As the host of a podcast about building startups, I should post more frequently on LinkedIn.

My go-to excuse is that I’m short on time, but here’s the real reason: a lot of the posts the algorithm shows me feel performative and inauthentic. People want to be perceived as thought leaders because we live in an attention-based economy, and hot takes are currency.

I realized this morning over coffee that my posts don’t need to sound authoritative. If I share fact-based posts that reflect my lived experience, it’ll be harder to sound like That LinkedIn Guy.

So here goes.

The first thing I want to say plainly is something seed-stage founders keep telling me, usually off the record:

If you do product marketing for Big Tech and hope to work at — or launch — a startup after you exercise your options or get laid off, whichever comes first, you’re going to have a hard time getting someone to hire you.

This isn’t a hot take. It’s something I’ve heard from multiple seed-stage founders, many of whom have worked at large companies.

If you’ve only ever worked for a large company with abundant resources, established systems, and a clearly articulated culture, you are completely unprepared to work at an early-stage startup.

Companies like Meta and Google may have to drive adoption, but they do it with brand trust, distribution, data, teams, and resources most seed-stage startups don’t have. They don’t create a framework for customer discovery before building and shipping. They don’t need to care whether the things they build generate revenue.

Put yourself in this scenario: you’re a seed-stage CEO deciding between two product marketing candidates.

One spent two years at a startup that didn’t make it to Series A. The other worked at Meta for four years before their position was eliminated in a massive round of layoffs.

Which candidate can point to individual accomplishments? Which one has shown they can build without someone else’s playbook? Which one has proven they can do more with less?

This is not a dig at Big Tech product marketers.

People who work at those companies have the opportunity to do highly specialized work and potentially help solve problems at scale for millions of people. If you’re working for a company that aligns with your values and you don’t care for uncertainty, that’s probably where you should be.

But if your goal is to join or start an early-stage company, you should be thinking about how to prove you can operate without Big Tech conditions.

That means showing you can talk to customers before the product is fully defined. That you can turn ambiguity into a testable narrative. That you can make useful decisions without a research team, a brand halo, a sales org, a data science partner, or six layers of approval.

Early-stage CEOs don’t need product marketers who can operate a machine. They need people who can help build one.

If you’ve been laid off from Big Tech and want to work with founders, here are two suggestions:

This is the kind of gap I focus on at Fund/Build/Scale: the distance between impressive credentials and startup usefulness.

Subscribe if you’re building, joining, or advising early-stage companies and want more practical notes from founder interviews, investor conversations, and the messy work of turning an idea into a business.

And if you’re preparing for a raise, launch, or important customer conversation, I help founders pressure-test the story before the stakes get higher.

More episode recaps to come this week. Happy Monday.

— Walter.