MBA students often miss out on amazing opportunities either because of the tendency to look for jobs in banking or consulting or due to a lack of awareness about other opportunities outside the typical ones. It is less common to look for opportunities at startups, and even when if you were looking, it may seem difficult to find the right opportunity. In reality, there are many good opportunities, but you may just not looking at the right ones.

In general, when you get advice that you should work for a startup, it doesn’t mean that you should work at any startup at any stage. The key to finding the right startup is that it’s about not getting in too early, but neither too late. So when is the right time? In this post, I’ll discuss a perspective on how to look for the right startup based on its needs and funding stage.

Before I do that though, I wanted to add a caveat: I’m not advocating MBAs should exclusively pursue careers or jobs at startups. I’m also not saying this is necessarily the best path for everyone either. It ultimately depends on whether you’re willing and able to take a certain level of risk, your loans/liabilities, and your openness to taking on more operationally focused roles. If you have little relevant experience or domain expertise in areas the startup needs, you may find this article less relevant to you.

What I’m advocating for however is that it’s worth taking time to consider opportunities at certain startups because in all the noise and fear of risk, there are actually some amazing opportunities that you might miss out on. If this is something you’d like to learn more about, then this article might help.

Let’s get to it.

Understanding startup needs based on fundraising stages

For context, when I talk about a startup in this post, I’m referring to software startups. For startups in biotech, hardware, or consumer products, timing may be a bit different.

There are roughly 3 categories of startup stages. The Seed stage, Series A and Post Series A (includes Series B, C, etc.). At each stage, a startup has different priorities and challenges which implies different needs. I’ll provide a high level overview of the different startup stages, but if you want to go more in-depth you can read this article.

Seed stage (or Pre-A)

At this stage, the focus is in building the product or an early prototype, finding product market fit, talking to customers and learning how to sell your product. Startups at this stage are not quite ready to grow/scale yet.

During this stage, a startup mostly needs software engineers and web developers. AI startups will additionally need a data scientist or an AI researcher who can build machine learning models. Typically one of the founders will be able to build product or develop a machine learning model. As for business development, sales, marketing and operations, these are functions that will usually be handled by a different founder. That being said, if a startup ever needs to hire at this stage, it will most likely be for technical talent.

Series A

At this stage, the startup has a working product, paying customers, and its economics and ROI seem to work out. The startup starts building their sales team and has a high potential to scale, but the work to get to scale is just beginning.

At this stage the startup start building out its sales, marketing and operations teams. The startup is also close to product market fit or has found product market fit. This means it will need product managers to help further refine the product and think of new features that can help grow or tackle adjacent markets. The product will solve a painful problem for many customers but the startup needs to increase awareness of its solution. It will need more people in sales and business development because the founders can no longer handle this on their own.

Post A

This stage is all about growth and scale. The startup is usually scaling rapidly. The product has matured and is more stable. Sales and support teams are in place and all the traditional sales management concepts apply (quotas, conversion rates). Gears are cranking so it’s about making things go even faster and more efficiently.

The startup has likely already achieved product market fit and it now needs to build both the technical infrastructure to support further product growth as well as the organizational infrastructure to manage customer acquisition. Most sales, marketing and operations teams are formalized and they’ll likely have a VP or SVP managing those teams.

Based on this context, here’s a table that roughly summarizes what roles startups will mostly need at different stages.

Functional needs at different startup stages

The opportunity window: You want to focus on getting in just before or at Series A

The best time for an MBA to get a job at a startup is just before or at Series A because it’s the window of opportunity that maximizes the 3 variables that most students will be looking for. Of course, I’m making some assumptions about what the typical MBA student is looking for at this stage. Here are the 3 variables and some of the assumptions made.