Startups vs corporates vs consultancies

What is the difference between a startup, a corporate and a consultancy?

At a consultancy you work across many client projects, at a corporate you work on a mature product inside a large structure, and at a startup everyone works on one product that is still being figured out.

Take an AI consultancy in Belgium as a concrete example. Account executives sell a proof of concept to a client. The price is worked out from the people it needs (a solution architect, a machine learning engineer, a solution lead) and the hours they put in each week. When the project ends, the job is to upsell the next version or extend it with new features. Then it starts again with the next client.

At a startup the same skills point in one direction. Everyone is building the same product, so the conversations are about the same problem, and it feels like being in the same boat. At a consultancy the work is fragmented. Everyone has their own projects, and what your colleague is working on often has nothing to do with you.

A corporate sits in between. The pay is usually better and often comes with stock. There are a lot of genuinely smart people who know how to scale a product, and a large internal network to learn from. There are also too many meetings, layers of middle management, and a lot depends on whether you land on a good team.

Is consulting a good route into startups?

It can be. Consulting teaches discovery and presenting, and it shows you problems worth building a company around, but it is easy to get stuck there.

The underrated upside of consulting is that it's an idea factory. You sit with a client, they describe a problem that clearly hurts, you scope a solution, and then they can't afford it. That pain doesn't go away because the budget did. Plenty of startups begin exactly there.

The skills carry over too. Discovery workshops are the same exercise founders run when they interview potential customers: sit down, ask a lot of questions, work out what's actually worth solving. And presenting matters. Giving a presentation to forty colleagues, or in one friend's case to the executive board of one of Belgium's largest telecom companies, with a real decision riding on it, is the kind of pressure that's hard to get anywhere else early in a career.

The honest version of the downside: in my own eleven months, a lot of the time was spent on the bench. Writing grant applications, answering tenders, running an ISO 27001 certification. That isn't everyone's experience, and some people go from project to project without a gap. But benching is a real risk in its own right, because a consultant who isn't billing for a few months becomes expensive to keep.

The more common pattern is the promise that the next project will be better, because consultancies take on whatever pays. If you're waiting on that, set yourself a deadline (a friend used three months) and start looking before it arrives, since finding the next job takes months on its own.

What do you give up by joining a startup?

Mostly salary upfront. In return you get equity, which ties what you earn to what you build.

Early-stage founders often pay themselves very little, and salaries at seed stage tend to follow. What you get instead is equity, and it changes how the work feels. Every day you work on the product, you are in some small way working on the value of something you own.

Consulting works the other way round. You earn a fixed salary whatever hours you put in, there is a ceiling, and the next raise is known in advance. The exception is making partner, which pays very well and asks for a large part of your life in return.

At a good startup, everyone holds equity in the same company, so everyone is pulling in the same direction. That's rarer in a consultancy, where people compete for the good projects.

Is a startup riskier than a corporate job?

Less than people assume. Layoffs happen everywhere. What differs is what you walk away with.

Large, supposedly safe companies lay people off constantly. A friend was let go from Cloudflare, which is about as far from a fragile startup as it gets. A corporate job is not the guarantee it looks like.

A startup that has raised a seed round of two or three million can usually run for a long time, and one backed by a top-tier investor is more likely to raise again, because that investor has already made a bet it wants to see through.

And if the startup does fold, look at where you land. You come out with experience that makes you more hireable at the next startup, or enough understanding of how companies get built to start your own. That's a very different position from being let go after three years inside a large structure.

The one situation where this lands differently is when people depend on your income. A sudden shutdown with a mortgage to pay is a real problem. Which stage you join is the lever for that.

Should you start your career at a startup or a corporate?

At a startup if you can get in. The longer you stay in consulting, the harder the move becomes.

Straight out of university, apply to startups. It shows you what building a company is actually like, and you learn in months what takes years elsewhere.

The risk with starting in consulting is getting stuck. It's common to see people go from consulting to a startup, and rare to see anyone go the other way, unless they're starting their own consultancy and keeping the revenue for themselves.

Getting a startup job straight out of university is harder though. Joining with no experience covers what founders look for instead.

Can you move from consulting to a startup later?

Yes, but expect to be asked whether you have left the billable-hours mindset behind.

After years of billing by the hour, the way a startup works is genuinely different. The question stops being how many hours this project needs and becomes how do we sell more of the one thing we make. Founders know that, and they will ask.

A friend applying to a startup after four years at a good consultancy was told they were convinced he was a strong engineer, and then asked to explain why he no longer thought like a consultant. He got the job by pointing to what he had actually done: as lead engineer on a product, he'd made product and design decisions, not just delivered to a spec. Have that answer ready before anyone asks.

Who should stay in consulting or a corporate?

Anyone who genuinely enjoys the variety or the structure, and who is honest with themselves about whether the next project will really be better.

Consulting suits people who like moving between problems and clients, and corporate suits people who want to learn how a mature product runs from people who have done it for years. Both are real reasons.

The wrong reason is waiting. If the job is only bearable because something better is supposedly coming, that is the signal to start looking, not to wait another quarter.