune 1000 companies. There is an understandable reason for red tape when working at a F1000 company. But why very small startups overly burden themselves with red tape, convoluted procedure etc. is a mystery to me. Anything getting in the way of shipping on the way to product/market fit should be cast overboard.
Another con - the advice here and in related milieu (Eric Ries etc.) is to make a minimally viable product, ship as quickly as possible (within months), then iterate on that MVP. This is very sensible for most startups. But even in very small startups - the founder gets hung up on some feature details, or wants too many features. They want too high of a quality in their first release. Ironically this can become self-sustaining - the longer you wait to ship, the higher the quality bar becomes and thus the more time you need before shipping. You get into this mindset and soon you're starting development of Duke Nukem Forever in 1997 and wind up shipping it 14 years later to a giant thud.
Then there are the various financial cons which people here already talk about. Even with a good team and all of that, odds are 100 to 1 against you making anything more than you would working for Alphabet/Amazon/Apple/Google.
The pros are you can get a larger chunk of equity than at other places (though as others will say, there are many caveats to that). You can have an outsized impact on the company. It is more informal and less rigid. And if you get into a company with good people on an upward trajectory, it can be very, very good.
> They want too high of a quality in their first release.
I've actually have seen the opposite. Usually it's a very crappy early product and then when the company grows they get bogged down. (They'll never address testing, tech debt, etc)
One of the cons I see in even very small startups is trying to be like Fortune 1000 companies. There is an understandable reason for red tape when working at a F1000 company. But why very small startups overly burden themselves with red tape, convoluted procedure etc. is a mystery to me. Anything getting in the way of shipping on the way to product/market fit should be cast overboard.
Another con - the advice here and in related milieu (Eric Ries etc.) is to make a minimally viable product, ship as quickly as possible (within months), then iterate on that MVP. This is very sensible for most startups. But even in very small startups - the founder gets hung up on some feature details, or wants too many features. They want too high of a quality in their first release. Ironically this can become self-sustaining - the longer you wait to ship, the higher the quality bar becomes and thus the more time you need before shipping. You get into this mindset and soon you're starting development of Duke Nukem Forever in 1997 and wind up shipping it 14 years later to a giant thud.
Then there are the various financial cons which people here already talk about. Even with a good team and all of that, odds are 100 to 1 against you making anything more than you would working for Alphabet/Amazon/Apple/Google.
The pros are you can get a larger chunk of equity than at other places (though as others will say, there are many caveats to that). You can have an outsized impact on the company. It is more informal and less rigid. And if you get into a company with good people on an upward trajectory, it can be very, very good.