Okay, to begin with, I had no idea how my resume landed into a startup's hands. It was a small company working on the ongoing trend of data mining in social networking domain - pulling out information about what you commented, tweeted or posted to analyze how you behave around with others - of course, with Machine Learning techniques. Nice idea.

Scheduled to meet up at a restaurant in a leading furniture store (Huh?). Wondered why. As it was a busy Sunday where families swarmed into the vast store along to kill some time and their wallets' weights. As expected, there wasn't any space for a decent talk amid the noise and long queues. We then, switched to a local food store nearby to continue.

The interview began. Synopsis, work and technologies came to the table. Explanation of what you did in your previous companies were drawn and summarized. The talk wasn't more of technical requirements but was rather, a "cultural" talk whether you "fit" in the organization with what you have or don't. But what intrigued me was this question, "Why do you want to work for a startup?". No final answer. Or rather, a convincing one, to put it straight.

I started to think. A valid question from the interviewer's perspective. How can I use my skills in the best possible way? What makes me thrive to apply for a startup? Why am I not applying for bigger companies? Why do I feel that startups are challenging? Is it just a fad seeing the cult or is it really the passion which propels me to apply for them? They're demanding, can I make it through? I know all of these might not be having a proper answer at all. Amid all of them, a proper reasoning emerged - being knowledge hungry, having a sense of ownership and conviction that at least, something valuable is being put into those lines of code for the company I could be a part of. The usual juggernaut of a big company employee, constantly broke into the conversation which was not actually a question, but a statement - "Do you have it in you?"

Agreed, being from a bigger organizational belt of experience and having seen projects with dozens of teams working in parallel, a startup can be really different. The level of responsibility is huge, the workload tremendously large and a continuous risk of staying afloat hovers. A new role today, a newer role tomorrow. Contacting people, keeping up the motivation all the time and an inert surrounding thought remains. But, it doesn't mean we cannot work in it just because we don't have any "experience". I see some people focusing on this in interviews. It doesn't mean we're not willing to sacrifice salary concerns, the primary concern. It doesn't mean we aren't passionate for the outcomes of what we might be doing in a startup, for the pure satisfaction of the effort. And, it doesn't mean we cannot put in longer hours of work effortlessly without a cringe of rebel, for the value it is adding to the company.

Founders, people are willing to work in startups. Demotivating them by just draping fine lines won't work for the betterment of either parties. You lose a good candidate who's prepared to strive for excellence. Similarly, the candidate looses a fine opportunity to make it a little bigger. One paragraph of resume which says about his startup experience works wonders.

Being skeptical in people's abilities is bad. But being skeptical in their intentions is in fact, worse.