| Depends on what you want to achieve out of the next few years of your life. As in any other choice in life, you have both pros and cons in both the choices. As also pointed out in other answers, it would hold true that doing your own startup will be the easiest now, as this choice will only get harder as you grow older and your responsibilities/obligations increase. This would definitely give you a good overall growth in many areas. If you want to develop skill-sets in a particular domain, then I would suggest to go join a big corp where you can learn some best practices, get mentors and maybe even find interesting folks for you own startup at some point later in life.
Also a somewhat middle path can be achieved by joining an early stage startup where you can find the above mentioned things in the team, and the pace of growth will be faster as well. Will share my personal experience as well, maybe it might help. (Though take it with a pinch of salt, as it's not purely objective for me anymore.)
I had a good chance to do a startup right out of college with a few friends and some ready funding/accelerators acceptances, but I took the option to go with a big corp. After about an year, I really regretted that decision. I have been wishing to go back and change that... So I left the big corp job after about 2 years, and have been working in core founding team of a startup for 2 years. Learning pace is much quicker in startup, but be clear in what you want out of the time you give to the organisation you will work for be it your own or someone else's. Big points of regret for me:
1. I had a good team with me then (damn difficult to find this),
2. I was quite passionate about the problem we were working on (again not as easy to develop as it sounds).
3. Seed funding was readily available, so finances would also have been taken care of while working there (as you grow this starts becoming a concern as your burn rate increases...) Also, I would suggest you to watch both Paul Graham's lecture (L3) and Dustin Moskovitz's advice (L1) @ http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ to also maybe get some more perspectives. Hope it helps. All the best! |