What is it like to be an early employee at a rapidly growing startup? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Being an early employee at a rapidly growing startup can be awesome… and at times, stressful.

I’ve spent much of my career in this situation. If you’re the type of person who likes to solve problems, there’s an endless supply of them around. As the company grows, there’s always more work to be done than there are people to do it. That tension creates lots of opportunity for you to move around and jump on exciting problems.

In my experience, there’s not always a lot of structure in fast growing environments, either by accident or intentionally. Again, this is awesome for some people, and stressful for others. Lots of people enjoy the autonomy of getting to chart your own path, it can be annoying and stressful when the direction of projects changes or gets cancelled. Part of not having structure is having far less predictability and communication than one would enjoy at a more mature and stable company.

Here’s a snapshot from early in my career at Facebook. I was working on a new events/calendaring app for the company. I got on this project because I overheard some people talking about it and decided it would be a cool thing to work on. The team we put together was 1 PM, 1 designer, and 2 engineers. The designer came up with some pretty out of the box interface ideas because the site still lived in a narrow, ~500px wide box at the time. I loved the process of figuring out how to build that. I didn’t really have a clue when I started, but figured it out over the next few weeks. We were all learning on the fly. A few months into the project, our team was struggling to get the project out the door because we hadn’t gotten buy in on how the product should function and what its priorities should be. At some point, it became clear this this thing wasn’t going to ship. (Pro tip: don’t codename your product, “Horizon”). While it sucked to not have the product ship, a week later I’d hopped onto a another project and was using a lot of the stuff I learned in order to rebuild the profile.

Some people would hate a process like this. To me, there were great parts (I just joined projects without needing approval, I learned a ton…) and not so great parts (it was hard to predict if and when something would ship).

The last thing I’ll mention is the “rapidly growing” part. It’s awesome to work somewhere that is rapidly growing. Lots of people say, “Growth fixes everything.” I agree. When things are broken or someone messes up, if you’re growing, it’s much easier to just move onto the next problem.

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