There is a great post by Dharmesh Shah at his blog OnStartups, about how to land your “dream startup job.” First, it helps if that type of job is truly your dream job. But the advice that I found most relevant was his last item:

Emphasize That You “Get Stuff Done”…You can be the most brilliant engineer/marketer/whatever on the planet, but if you don’t have a tendency to get a lot of stuff done, you’re not an attractive recruit…If the startup team hires you, they want to know that you’re going to put a dent in their workload–not just come up with great ideas for other people to work on.

It’s good advice to keep reminding yourself of, even after you are hired and start work. Yes, you are smart and have great ideas, but you are not alone. In technology, we have a tendancy to look for the optimal solution and to believe that there can be some great tool that will solve all our problems. But you need to roll up your sleaves and do something more than talk about great ideas because:

• it’s arrogant and presumptuous–it sounds like you think you know better and are putting down the efforts of people who have been competently trying to solve the same challenges for months before you arrived.
• it’s lazy–talking about what could be done starts to sound like ways for you to avoid work when no progress is being made on actually doing anything.
• it’s tiring–chances are, many of your ideas were tried and rejected before because no on had time to do the detail work. That’s why they were able to justify hiring someone.

So the question to ask yourself is always, “What can I do right now?”–and then, go do it! In a startup, that’s what’s expected.