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This summer, over coffee at a small café in Palo Alto, California, I had one of the most enlightening conversations I’d ever had. Across from me sat Sanjay Subhedar, co-founder of Storm Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and an alumnus of Indiana University.
After spending nearly 25 years watching companies rise and fall, Subhedar seemed like the right person to ask the question most college students carry around: what should I do with my career?
His answer came without hesitation.
“When you see a rocket ship, you leave everything and jump on it,” Subhedar said.
He believes startups are those rocket ships. This advice runs against nearly everything we are taught at business school. At the Kelley School of Business, the unspoken goal is a recognizable name on an offer letter, be it Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan or another Fortune 500 company. The case for these firms usually rests on prestige, a strong starting salary and, most notably, stability.
But in recent times, stability has become an illusion. In March, Morgan Stanley cut roughly 2,500 employees, about 3% of its workforce, across its investment banking and trading, wealth management and investment management divisions. Citigroup is another Fortune 500 working through a multi-year plan that could reduce its headcount by 20,000, while Amazon’s January 2026 announcement of about 16,000 corporate job cuts, following roughly 14,000 reductions announced in October 2025, brought its total announced corporate workforce reductions to about 30,000.
None of these companies were in trouble. All are among the most profitable institutions in the world, and still, they decided their employees were a cost worth cutting. In this market, a large employer does not really offer stability so much as the appearance of it.
The opportunity on the other side can’t be overstated. Figma, a collaborative design tool for creating, prototyping and sharing digital interfaces and products, employed about 150 people five years ago. When it went public on the stock market in July 2025, it ended its first day of trading valued at roughly $68 billion. Many employees who joined when it was a small and uncertain design tool found themselves with wealth they could hardly have imagined. This was because almost all early employees in a startup are compensated with ownership in it.
Anthropic offers a sharper example. When it first allowed employees to sell shares in May 2025, the company was valued at $61.5 billion. The next year, Anthropic reported that figure had reached $965 billion. For its part, OpenAI allowed current and former employees to sell about $7 billion in stock this August at an $852 billion valuation. Each of those employees made their decision years earlier, when joining looked far more like a gamble than a career move.
This path carries real risk. Many startups fail, and ownership in a failed company is worth nothing. The days are long and often disorganized, and job descriptions tend to be loose, because there is usually more work than there are people to do it.
But even the failures leave you with something valuable. Working at an early-stage company means speaking with customers, contributing to products, making decisions with incomplete information and seeing the results of those decisions quickly. No doubt, a single year of that teaches more than several years spent refining presentations within a large organization, where it can take a long time before anyone above you even knows your name.
Investors and founders of various startups have made versions of this argument for years. Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList, a startup investing and hiring platform, and he often notes that it is very hard to build wealth by selling your time and that real wealth comes from ownership.
Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, argued that one's early twenties are the ideal time to take these risks, since that is when there is the least to lose and the most to learn. Those observations describe many of us here in Bloomington.
This fall, I also had a long conversation with Aadi Khanna, who left IU to found Edvise, a startup later acquired by EdSights. When asked what he would say to students weighing their options, Khanna said building and working on a startup was the most rewarding experience of his life. He hoped more students would build things of their own, join companies on a steep trajectory and question the way things have always been done.
My suggestion to fellow students is modest. Before accepting an internship, mainly because of how it will look on a résumé, take a week to explore the alternative. Write to founders of small, fast-growing companies and offer to help. Look through Y Combinator's Work at a startup job board. Reach out to IU alumni who chose the less conventional path, and ask whether they regret it. In my experience, very few do.
A legacy company might give you a job. A startup gives you a life, and a life less ordinary.
When you see the rocket ship, I hope you jump.
Rishabh Karnawat, Sophomore at Kelley School of Business, Major - Finance
