You’ve worked several years for a large corporation with a decent salary and good benefits. After a while though you got bored of being just another peon, who did a lot but was rarely recognized, so you made up your mind and decided to jump ship, only to land in yet another large corporation. Sure you might have a higher salary now, or maybe even an office rather than a cube, but this achievement is likely to wear off as you realize that you are more or less number in a huge database of other numbers. Fed up with large firms you are craving something more exciting, and so you decide that a small startup where each team member knows you by name would be a welcome change.

Which is exactly where the problem begins for finding a job with a startup company is not exactly an easy task. First of all, major job-search web sites don’t usually have an option to filter search results by startup-company. Then again, many early stage startups probably don’t use these services anyhow, rather opting for local job-sites that might yield a better return on investment. Another strategy might be to search for startup companies directly; however, if you’ve ever tried this approach using just about any of the major search engines out there, you came away with many search results, but most of them irrelevant. Yet another strategy is to visit venture capital firm websites and examine their portfolio companies. This however is a very tedious process: First you have to find the actual venture capital firm website, then you have to look through companies that the firm is currently funding, find some that might be of interest to you, and only then examine those company web-sites for possible job listings. That is, if you are lucky and the company is no longer operating in stealth-mode and actually has a functional web-site.

As it turns out, the process of finding a gig with a startup company can be a lot simpler thanks to VentureLoop. The premise of the service is simple; bring startups, entrepreneurs and talent together. Thus, satisfying individuals that are interested in startups while helping startups locate talent they would most likely miss on the large job-posting sites. To make this happen, VentureLoop works directly with venture-backed startup companies as well as venture capital firms and is able to aggregate job postings that usually cannot be found on other job boards. Although the company has been around since 1999, it is not clear how long their startup job posting service has been online, since the logo still seems to indicate that it is in Beta. After signing up for an account, which only takes a few seconds, the site works like most other job-boards: you can search for jobs based on keywords or geographic location, create your own profile, create a search agent that will alert you of new openings, and apply for available positions - with the distinguished advantage that all positions are with startup companies. You can search for summer internship opportunities as well, albeit this functionality is currently restricted to Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan students, and an official school email address is required to gain access to that part of the site. Anyhow, if you’re yearning for the excitement and stress that only a startup can offer, and of course a possible buyout or IPO that will make you rich beyond  your wildest dreams, you would be making a mistake by not giving VentureLoop a look.