Develop yourself. Never stop learning. Have an optimistic outlook. Have a pleasant personality. Work well with others. Don't afraid to do more than necessary.
Avoid excessive startup if possible. I was young and naive. After doing 5 or 6 startups, I realized it's a lossy deal. VC spread their risk by investing in 10 companies and assuming 9 would fail. Founders go in with 90% chance of failing but with enough equity to offset the risk. Early employees are screwed, with 90% chance of failing but with meager equity, while doing huge amount of work.
Join startup for the learning. Join big company for the cash. If you really want startup, join late stage startup that are making money, which drastically cuts down the risk of failure while still give you upside.
Go into consulting is you want the cash. You have to be good and deliver.
Thanks for your points, hoping you or someone else can answer a few questions.
How did you find the jump from inhouse to doing your own consulting? Is it just a case of getting experience in delivering? i.e. more likely to have success after some junior manager experience inhouse?
I had a really good GM in my last job who taught me a fair bit about how the business works - after moving on I've felt that void in other roles where senior managers are much less transparent. I want to streamline into business function ownership - have you got any advice on how to get to this stage or does this just come with general experience and following management track up?
You don't need much people management skill to do consulting. You are managing yourself, not running a company. You do need to deal with clients. Product management skill would help tremendously. Basically clients rarely have any clue on what they want. You need to take their vague ideas, map to equivalent feature/functionality, extract the detail from them, and translate those into development functionality. Then fit the change into existing architecture, do the design, and implement them.
On the technical side, try to understand various architecture and how things work together. Do the full stack. Ideally when talking to the clients about a feature, you should be able to figure out what need to be done along the whole pipeline of work.
If you are a software developer and want to go further, I would say get involved in:
Avoid excessive startup if possible. I was young and naive. After doing 5 or 6 startups, I realized it's a lossy deal. VC spread their risk by investing in 10 companies and assuming 9 would fail. Founders go in with 90% chance of failing but with enough equity to offset the risk. Early employees are screwed, with 90% chance of failing but with meager equity, while doing huge amount of work.
Join startup for the learning. Join big company for the cash. If you really want startup, join late stage startup that are making money, which drastically cuts down the risk of failure while still give you upside.
Go into consulting is you want the cash. You have to be good and deliver.