Why I left Google for a startup
tl;dr — I left Google for a startup so I could accelerate my learning in healthcare and technology, launch and iterate faster, and have more leadership opportunities
Why I left Google for a startup
While in business school (if you’re debating whether to go, I suggest my post “Should you go to B school?”), I decided to transition from consulting to product management (as documented in “Transitioning from consulting to PM”) and ultimately accepted a full time position at Google. In my blog post “What I Learned as a Google PM”, I talk about how how cool it was to launch products for millions and billions of people. Recently, I made the difficult decision to leave Google for a healthcare startup named Circulo.
Here’s why I left for a startup.
To get closer to my passion for health tech
At Google I worked on Search features that helped people find healthcare options (e.g., showing users telehealth options, allowing users to filter doctors based on accepted health insurance). It’s likely millions of users have either seen or used the features I’ve worked on by now.
However, it still felt more removed from making people healthier than I would have liked. Circulo on the other hand, directly cares for people’s health and employs doctors, nurses, mental health professionals and other healthcare providers. Building a suite of clinical products that supercharge Circulo’s ability to make our members healthier has been extremely rewarding.
In addition, there’s nowhere else (Google or otherwise) I would’ve learned about 3 different healthcare businesses (insurance, provider, home health) over the span of 1 year thanks to Circulo’s broad scope and wearing many hats at a startup. Joining Circulo definitely accelerated the areas of healthcare I was exposed to.
Learning to build from 0 to 1
I was not only exposed to many different parts of the health industry at Circulo, but also to a much more diverse set of technologies that I got to build into original products. At Google, I worked on Search for the most part. Search is an extremely established product that’s been iterated on for decades and I was working on just one part of it.
At Circulo, there wasn’t really anything built when I joined. Everything we built was built from scratch. We underwent build, buy, and partner analyses. We analyzed whether web or native app was the right solution. I worked with my engineering and design partners to architect and design a suite of products from the ground up. I found this pressure tested a lot of my PM abilities much more so than when I worked on one vertical of Search at Google.
I think this experience will be critical if I decide to start a company of my own one day or join another early stage company.
Launching things faster
Launching one Search feature at Google could easily take anywhere from a quarter to a year from hypothesis to full launch. You spend months researching a potential feature, designing it, building it and getting approval to run an experiment on Search to test a hypothesis.
Oftentimes, it felt like I was spending more time collecting approvals for a feature than I would spend actually designing and building a product. Google has done a lot to try and combat this problem. At the end of the day, it makes sense that launching features has a lot of red tape, since the company has so many users and is under constant scrutiny from the public, even more so when it comes to health-related features. However, for a PM that is trying to build and learn, this can be frustrating.
Leadership and management opportunities
Google is ultra conservative when it comes to promotions and letting employees become people managers. It could have easily taken me 4–7 years before I managed another PM. While I don’t believe managing others is the most important skill a PM can have, it is an important signal to recruiters when you are looking at more leadership opportunities.
There are a lot of unglamorous parts of leadership, but as a woman in tech/business, I believe it’s my responsibility to pay it forward to create safe and enriching environments for all people in the workplace if I can.
Circulo had just raised a $50 million Series A when I joined as one of the first dozen or so employees, so I knew it was possible there’d be substantial organizational growth in the next year and within 7 months of joining, I was given the opportunity to manage a PM. Joining a startup doesn’t guarantee being able to manage someone, but if you time it right with how the company is growing, you can accelerate the path compared to how long it’d take at a large company.
In conclusion
Am I glad I made the jump? Absolutely. Joining Circulo accelerated my learning and opened up new opportunities to me. Could I see myself boomeranging back to Google one day like many of my managers there did? I wouldn’t rule it out.
Would love to hear in the comments any questions, reasons why others left, and more!