After four years as a management consultant, I made the jump to an early-stage startup. It was the kind of decision that is hard to explain to a spreadsheet and easy to second-guess at 2 a.m. This post walks through how I thought about the move: what made me realize consulting was no longer the right fit for where I wanted to go, how I built my shortlist, and how I made the final call when two equally good offers were sitting in front of me.
TLDR:
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Consulting builds strategy skills; early-stage startups build execution skills, and the gap between them matters when choosing where to go next.
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Seed and Series-A companies offer the “0 to 1” experience that lets you build hands-on operating habits before responsibilities harden into fixed lanes.
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Use a 6-point filter (B2B vs. B2C, founder track record, investor quality, financial rationale) to narrow your shortlist before investing time in conversations.
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When two offers look equally strong on paper, reframe the decision: ask who you’d want to work alongside if the company doesn’t pan out.
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Watch for red flags in the process itself: vague hiring intent, slow or shifting interview timelines, and rigid scope descriptions signal how a team actually operates.
Learning the Importance of Execution
During the early days of COVID lockdown, the local nonprofit I volunteered at needed to take drastic actions to continue serving the local community. While I continued to focus on improving the organization’s 3-year strategy, the CEO began taking decisive measures that kept the nonprofit running. The CEO made hard HR decisions, reduced expenditure, and found ways to secure key revenue streams. Despite all the challenges, the organization continued serving the local community thanks to those swift actions. It was a humbling experience. I saw first hand the importance of execution and realized how important it is to an organization’s success.
Learning What I Truly Enjoyed
Around the same time, I worked on two very different consulting projects: building a digital product for operating room surgeons and nurses, and helping a C-suite team analyze a $1+bn decision. One was on-the-ground building; the other was boardroom recommending. Both were interesting and challenging, but only one left me energized at the end of the day. Working directly with surgeons to turn research into product features felt alive in a way the C-suite work, for all its scale, did not.
That contrast made something clear: I had a genuine interest in product and a strong desire to get better at execution. Startups stood out as the right environment to do both. My job search began.
Where to Start
So with that, I decided to look for startups in the Seed/Series-A stages.
A quick tip: Startups can come in different sizes (less than 20 people, 300 people, or 1K+ people). When thinking about joining a startup, it’s worth asking yourself whether you prefer joining a company and helping build up the initial product/process/strategy or prefer joining a startup to help the company scale. Jeff Bussgang’s book Entering StartUpLand provides an excellent overview of startups at different maturity levels and what you should expect. For someone who’s never worked in a startup, I was missing contexts for what day-to-day could look like. I found speaking with people working at startups to be the best way to get a feel for what company size I prefer.
Knowing Which Team to Join
With my focus narrowed to Seed and Series-A startups, the next challenge was building a shortlist. Most early companies have little public presence, and it’s rarely clear upfront whether they need a non-technical hire. To narrow the field, I filtered by a few criteria first:
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Is the company B2B or B2C? I like B2B because the business problem is concrete. There is a known issue, and others will pay you if you solve the problem.
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Are they solving a technical or business problem? Business problems speak to me and are something that I appreciate.
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Are they solving a problem that I can relate to? This one is obvious :)
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Do they have repeat founders or first-time founders? I’ve never worked for a first-time founder, so I’m biased. I wanted to learn about entrepreneurship, and I thought repeat founders have more experience starting a company (so more opportunity to learn from them).
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Do they have good investors and board members? There are a lot of startups out there. Targeting ones with reputable investors and board allow me to be more focused.
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How are they doing financially? I looked for startups that showed great rationale for how they spend and raise money.
A shorter list gave me a genuine reason to reach out, and that matters more at the seed stage than a polished resume. Founders are busy, but happy to talk to someone who shows real interest in their business.
| What to Check | Green Flag | Red Flag |
|---|---|---|
| Business model | B2B with a concrete, payable problem | Vague monetization or unclear customer |
| Problem fit | Business problem you can relate to | Deep technical problem outside your skill set |
| Founders | Repeat founders with startup experience | First-time founders with no relevant track record |
| Investors & board | Reputable investors focused on the space | Unknown backers or no board structure |
| Financials | Clear rationale for spend and fundraising | Burning fast with no coherent path forward |
| Hiring process | Fast, organized, and clear on what they need | Slow, shifting timelines or vague on the role |
Equally important: not wasting time with teams that didn’t respect mine. Knowing what good looks like helps. See hiring practices every early-stage startup should follow. Watch for:
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Wishy-washy response when asked if they are interested in hiring you, but still ask you for more time.
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Taking a long time to progress you through the interview process and/or changing the interview process midway.
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Low-balling salary and equity.
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Trash talking other companies or people during conversations with you.
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Showing a limiting belief in the scope of your work (“I need you to do XYZ and XYZ only for the next three years”). Everyone needs to get hands-on early on, but it’s unrealistic to assume that someone’s responsibility will remain constant in a startup environment.
After shortlisting and interviewing, I ended up with two offers from companies I genuinely liked. Deciding between them turned out to be the hardest part of the whole process.
The Search for the Startup: Knowing Which Team to Join
To give you an idea of why it was hard, here are some of the stats about both companies:
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Both B2B
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One solving for a business problem, the other solving for a blend of business and technical problem
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Both have repeat founders
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Both have great inventors
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Both are doing well financially
On top of that, I had convictions around both companies’ missions, products, and goals.
At this point, everyone was selling me the dream (“we are going to be [insert company that’s on the news] in X years”), but I didn’t have enough information to know for sure what would happen next year.
The criteria I had outlined to find these startups failed to help me decide which one to join. It was impossible to compare the upside when all options have unlimited potential. So instead, I turned the question on its head and asked:
“Who would I rather fail with if this doesn’t work out?”
This mental exercise allowed me to surface what mattered to me most:
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I want to learn and grow so I can be a great operator.
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I want to work with people I can be friends with (do it for the mems)
Once I knew what my priorities were, the decision to join Dover became clear to me.
Joining the Startup with Dover
I decided to join Dover. A few reasons stood out:
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The problem (recruiting) is real, and I believe technology can make it better. Dover’s model pairs a free ATS with on-demand fractional recruiters who work inside the same shared system, so internal teams and outside recruiting support stay coordinated from day one instead of operating out of separate tools. I’d experienced the product firsthand as a candidate, which gave me confidence the approach actually works.
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The team moved fast and ran a clean interview. The co-founders knew what they wanted and made me feel understood by the end of it.
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Dover cared about both learning and impact, going beyond output. We had a candid conversation about growth during my interview, and that stuck with me.
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People here are smart, humble, and quick to credit each other.
Now 1.5 months in, I split my time between managing accounts, building the Dover product, and contributing to company strategy. The hands-on execution experience I was looking for is very much there.
The one thing that surprised me most: the feedback culture. I worried that leaving consulting meant slower learning, but that hasn’t been the case. My colleagues keep pushing me forward (still a work in progress).
If you’re making a similar jump or have a different take on any of this, I’d love to hear from you. For another angle on switching from a big company to tech, a Dover colleague shared their own story.
FAQs
Should I target Seed and Series-A startups or later-stage companies when making the move from consulting to a startup?
Seed and Series-A companies give you the “0 to 1” experience that builds hands-on execution habits, the kind most consulting careers leave underdeveloped. Later-stage companies (Series C and beyond) offer proven scale but often mean joining a fixed function instead of building one from scratch.
What is the “0 to 1 experience” in a startup, and why does it matter for someone coming from consulting?
The “0 to 1 experience” means joining early enough to build initial product, process, and strategy from scratch, instead of scaling something that already exists. For consultants, who develop strong analytical and strategy skills but limited execution experience, it is the fastest way to close that gap while responsibility and ownership are still broadly shared across a small team.
How do you build a shortlist of early-stage startups when most have little public information?
Apply a short filter before investing research time: B2B or B2C, technical or business problem, first-time or repeat founders, investor quality, and financial rationale. This narrows your list enough that deeper research becomes practical, and it gives you a genuine basis for outreach, which matters more at the seed stage than a polished resume.
Do early-stage startups need a recruiter if they’re already using an ATS?
An ATS organizes your pipeline and gets jobs in front of candidates, but it doesn’t replace the judgment and relationship-building that fills competitive roles. For straightforward or high-volume hiring, an ATS alone can be enough. When roles are senior, specialized, or require active sourcing into passive talent pools, a fractional recruiter layered on top of the ATS covers the work software can’t. The cleaner setup is having both operating in the same system: when recruiters and internal teams share a single pipeline, there’s no coordination overhead or duplicate outreach to manage.
Final Thoughts on Finding the Right Startup After a Consulting Career
The move from consulting to an early-stage startup rewards people who know what they want to get better at, not merely what they want to escape. Building a shortlist of companies is the easy part; knowing which one fits your learning goals and working style takes more candid reflection. Whether you’re drawn to the 0-to-1 stage or something further along, the best filter is usually a simple one: who do you want to grow with? Dover’s model, a free ATS paired with on-demand fractional recruiters in one shared system, is one concrete example of the kind of problem I find worth working on: a real structural fix to how early-stage companies hire, rather than another layer of software or another agency with misaligned incentives.