Seven months ago, I left my Product Management job at Google to work on starting a company. My co-founder and I have been working on [Kapwing](https://www.kapwing.com), an online video editor, for the last four months. In this post, I’ll compare life before and after so other big-company product managers know what they’re getting themselves into if they’re thinking about jumping ship.

#### Commute

*   Google: Google shuttle, 1 hour++.
*   Startup: The time it takes you to move from your bed to your desk. And occasionally Muni.

#### Career progression

*   Google: You spend a lot of time going through the motions of performance review and pleasing your manager, both of which are annoying.
*   Startup: You spend equally as much time on growth hacks and pleasing upvoters on product hunt, which is more fun but equally as obnoxious and random as Perf.

#### Lunch

*   Google: Everyday for free.
*   Startup: You still eat at Google a few times a month because the VC you’re squatting in is so close to the SF office and Googler blood runs deep.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*pseNPz-dyP6EQYTHsCADCw.jpeg)

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*j1zcAkpwSminQjUoJCuvuQ.jpeg)

Taco Tuesday at the Google SF office

#### Conversations with co-workers

*   Google: “Oh, how was your weekend?”
*   Startup: I already know everything about your weekend because we chatted every hour on Hangouts.

#### Monetization

*   Google: If your product makes money, it’s probably not fun to work in your org.
*   Startup: If your product makes money, everyone wants to work with you.

#### How search works

*   Google: Even though you work on Search, you barely know about how SEO ranking works, because you’re not a ranking engineer, and does anyone really understand ranking anyway?
*   Startup: SEO IS LYFE

#### Speed

*   Google: Text changes go through eng review, product review, design review, and Ariane approvals.
*   Startup: In the time it took to write this sentence, the text has already been changed in production.

#### Stock

*   Google: Multiply by 1000 and liquify whenever you want
*   Startup: Monopoly money that might be worth millions of dollars in a decade.

#### Press

*   Google: I get multiple unsolicited emails from journalists every week and redirect them to the Comms team because that’s someone else’s job. Eye roll.
*   Startup: I send hundreds of unsolicited emails every week begging journalists to care about my product.

#### Travel

*   Google: Business trips to Zurich, Delhi, Tokyo, and Tel Aviv on the corporate card because you have partner engineering teams in remote offices.
*   Startup: It’s exciting to walk to the food truck park for lunch.

#### 1 million users

*   Google: Probably noise. Did you flip the launch bit yet?
*   Startup: An unbridled future fantasy.

#### Engineering

*   Google: Why are the engineers taking so long? They’re so sllloooww.
*   Startup: Why am I taking so long? I’m so sllloooww.

#### Mission statement

*   Google: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
*   Startup: WIP, but I think it’s written on the first slide of the pitch deck.

#### Perks

*   Google: Makes six figures but still annoyed when they don’t give you a holiday gift.
*   Startup: You make less in a week than you used to make in a single peer bonus.

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*QpAnxiDTW9KLSy8i-VZwvQ.jpeg)

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*7cyMj1feMVh5gd5SkLo-XA.jpeg)

Offices with climbing walls vs lucky to have an office at all

#### Success

*   Google: Level 8
*   Startup: 30 under 30

#### Growth

*   Google: All you need to do is ship a great product. If it’s a great product, people will use it, and monetization doesn’t matter.
*   Startup: You have to build a great product AND get people to use it AND make money from it. You can have a great product that people don’t use and a great product that people use and doesn’t make money. Either way, your product will die despite its greatness.

#### Day-to-day

*   Google: Build awesome software, work with amazing people, dream about the future, and have a lot of fun on the way.
*   Startup: Same :)

![](https://hackernoon.com/hn-images/1*bVKAV4jCHf4nmOm1JcIBYg.jpeg)

Sun setting on the Googleplex

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts about what it’s like to leave the Man for a tech startup. If you enjoyed the post, let me know by giving us some Medium love, checking out our [video editing website](https://www.kapwing.com), or following our startup journey on the [Kapwing blog](https://www.kapwing.com/blog).

Life after Google: A comparison to startup life

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