I Lied at My First Job Interview

The uncomfortable truth about career growth: big brands won't make you better. Freedom to experiment will.

I lied at my first job interview.

Not a small lie. Not a “slightly embellished” version of the truth. A full-blown, made-up story about experiments I ran at my startup, Spaceonova, that I never actually ran.

I had planned to run them. I had spreadsheets. I had hypotheses. I had a whole mental roadmap of growth experiments that would’ve been brilliant. But I never executed a single one. Life happened. Resources dried up. Priorities shifted.

So when I walked into that interview, I talked about those experiments like they were my greatest hits.

And I got the job.

The Lie That Kept Compounding

At my second job interview, I did it again. This time, I lied about the things I had done at my first company. Things I had planned to do there but could not execute because the same story repeated itself. Not enough time. Not enough autonomy. Not enough room to actually try things.

Here is what nobody tells you about most jobs: you will have 50 ideas and permission to try 2 of them.

A 2024 Gallup study found that only 30% of U.S. employees feel engaged at work. That is an 11-year low. And I would bet a big chunk of that disengagement comes from people who joined companies with a head full of ideas and got told, that is interesting, but let us focus on the roadmap.

So I kept lying. Not maliciously. I was lying about the person I could have been if someone had just let me try.

Then I Found StreamAlive

My third interview was different. The founder at StreamAlive (Lux) did not ask me, What have you done? He asked, What can you do for us?

That question changed everything.

I did not have to lie. I just told them every single thing I had ever wanted to do. Every experiment I had dreamed up. Every wild hypothesis sitting in my notes. Every growth play I had been itching to try for years.

Their response? Go do it.

I spent the better part of two years at StreamAlive. And in those two years, I ran more experiments than most growth people run in five.

Some worked. Some flopped spectacularly. But nobody kept score. There was no experiment success rate KPI hanging over my head. There was just a team that said, Try it. See what happens. Learn from it.

Why Big Brands Are Career Traps (for Growth People)

I know this is a spicy take. But hear me out.

1. Big companies optimize for process, not learning

When you join a large org, you inherit playbooks. Established funnels. Best practices that someone figured out three years ago. Your job is to operate the machine, not rebuild it. A Forbes report on workplace innovation found that the most transformative ideas emerge when employees have freedom to experiment, take risks, and own their work. Most big companies give you none of that.

2. The brand on your resume is a depreciating asset

People chase names like Google, Meta, McKinsey because they think the brand will open doors forever. And sure, it helps for your next job. But what opens doors for the job after that? What you have actually done. And if all you did at Google was run the existing paid search playbook with a slightly bigger budget, that is not a story. That is maintenance.

3. Your experimentation muscle atrophies

Growth is a craft that gets sharper with reps. Every experiment you run teaches you something: about users, about channels, about what works in this specific context. At big companies, you might run 2-3 experiments per quarter. At a scrappy startup that trusts you? You could run 2-3 per week.

The Freedom Compound Effect

When I interviewed at ngram for my current role as Growth Lead, something felt different. For the first time in my career, I did not have to lie. Not a single word.

Every experiment I described? I had actually run it. Every result I quoted? I had the data. Every framework I referenced? I had built it from scratch and stress-tested it in the real world.

That is the compound effect nobody talks about. One company that gives you freedom does not just help you at that company. It makes you genuinely qualified for every company after.

How to Find Your StreamAlive

I am not saying quit your job tomorrow. But if you are early in your growth career, or feeling stuck, here is what to look for:

1. Ask the right interview question: Instead of What is the growth team structure, ask: What was the last experiment someone on this team ran that completely failed, and what happened after? The answer tells you everything.

2. Look for founders who say I don’t know. If the founder has a rigid vision for exactly how growth should work, you are going to be an executor, not an experimenter.

3. Optimize for learning velocity, not title or brand. A Senior Growth Manager title at a Fortune 500 sounds great on LinkedIn. But if you learned more in 6 months at a 20-person startup, your career trajectory will reflect that.

4. Find the chaos. The companies where everything is figured out are the companies where you will learn the least.

5. Trust the pattern: freedom now, credibility later. My career went: lie (no experience) → lie again (still no real experience) → freedom (finally got to do the work) → truth (because the work was real).

The Career Ladder Is a Lie. Build a Trampoline Instead.

Most career advice tells you to climb the ladder. Get the brand name. Move to a slightly bigger brand name. Repeat until LinkedIn is impressed.

My experience taught me the opposite. The biggest career jumps don’t come from climbing. They come from finding a place that lets you bounce.

StreamAlive was not a famous company. It did not make anyone’s eyes go wide at dinner parties. But it gave me something no big brand ever could: a body of real work that I did not have to embellish, exaggerate, or lie about.

So if you are sitting in an interview right now, stretching the truth about experiments you ran that were really just slides you made, I get it. I have been there.

But instead of getting better at lying, go find a company that makes lying unnecessary.