Why I picked Rundoo over Meta

When I was deciding between Meta and Rundoo, I kept coming back to a simple tradeoff that I think every engineer weighing big tech against a startup eventually runs into.

Reach versus scope

At a big company, you have wide reach but small scope. Whatever you ship touches millions or billions of people, which is genuinely exciting, but your slice of the product is thin. You might spend a year making one corner of one feature slightly better, and the system around you is so large that most of the interesting decisions were made long before you arrived.

At a startup, the equation flips. You have wide scope, since you might design the schema, build the feature, talk to the customer, and fix the bug all in the same week, but your reach is unknown. The product might touch a few hundred people, or it might touch nobody, because the company might simply not make it.

Here is the part that made the decision for me: if you believe in the company, you get both. Wide scope today, because that is just what working at a startup is, and wide reach tomorrow, because the company grows into it and your fingerprints are on everything it became along the way. The whole bet collapses into one question, which is whether you believe. I looked at what Rundoo was building for independent supply stores and I did.

The part I did not expect

What surprised me was just how fun it is. I like having friends at work. I like that it does not feel like a 9-to-5, where you badge out and the day evaporates behind you. We eat lunch together, we give each other a hard time, and the line between coworker and friend is pleasantly blurry.

I think that kind of culture is fostered more at startups, almost structurally. When there are a few dozen of you building something together, you cannot hide in a reorg, and you would not want to. The wins are shared, the inside jokes compound faster than the codebase, and showing up is something I look forward to.

The reach-versus-scope math got me to take the job. The people are why I am glad I did.