Leaving McKinsey for a startup

Guide to joining an early startup after working in a corporate

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Tereza Tizkova | Substack

What is this article about

I had all these thoughts written for over a year and I am finally starting to publish them. I didn’t want to share advice (even implicitly) about how to leave my previous employer. I am still grateful for my time at McKinsey and I respect many people I met there. Some of them positively affected my life to a great extent. This blog post is for people who think they might be a great match for a startup in the future.

I worked at McKinsey as a management consultant. I spent around one year there, starting as an intern. I applied because it was a prestigious company, and I hadn’t decided about my career yet. McKinsey gives you access to many different industries, you get to talk to the leadership of big corporations or government, you learn fast, and have smart and ambitious colleagues.

However, I wasn’t a good management consultant. I struggled to produce good slides and Excel models, I felt super-awkward during the interactions with clients, and I didn’t see the “meaning” behind my work.

This article is an intro to:

• How I got from McKinsey to a (successful) startup
• Why I was lucky
• How to be lucky too
• How to know that startups would be a good fit for me?

How I got from McKinsey to a (successful) startup

I have to say “successful” because you will easily find a lot of startups that look interesting at first glance.

My personal definition of “successful” is a startup that is building a technical product that I believe in, a startup on a strong growing track, with a good strategy and internal systems (by that I mean things like “how do we decide what to actually build next”). Also, for me, it has to be a startup that has a great team of smart people with values similar to mine.

Of course, I am humble and I am aware that statistically most startups fail. The important part for me is still the journey, the learning, and the fun. I genuinely love my job now, and it’s a match for my personality and skills. I can’t predict the future so I count on all possible outcomes of this journey.

I got to E2B like this:

1. A person I knew connected me with two guys who were just starting to build software for AI developers.
2. I went to get coffee with them and talked about the vision and early product they had.
3. We clicked, and I saw the big potential and decided to quit McKinsey.

This is a short post (more like a diary entry) about it.

I am not saying that startups are better than management consulting or any other type of job, but if your heart guides you in the startup direction too, here are some tips.

Why I was lucky

I was lucky to get the opportunity I got, However, I believe you can and should hack your luck. That is, actively create opportunities to be lucky. There were multiple moments on the journey from McKinsey to E2B where it could have failed if I hadn’t actively optimized my luck. That is:

• If I didn’t want to make the tradeoff of saying yes to a coffee with startup founders when I had an infinite amount of work at my consulting job, I wouldn’t meet my current team at all, or much later. Sometimes I had to decide whether I spend one additional hour fixing slides, or on a coffee.
• If I wasn’t regularly learning about new technologies (there was a generative AI boom starting at that time) I wouldn’t have been able to ask reasonable questions when I first met E2B founders. And maybe they would doubt that I am a good fit.
• If I hadn’t told everyone how I wanted to do a startup, maybe the person who recommended me to E2B wouldn’t have remembered that I existed and wouldn’t think I was a good fit.

These are just a few points, but there’s probably more, and I strongly believe in the butterfly effect. Of course, saying YES to something means saying NO to something else. You can’t do all the things with 100% energy.

I am thinking about it as convex vs concave situations. Simply, a convex situation (the function graph on the left) is a situation with limited downside and (almost) unlimited upside. The concave situation is the opposite (the function graph on the right).

Sorry for the bad drawing

Example: If I go for a coffee break with a very interesting person while I still have slides to finish for my manager, that is a convex situation in my life. The worst that can happen is that I submit low-quality work, receive bad feedback, and eventually get fired (if this is consistent). The best that can happen is that the “very interesting person” gives me an opportunity that drastically improves my everyday life.

How to be lucky too

These are some main things I was doing on purpose for a few months to get closer to my startup dream job:

• Talk about what you want. I called myself a “startup enthusiast” (haha) and actively talked to people about wanting to build a startup in the future. I think you have to make a mix of doing things and telling people about things.
• Also, write about what you want. You can update your LinkedIn so it has subtle hints about your startup interests. A big part of you is alive on the internet, so use it too to tell people about the kind of person you want to be. You can share content that attracts startup enthusiasts, blog, make videos, stories, whatever makes you happy.
• Attend startup events. It can be online, or offline, you usually find them on LinkedIn, X, or channels of the startup communities in your city. If you haven’t heard about any, try googling them or asking people.
• Check what roles the startups want. I was checking startup job posts (even though I believe the best roles are filled via personal network and aren’t even posted). Think about what roles might be relevant for you. This is a topic for a separate blog post.
• Meet new people. When I got a chance to get a coffee with startup people, I found time. Even when I wasn’t that interested in a particular field, it was good for the mental benchmark. I was making observations and asking a lot of questions. I even wrote a cold message on LinkedIn sometimes if I spotted a person doing something I wanted to learn more about.
• Find a way to pursue your dream within your current job. Within McKinsey, I joined the internal startup club, which was great and I actually met one startup with super great founders which I’m still friends with in San Francisco. McKinsey is amazing for the amount of initiatives and activities you can join within the firm.
• Apply to startup programs. For example, I applied to Entrepreneur First, but there are many more startup incubators and programs like that. Even though I didn’t join any, I learned what “startup people” build, and how they think. You can apply even though you don’t have any business idea.
• Connect with your friends. If you have friends doing startups, ask them about things, people usually know similar people. If your friends are going to a hackathon, a competition, or whatever, join them. Don’t forget that one possibility is to start your own company and be on a founding team, not just an early employee, so it’s worth spending time with like-minded people.
• Spend your free time improving your capabilities. I was preparing for a potential startup role while at McKinsey. On weekends or when there were weeks without projects, I read a lot about technology (at that time, the ChatGPT and hence AI hype was just starting) and occasionally made a blog post about something like neural networks. There was a high likelihood that a startup would do something tech-heavy, so I also needed a way to show people that I was interested in that. If I didn’t do this, I probably would have zero confidence to even discuss AI agents with experienced developers.

By the way, you should also enjoy doing at least some of these hacks. If you don’t, it might indicate that you chose the wrong dream. Don’t push it if you aren’t really interested in it.

Also, this obviously works with all kinds of dreams, not just startups.

How to know that a startup would be a good fit for me?

It depends a lot on the stage of a startup, the particular team, and many other factors. As a proxy, I would say that if most of the following are true for you, you might enjoy early-stage startups:

• You are a novelty seeker. You enjoy changes and variability of tasks. You are afraid of stereotypes and seeing a clear and predictable career path scares you.
• You are ready to sometimes live for your work. You don’t want to differentiate between work and free time, you just see work as another “fun quest” in your life that you enjoy. You want to work on something that is so interesting that you would spend even your free time thinking about it.
• You don’t mind risking. I have some friends asking how it doesn’t stress me out that our startup has a certain limited runway. I didn’t think of it that way, but I guess a startup can be an unstable and risky career option. Also, I am still relatively young and can afford more risk.
• You think failing is just learning. I think you have to strongly believe in your startup, but you also have to count on struggles along the way. I think it’s good to count on the possibility that things fail, and it just helps to be used to it.
• You hate doing something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t bringing value.
• You are fascinated by technology and innovations. I mean, you don’t have to be, but you shouldn’t hate technology if you want to join a good startup. Most of them probably will be doing technical products.
• You have a history of entrepreneurship. And by that, I don’t mean you opened a lemonade stand when you were ten or already started a business. I also mean small things like starting a side project within company you work for, starting a university club, starting a free-time initiative, or smartly hacking some part of your life…
• You have a history of struggling in bigger companies or teams (for various reasons).
• You have ADHD diagnosed (I’m joking, but I also read that people with ADHD are 500% more likely to be entrepreneurs.)
• You enjoyed the HBO Silicon Valley series. :)

The Silicon Valley series is the most accurate representation of startup life ever.

There’s much more…

I promised myself to stop producing lengthy articles, but next time I need to also write about:

• A) What are indications that a startup is going to be successful?
• B) What resources to watch to stay updated about startups and opportunities?
• C) How do I connect with startup people?
• D) How do I tell my story if I am coming from a corporation?
• E) Does consulting help me at a startup? What skills are applicable?

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Leaving McKinsey for a startup