Career growth in startups isn’t about waiting your turn. It’s not about title, tenure, or even talent.
It’s about mindset.
Some people take years to make a step. Others make a leap in six months. What separates them isn’t credentials or experience. It’s how they show up. How they think. How they work.
These are the mindset shifts that helped me make leaps, not just steps, in my own career. And they’re the same ones I’ve seen in the early hires who go on to shape the companies they join.
At startups, nothing is figured out. That’s the job. And yet so many early hires show up waiting for direction, assuming the founders or investors know the way. But the reality is, nobody has all the answers. The business is constantly evolving. The people in charge are solving problems in real time, just like you.
You don’t join a startup hoping it works. You join to make it work. That means forming your own opinions. Challenging assumptions. Seeing around corners. Contributing to the shape of the company, not just reacting to it. If you're not actively helping drive the outcome, you're just along for the ride.
One of the most important shifts I made was moving from waiting for projects to chasing problems. I stopped relying on what landed on my desk and started looking around for the real issues facing the business.
I developed a simple tool for this that became invaluable: the overheard list.
I kept a running list in my notebook of anything that felt unresolved—questions raised in meetings, metrics that didn’t seem quite right, offhand comments like “I think churn is a bit worse this month” or “I’m not sure that number’s accurate.” If I heard something once, I’d note it. If I heard it again, it jumped to the top of the list.
The more I paid attention, the more signal I found. And when I had time, I’d dig in. Sometimes the trail went nowhere. But sometimes I’d surface something meaningful; a bug, a miscalculation, an opportunity we hadn’t seen. I’d share what I found, and usually, people were surprised. Grateful, even. It built trust. And it created momentum.
That one habit changed the way I was perceived. All of a sudden, I wasn’t just doing what I was asked. I was solving problems that mattered. And when people see that you can solve problems, they give you more. More responsibility. More influence. More resources. That’s how careers snowball.
But the biggest shift of all was this: I stopped thinking of myself as just an analyst. I started acting like the CEO of my own work. Every time I took on a problem, I imagined I was the one accountable for the outcome. It forced me to think through the full picture. To get the context. To pressure test the recommendation. To own the result. And it made my work better, every time.
Over the years, I’ve seen this pattern play out again and again. At Intercom. At Equals. Across dozens of conversations with other operators. The people who rise the fastest aren't always the ones with the perfect background. They're the ones who show up like owners. Who step into the ambiguity. Who take initiative without waiting for permission.
That’s what it means to have the First Operator mindset. It’s not about title or tenure. It’s about showing up every day with the conviction that the outcome depends on you, and then doing the work to make it true.