Taking a big risk at the beginning of my career

When I started my career in early 2013, I did something that felt like a huge risk.

I joined an unknown, not-yet-profitable bootstrapped startup with four full-time employees.

It was my first job after completing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

Many of my classmates were starting roles in finance and at top consulting firms. They were getting high salaries – about 2-3x what the startup paid me in 2013.

A lot of my classmates were also already financially secure, thanks to their well-off families. I had a net worth of $2,500, thanks to a part-time job in college.

While my peers moved into nice studios and one-bedroom apartments in New York and London, I unpacked my belongings in the dusty basement of a group house in northeast Washington, DC.

…Why did I take such a big risk? Why didn’t I try harder to copy the career moves of my peers?

Because I believed:
→ Working at a startup would provide more professional growth opportunities than I could get at a much larger, established company.
→ Working at this particular startup would teach me how to start and grow a business without VC funding. This was something I hoped to eventually do.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Today, the small startup I joined – Industry Dive – is one of the leading business journalism publishers in the world, with 14M+ readers, 37 publications, and a newsroom of over 100 journalists.

What is a risk you've taken that helped you get where you are today?