Who’s this clever capybara working hard all day to find you the best growth marketing jobs?

Meet Capy. He’s curious, committed, and wants to help you with your career. He’s a scrappy Capy!

He’s also a slightly unusual capybara. He’s worked in growth marketing at a variety of startups himself, so he knows a thing or two he hopes will help you.

For one, he knows that growth roles can be pretty intense, depending on the company, its stage, and your responsibilities. Especially at a venture-backed startup hell-bent on achieving exponential growth.

The word growth is literally in the job title, after all.

At the same time, the pace of a startup can give you extraordinary opportunities to learn, take on new responsibilities, and build skills much faster than you might elsewhere. You might love that environment. It might be exciting, energizing, and exactly what you’re looking for.

Which reminds Capy of an old Paul Graham essay.

Compressing your working life

In How to Make Wealth, PG describes a startup as a way to “compress your whole working life into a few years.”

Rather than working at a relatively steady pace for forty years, you work extraordinarily hard for four. And, as he goes on to explain, you compress much of the stress into those four years, too.

Capy likes PG. He read all his essays back in the day, still loves them, and appreciates the way PG thinks about startups.

To be fair to PG, he’s quite clear about what he’s trying to explain. The essay asks a specific question: if you wanted to get rich, how would you do it?

His answer is that your best bet would probably be to start or join a startup.

In a startup, you have an unusual opportunity to create a great deal of value in a relatively short period of time, and potentially capture a meaningful share of it.

Capy still agrees with much of that argument.

But looking back, he thinks it was easy, especially when he was younger, to project quite a lot onto it.

To take a persuasive argument about how to create wealth and turn it into a blueprint for how to build a career, or live a life.

There’s more than one way to have a good career

Maybe Capy has had too much coffee this morning, but there’s something he wants you to remember.

You don’t have to treat the most intense version of startup life as the only way to have a career and a life you love.

There’s something genuinely exciting about being part of a small team trying to do something ambitious. But spend enough time in startup ecosystems, particularly somewhere like the San Francisco Bay Area, and it can become surprisingly easy to lose perspective on just how many different ways there are to approach work.

PG himself is explicit that the extreme scenario he describes, where you have no leisure time and work so hard that you endanger your health, is a limit case.

And that’s quite a trade-off.

Capy also remembers meeting Paul Graham and hearing him ask something that stuck with him:

“Why would you want to be a cog in someone else’s machine?”

But as Capy got older, and perhaps a little more mature, he came to appreciate something else.

The stability of working at a larger company, having a predictable salary, and enjoying a life that doesn’t revolve around the possibility of a big equity payout can be incredibly valuable.

It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a cog in someone else’s machine.

For someone who grew up in a family where money always felt scarce, a stable, well-paying job might represent a profound change in their circumstances. It might even change what’s economically possible for the next generation of their family.

And there’s nothing insignificant about that.

Capy still loves PG’s essay. He doesn’t think the argument is wrong. He just doesn’t see it as a value judgment about which kind of career, or life, is better.

Finding the right kind of growth

Fortunately, the startup world has grown up quite a bit. There are more companies at different stages, and a much wider variety of roles and functions within them.

You might enjoy being the first growth marketer at a small startup, figuring out a bit of everything. Or you might prefer joining a more established team, where you can specialize in work you love, learn from experienced colleagues, and enjoy a little more predictability.

And what suits you today might be quite different from what you wanted a few years ago.

Anyway, Capy was supposed to be introducing himself, and somehow he’s ended up talking about Paul Graham and the meaning of a good career.

Perhaps that tells you a little about him.

He’s here because he likes growth marketing, understands something about the opportunities and challenges that come with it, and wants to help you find a job that’s right for you.

That’s why he spends his days working away at Titleless.fyi, finding growth marketing jobs and helping you discover opportunities you might love.

Now, back to work.

Capy’s got jobs to find.