Working in a Start-up vs Big Organisation

After working for 3 years with well-established companies, I am now working with a one year old start-up. In initial 3 years of my career, in first year I worked with a mid-size company, having employee strength of around 200. After that, for next 2 years, I worked with a very old and large company, having over 2 lakh employees, though the environment and working culture there also was very relaxed, no-nonsense kind, courtesy to my manager and all teammates. Coming from that huge company to directly a start-up feels very different. Start-Up, the word seems to tell:  Start and work your way up, if you were sleeping till now. Though it has just been a week since I joined my new start-up company, so it may be a very early to compare both, I would still like to list few differences I have noticed.
I would start with very visible and common things. Here in start-up, there is no restriction on you should wear at work. You don’t have to be very formal with your attire. You can wear t-shirts, jeans daily. There is a guy in my office who comes in half pants daily. You do not need a pair of formal shoes. Your casual sports shoes or even sandals will do.  There are no specific timings. You can come late if you don’t like to get up early, and work till late. There is no specified number of hours that you have to spend in office. Although, that means that often you end up working long hours in office, as there is a lot of work and few people in small company. If you don’t feel like coming to office, you can work from home. So you can see, there is a lot of flexibility in a start-up.
There are other more important benefits of working in a start-up. There are less number of people, so everyone is important and your opinion counts.  You are noticed for almost everything you do, for every step you take, though it applies for your mistakes also, as much it does for your contributions. In starting years, there is generally only one office, and that also is small, so you end up sharing your space with the people who matter most: the founders and CEOs/CTOs of the company. You can see how they are running the organisation, how much effort they are putting, what new ideas they are thinking of, their decision process etc. You can even give them your suggestions, and thus directly become even more important part of the company. In big organisations, you sometimes have not even seen these people even after working for years. In those big companies, some big guys, sitting in some other part of the planet, will take decision for you, and you don’t even know that who has done what to you. There you are just another drop in the ocean; here you are like a river, which after meeting with other rivers will form the ocean someday. There you are just going with the flow; here you are actually deciding the direction of the flow.
In small companies, you can try new things, fail at them, then retry something new again. There are no monolithic hierarchies for decision making. Instead of deliberating on pros and cons of something in meeting rooms for hours without actually trying it, here you just try it, learn from failures, and move on. Whatever work you do, its effects, whether good or bad, are in front of you very soon. There is no waiting for months to see the result of your work. That is called failing fast approach.
But there are lot of things that I will miss from my previous companies. Here I cannot sit in canteen and chat with colleagues on latest news, cricket or movies. Nobody seems to have much time for long discussions on Sachin’s 100th hundred, or Dravid’s retirement, or the movie released last Friday, or share market, or the next scandal done by UPA government.  But as they say, nothing comes for free in life. Here you are important, your time is important, so you do only important thing.
Welcome to Start-Up !!!.


Edit: As one friend pointed out, I forgot to mention that there are some exceptions among big organisations, where still a start-up environment is maintained as Google,Facebook,Cisco etc.