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.   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.   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 :)  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).