Tell apart the main kinds of tech companies and what each is like to work in.
Goal: Tell apart the main kinds of tech companies and what each is like to work in.
Teo is two coffees deep into her morning job-search ritual when she notices something. Two postings, both say "software," both want someone "comfortable with ambiguity." One is at a company that makes a single study-planner app. The other is at an agency that "builds custom web platforms for clients." She almost treats them as the same job. They are not even close.
The first is a product company: it builds and owns one product, sells that same product to many customers, and spends years making it better. The study-planner is the whole business. Every hire, every meeting, every late night points at improving that one thing.
The second is a services company — also called an agency, a consultancy, or an outsourcing shop. It builds software for other companies for a fee, one project at a time. A retailer pays them to build a checkout site; a bank pays them to build an internal tool. When the invoice clears, they move to the next client. They own the skills, not the product.
Why Teo should care: the day-to-day feels completely different. A product company offers deep, long-term ownership of one thing, and it is where roles like product manager and product designer actually live, because there is a product to manage and design. A services company offers variety — many clients, many problems, fast — and it is often an easier first door to walk through, because agencies hire steadily and value people who learn quickly. The trade is that you rarely own a product; you rent your time to whoever's paying this quarter.
A product company asks "how do we make our thing better?" A services company asks "what does this client need built?"
Neither is the smart choice or the dumb one. But the instant Teo knows which one a job is, she knows what her year would feel like.
Davor, the ex-accountant who's one step ahead of Teo on this same track, asks her a question that sounds simple and isn't: "Who actually pays?"
That question splits tech almost in half.
B2B (Business-to-Business) means selling to other companies. Think of a payroll tool, or software a hospital buys for its staff. The customers are few and large. Nobody buys on impulse: a real deal moves through weeks to many months of conversations, and it's rarely one person signing. A buying committee weighs in — the manager who'd use it, the IT person who has to approve it, and increasingly a finance leader checking the cost. Industry data in 2025 puts the median B2B software sales cycle near twelve weeks, with six to ten stakeholders on a typical deal and big enterprise deals dragging past six months. What wins a B2B deal is ROI and business value: will this save us money or make us money? Salesforce and Workday are textbook B2B.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer) means selling to individual people, one human at a time. Think Spotify, Duolingo, a mobile game. There can be millions of customers, and they buy in seconds — they tap "subscribe," no committee, no procurement. What wins them is ease of use, design, brand, and smart use of data. The price per person is usually small, but the scale is enormous, so a tiny improvement in how many people sign up or stay is worth a fortune.
Teo's lightbulb: this single split predicts the rhythm of the place. In B2B, your colleagues obsess over a handful of big accounts and long relationships. In B2C, they obsess over millions of strangers, a signup funnel, and a retention number that twitches every day.
Teo's been quietly studying Brightwell, the 40-person edtech company she'd love to work for. It sells a subscription study-planner — clearly a product company. But then she trips on a detail. Brightwell doesn't sell to students directly. It sells to schools, and the schools hand the app to their students.
So is it B2B or B2C?
It's both, and that pattern has a name: B2B2C — business-to-business-to-consumer. The company sells to a business that serves consumers. Brightwell signs a contract with a school district (the B2B half: a slow, committee-driven sale won on educational outcomes and budget), and then thousands of students actually use the app every day (the B2C half: it has to be pleasant, or the kids abandon it). Stripe is the classic example — it sells payment tools to online shops, and your card gets charged through Stripe's rails when you buy from those shops, even though you've never heard of it at checkout.
The thing to hold onto: B2B2C is a common hybrid, not a fourth category. When Teo spots it, she shouldn't reach for a new box. She asks the two B2B2C questions: who signs the contract (the business) and who taps the screen (the consumer). A B2B2C company has to keep both happy at once.
A company is defined by what it sells and also by where it is in its life. Teo learns this in an informational call with Bao, the senior PM at Brightwell who's become her informal mentor. She asks what it's like to work there. Bao laughs and says, "Depends which year you're asking about."
A startup is small and young, still hunting for product-market fit (PMF) — proof that enough people actually want what it's built. Everyone wears many hats; the plan changes constantly; the risk of failure is real and so is the upside. It's a brutal, fast, brilliant place to learn, because you touch everything.
A scale-up has found PMF and is now growing fast. The product clearly works; the job is to sell more of it and serve more customers. There's more structure than a startup — actual teams, actual processes — but it's still dynamic, and it's hiring constantly, which means opportunity. Many people call the scale-up the career sweet spot. Brightwell, at Series A and roughly 40 people, lives right here. (For context, Series A companies usually run from a couple dozen to around fifty people, with product-market fit established and revenue growing — exactly Brightwell's shape.)
Big tech / enterprise companies are the large, established household names. Roles are specialized and narrow — you own a small, deep slice rather than the whole thing. There's more process, more stability, strong training, and strong pay. The trade is that it moves slowly and your personal impact on the giant whole is smaller.
Startup: high risk, high learning. Scale-up: fast growth, the sweet spot. Big tech: stability and structure, narrower impact.
Marisol, Brightwell's founder and a former teacher herself, embodies the tension. The freedom to build something new is the whole reason she left the classroom — and in the same breath she'll admit that a slow fundraising quarter keeps her up at night in a way a salaried job at a giant never would. That's the startup-vs-big-tech trade, lived.
So which type should Teo aim for? Renske, Brightwell's recruiter, gives her the honest answer when she asks: "There's no best. There's the one that fits what you want right now."
If Teo wants fast learning, broad impact, and can stomach risk, smaller and scale-up companies suit her — and as a career-changer that's lucky, because smaller companies are frequently more open to non-traditional and self-taught backgrounds; they hire for hunger and fit. If she wants stability, structure, training, and security, big tech suits her better, and big companies more often run structured early-career and returnship programs built for people like her.
Now the move that ties the whole topic together. Those three axes — product vs. services, B2B vs. B2C, and stage — are independent. A company is some combination of all three at once. Brightwell is product + B2B2C + scale-up. An enterprise consultancy might be services + B2B + big tech. Naming all three is how Teo reads a job posting in seconds and pictures, accurately, what the work would feel like.
Teo finally sees a real Brightwell posting: "Junior Customer Success Associate." Before this topic she'd have skimmed the title and applied blind. Now she runs the three axes.
Product or services? The ad talks about "our app," "our roadmap," "long-term customer relationships." Product. She knows there's one thing to get good at, not a parade of client projects.
B2B or B2C? The role "manages relationships with school administrators" and tracks "contract renewals." Schools sign, students use — B2B2C. So she'd be on the business-facing side, nurturing a handful of important accounts, even though thousands of students sit behind each one.
What stage? Forty people, Series A, "you'll wear several hats and help build our playbook from scratch." Scale-up. Translation: structure exists but is still being written, hiring is active, and a career-changer who's eager has a real shot.
Three reads, thirty seconds: product + B2B2C + scale-up. Teo can now picture the job honestly — relationship work with schools, a young playbook, room to grow — and write a cover note that proves she understood the company itself, beyond the title. That's the entire skill this topic was built to give her.
Pick one real tech company you already use — the app on your phone, the tool at your old job, anything. Write one sentence placing it on all three axes: product or services, B2B / B2C / B2B2C, and startup / scale-up / big tech. Then add a second sentence predicting one thing about working there (slow committee sales? millions of users? wearing many hats?). Do it for two more companies. After three, you'll read any company on instinct.
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