I left university after first year university to pursue startups and tech at the age of 19. Since then, I’ve moved to Sydney and have been working as a Growth Associate at Startmate, Australia’s top accelerator for early-stage startups.

Check out my LinkedIn post here.

It’s around the 6 month mark at Startmate and I promised myself before making the move to Sydney that I would take time to reflect. These writings are a note to self.

Prior to Startmate I’d worked in a few roles but nothing that could quite prepare me for my first full-time gig in a new city. On top of this, I was the first growth hire, with no direct growth experience, in a team of ~15, working on a huge vision to make ANZ the best place in the world to start a startup.

While on the job search I heard from a few people that it would take around 6 months to get used to things and be in the position to add value to a company. Since then I’ve had some thoughts on the topic.

I’ll be exploring the dynamic between usefulness, context, and confidence. Note that I’m ignoring other factors like experience and natural inclination.

Context

Understanding the history of a startup, the people who work there, the competitive environment, the reason why certain things have been done, the strategy, the previous strategy, the founders, failures, even the past employees and leadership, matter.

The idea here is to not only aim to understand your domain, but realise that all these pieces work together and will form your foundation to do great building.

I’ve found that the reality here is that this really does take long. Longer than 6 months. Startmate for example is a context rich business that spans across many areas. Even just understanding the accelerator model can be tricky.

Once you understand how important this is, it’s easy to feel that your ability to be useful is proportional to your ‘level’ of context.

At least this is how I felt for a while. The problem is that having sufficient context is an arbitrary state. Thinking this way means you end up doing less now in the hopes that eventually you can do more.

Confidence

This is where confidence comes in. I’m using confidence synonymously with taking action and contributing.

Yes it takes long to build context, but, try not to confuse being able to add value with context. They relate, but they aren’t mutually exclusive.

You have to not only operate knowing you don’t understand things, but also contribute on the basis of what you do know.

You shouldn’t let the pursuit of context make you believe that you can’t contribute meaningfully in the present.

You being more ‘green’ can mean that you bring unique perspectives that are worth being heard. Especially if you’ve previously been a user of the product or a fan of the business.

I’ve struggled with this. It’s quite easy to feel that a lack of context (and other things like experience) compared to colleagues mean it’s better to observe than to be opinionated.

Usefulness

So what then does it mean to be useful? I see it largely as a mix of the above two factors.

As your level of context ramps up, so will your ability to be useful. But your confidence is a key part of this equation.

You can have all the context in the world but if you don’t take action or contribute, you won’t be useful. You can have little context being new to the business, but still exercise what you do have along with other factors to be useful.

The danger in all of this is that if you don’t feel you are adding value, you might feel you don’t belong, and if you feel you don’t belong, your quality of work will decrease. Then you get a fun little imposter syndrome loop going as you chase this state of ‘knowledge’ that you can’t actually reach.

Find logic that keeps you away from that loop.

Be kind to yourself and remember that you’re thoughts are worth being heard. At least more than you probably think.