The metaphor of early startup employee as investor seems really smart at first but is ludicrous in reality.
It is physically impossible to choose a startup like a VC because you cannot diversify your portfolio like they can. VCs can sprinkle (relatively) small amounts of money across dozens or hundreds of startups. If one fails then the impact to the portfolio is negligible. In fact, VCs expect that most of their portfolio probably won't pan out.
Good luck diversifying as an employee. Working part time at even 2 startups is obviously laughable.
If you're in it for the money, working at a startup is probably not for you. It really is akin to gambling. There may seem to be more information available than gambling, but there is so much unknown and hidden information it's damn near impossible to make a 'rational' decision.
That's not to say you should never work at a startup. Startups are often great learning opportunities because you usually have both broad and deep scope of responsibility. There's also often better alignment between management and employees because people tend to be working stuff that is materially relatable to the bottom line. It can also be a career accelerator if the company grows headcount rapidly and you suddenly become a 'senior person'™. YMMV.
The best part is stock options. Not only are you not diversified, now you get to concentrate your portfolio by buying stock in the company that provides your income.
Stock options: for concentrating your income and your investments when you're excited and biased.
I agree with you, and this was my initial response when i started reading the post.
VCs also get far more information about the company and can demand way more control. How many employees of a startup get a board seat, even if you're non-founder employee #1?
Even those diversified portfolios aren't going to have huge returns in most cases.
I think the lesson is that if your value proposition is exchanging your skills and time for money (ie, an employee) you can't parlay that into startup style returns without essentially winning the lottery. If you can pick the next unicorn for employment purposes don't waste your talents on actually being an employee
> It is physically impossible to choose a startup like a VC because you cannot diversify your portfolio like they can.
As an employee though you can contribute your sweat equity on a daily basis, rather than needing to make your contribution upfront. So if you figure out the startup is a scam after day 3 of working there full time, you're free to quit immediately with basically no sunk cost. If investors could drip out their cash on a daily basis then most probably wouldn't put in the work to be fully diversified. So yeah, it's a difference, but I think it's a little overstated if you're just comparing the raw numbers of startups each group has equity in.
What I think is a bigger difference is that employees don't have to worry about IRR. If as an employee it takes you an extra two years to get to liquidity, that makes basically zero material difference in your quality of life. Whereas as a professional investor that can destroy your business. On that basis I think this piece may overstate the value in looking for signal. As an investor, placing your bet on someone who is going to be successful but not for another couple years is basically the same as a loss. But that's not really true as an employee.
It's actually easier to "invest" as an employee than as a VC. VC's have to wait until the next round, and have to compete with other VCs.
As a potential employee, you can see a company wildly succeeding (twitter in 2009, uber in 2012-13, slack, github, etc) and yet they will have <200 employees and their stock options will be granted at a 409a valuation around ~100million. Its a pretty reasonable bet at that point.
You will hit some underperformers/duds (coinbase? bird?), but you will have worthwhile stock options a good chunk of the time.
No one can predict with certainty which startups will fail and which won’t. If someone did there would be just one VC firm that grossly outperformed everyone else. The truth is you get the smartest people out there, make the most careful bets you can, and you still lose or break even 9 out of 10 times.
Anyone who is joining an early stage startup primarily to get rich has got their eye on the wrong prize. Join because you like the early stage craziness. Join because you care about the mission. Join to learn. If you want to get rich, work at Fang for 10 years. That’s a lot more certain.
Even if you are not in it for the money, joining a big company gives you good income right away. Speaking from experience, the quality of life change when you don't have to worry about daily expenses is enormous. Being able to buy high quality groceries, eating out when you want to, spending time/money on hobbies, etc. can improve quality of life significantly. Besides these selfish reasons, it's also possible to donate a much higher percentage of your income for good causes.
Between my wife and I (both software engineers), we have played this VC startup game 5 times. Never again.
That's missing the point. You can't get the same deal as an investor, true, but you can still do the due diligence they do. Or at least you should try to as much as you can.
This isn’t really true. The experience you can only get at a startup is learning to work with VCs, the board, early strategic partners and so on. This will be dangled in front of you like a carrot but as a mere employee you will never get meaningful exposure here. Unfortunately, like “dilution”, this is something that founders hope you don’t know so they can exploit you.
I worked at three startups before taking the current break I'm on - one I left before my stock was worth anything (would have paid out a small amount in an acquisition), another, the stock is now worth zero, and the third has a shot at being worth about a year's salary if current late-stage valuation is to be representative of a potential buyout/IPO (I'd say odds are alright this will happen). While I try not to think about it, because honestly the experience was worth it, I would have made far more over the last eight years of my career staying put at BigCo.
With that being said...
All three times, despite considering myself a pretty rational person, I got this strange psychological delusion when joining the startup that it was going to somehow magically make me rich. I think it's probably the "honeymoon" stage of joining any company. Things are awesome! The culture is fast-paced, chaotic, and offers plenty of opportunity! This is a rocket ship! It kind of matches the "what if" feeling of buying a lotto ticket. It's impossible not to imagine what might happen.
I think if I jump back into startupville, my cynicism toward the "get-rich-fast with these private options" will outweigh the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed sensation of my 20s.
IMO there's only two paths that really makes sense now when considering a private co. Either a) join super early (e.g. penny strike price) with a meaningful % of total company (at least 10 bps) OR b) join late stage growth co that offers RSUs over options (e.g. "Softbank" stage cos).
Joining a "middle" stage co where you are offered expensive options is the worst, since you've missed out on the early upside and you take on a ton of risk due to cost of exercising.
Best risk-reward is VP or SVP level at Series C or D company which gets you options for 1-2% of the company... switch every 18 months to diversify and build a portfolio but negotiate 10 year exercise window on your options when you leave rather than the standard 90 days.
Thousands of execs doing that around Silicon Valley working through Daversa and other executive recruiters (who themselves get $85K-$100K per executive hire).
I can't upvote this comment enough. The bottomline for risk keen candidates is to get in with founder's equity and risk averse (and experienced, of course) to work with a headhunter to maximize your chances of building wealth.
That's what I hear too these days. The risk/reward sweet spot in the Valley apparently is either VC (collect management fee for a few years, don't have to show results for a while) or what you said, which is being an executive at a 50+ person company that's shown a very strong trajectory of revenue growth.
Or you could just take a non startup job for higher pay and buy 0.1% of a bunch of late stage startups on EquityZen or Equidate. No need to wait 10 years...
An aside to this article: along with thinking like an investor, you can also reach out to investors who will often be willing to help with your job search.
For example, as a seed VC there are now about 80 companies at various stages that my fund works with. If someone emails me and says, "I'm a good engineer who wants to join a Series A startup in SF or Oakland that has characteristics X, Y, and Z," there's a good chance I can make a few useful recs.
There's nice incentive alignment here: the VC doesn't get any compensation, they just want their companies and the prospective employee to do well. That means 1) we won't recommend a bad fit to an employee because we want the employee to join and be happy and get their friends to ask us for company recs; 2) we won't recommend a bad fit to a company because we want founders to like us and not feel distracted by us. We're going for quality, not quantity -- and you're welcome to ignore our suggestions. So if you're good at what you do and are looking to join a startup, consider soliciting recs from a few investors with large portfolios.
> However you will learn significantly more, build a stronger network, and accelerate your career trajectory much faster by joining a successful startup than an average one.
smack forehead Yes, what ever could I have been thinking before! Yes, yes, I should only be joining a successful startup, not an average one!
> steep career trajectories, like Jeff Dean, Marissa Mayer or Chris Cox.
Yes yes! New plan: be Jeff Dean!
> Next, you need to evaluate the strength of the team and market
Unfortunately, this is not realistically possible for most non name-brand candidates. The company is not going to entertain the amount of inquiry (due diligence) you would need to pursue.
> Evaluating the relationship between founders is as important as evaluating the founders themselves.
Indeed it is! Good luck getting access to do that ...
This article is just more hyperbole from triplebyte. I wonder how their business is doing ...
> one thing we learned at YC was not to be fooled by large absolute numbers. What matters most is the growth rate.
triplebyte, put your money where your mouth is and advertise your top line growth rate, not the fact that you are profitable. When your fee is on the order of $30k per hire and your infra and operating costs are low, I expect you to be profitable.
Evaluating the strength of the team and the market is something you can do with zero involvement from the company, and you probably shouldn't depend on them to tell you either even if they offered.
Getting a sense of founder dynamics can be harder, depending on stage, but it's easy if you're early enough. I interviewed at Dropbox when it was 20 people and it was obvious what roles Drew and Arash played, as an example. At a larger stage this is harder, but you have more public sources of information at that point.
Regarding Triplebyte's profits, you should be asking how fast they're growing.
Probably one of your main considerations should be how you are left if the startup dies. There's plenty of good advice here about how to pick a startup that might succeed.
So there's a few considerations:
- Have you got some savings, in case it dies suddenly? You need to be able to pay rent until you find another job. Hopefully the startup is located near these other jobs.
- Does it allow you to build on existing experience? If you can claim you're in the same industry, you're not losing much (perceived) seniority by trying your luck for a bit.
- Does it give you an easy promotion? This is probably one of the main things a startup can offer. Just being able to add "Senior" to your name or "Team Lead" a few years before you would in BigCo might be worth it.
- Do you get to work with the tech that you want for your CV? You probably have an idea of what's hot to have on a CV, and a startup is relatively new, so maybe you can direct things that way?
> It's also only by joining a successful startup early that you can get remarkably steep career trajectories, like Jeff Dean, Marissa Mayer or Chris Cox.
The number of people with these sort of "career trajectories" is vanishingly small. This reminds me of what Phil Greenspan wrote (2006?), mocking the college student's career evaluation process:
"I can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."
Even top VCs need a portfolio of companies to produce a return. If you asked a VC to bet a whole fund on a single company :) and these are people who's full time job is to pick companies
Start up employees take on far more risk than startup investors. Investors can diversify over 10s or 100s of companies but an employee has to pick just one and bet their career on it.
TripleByte is a hiring agency with a financial interest in placing people with startups of all sizes and financial states. This information should be taken with a grain of salt.
Naive question: why not work for a FAANG, try to make close to half a million after enough time, promotions and jumping ship between the different firms, then just invest whatever you're not spending into the stock market or whatever other assets you choose? Take the 400k you're not spending and dump into Tesla and friends, or whatever other sexy stock du jour?
Seems like a much healthier risk profile unless you ONLY want a huge Google-like unicorn outcome as an early employee.
If you can, you probably should! I've come to believe that the best chances of getting a financial benefit (as opposed to just an experience benefit) from working at a startup is to be a founder. If you're "just" an engineer, it's unlikely to be worth it.
I accepted early on that working for a startup will probably not make me rich. Quite the opposite, I may wake up one day and find out that I no longer have a job or my next salary isn't coming. I'm not the kind of person who believes in gambling. Working and living in Europe doesn't really help with the vision that I might join a European unicorn startup, whose stocks might not be worthless one day.
However I do see a lot of benefits that come with working for a startup. You can voice your opinion and be heard. Pushing code to production on your first day. Owning what you do and being able to make decisions. Creating your own environment in which you can learn and become a better developer.
And, most importantly, startups are more open to remote than BigCo Inc.
Monetary compensation might be less, but freedom has a price. If I'm able to work remotely, I can move to a place that is cheaper to live.
Most of the startups I've come across in Europe usually pay at or near to market rates. Maybe it's just my experience (I've mostly been working as a contractor), but I find this somewhat surprising, given that the social structures here mean that taking a risk by working unpaid/lower pay for a startup isn't such a big issue.
I think the author should produce some data showing this is a viable strategy before he gives people advice that could lose them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other people have pointed out the statistical problems with this strategy so I won't restate them.
The author may sincerely believe in his own advice, but we should note that he did not, himself, get rich this way.
A dropout from elite UK universities, he founded a startup and exited for a small amount of money. Since then he has worked for Y Combinator, invested, and also founded a few companies.
Taggar has never, himself, been anything like a startup employee. And great for him; he seems extremely talented and maybe that route isn't for him. But his company (TripleByte) profits from directing talented people into these kinds of companies.
This is how I've approached joining the last two companies I've signed on with. In the hiring process I ask to speak with finance and the founders to see if the company has the legs to be a real rocket ship. Remember that an interview is just as much about them interviewing you as it is for you to interview them.
,,It's also only by joining a successful startup early that you can get remarkably steep career trajectories, like Jeff Dean''
It's sad that Jeff Dean is the last example the article can give. When evaluating a startup as an investor, I see that while investors get great terms, employees get junk options. So until it changes, I'm just staying with big companies, thank you very much.
Bad advice. You shouldn't pick a startup solely based off these criteria. You are a very minor investor that is the last to get paid. Investors can accept far more risk and reward, and care very little for things like whether the employees are happy.
Does the work look interesting? Will you learn new things?
Do you like the problem space the startup operates in?
Some good points there. A couple of things to add from my experience.
The asking hard questions is very important. I once interviewed with a startup that just raised $3MM. You pay them a small fee and if your flight gets cancelled they find you a new one for free. I pressed the founder hard on why someone like me would buy that insurance and his answer eventually was for the same reason you buy insurance for your car or house. Once he gave me that answer I knew I'm not going to work there. And this was actually a nice startup with some good people. There are much worse startups with founders who have no clue and god knows how they managed to raise money. One founder once told me he is well connected and one phone call and people write him checks (red flag). Then there are the ones who are really shady and will lie about everything. Be very careful and don't ignore the red flags!
Another important point is that you need to make sure the startup really needs you. In the past I talked with two startups that built their pitch around AI but they had very little knowledge of AI so what they had in mind wasn't really possible and even if it was, the product had millions of other things to succeed before AI was even needed. The problem is that founders sometimes focus too much about their pitch and how to impress investors rather than on their product.
The author writes from the point of view of an investor. How likely it is that as a candidate for a job, they would give you all that service and access to all that information? A meeting with all the founders?
Unless you're a valued, seasoned industry veteran, joining a very early stage startup founded by 20-somethings, would you really be able to access all that the author suggests?
“If you're happy working where you are, and you don't have any ambition to do anything else, you're probably going to get paid less and work more if you leave for a startup. If getting paid less and working more is unappealing to you, then I would recommend staying where you are!”
There's another option. You can pick a job that isn't a startup, that makes you hate your life, and phone it in every day just to get by. You save your energy and grind away at night on your own company. I say "company" instead of startup because I don't think venture capital is the right thing to pursue for a single founder doing this.
Just have a goal to build a product that has at least 1000 customers paying $10/mon so you can quit your dayjob. The hatred of your dayjob will fuel your motivation to work at night.
A startup is much riskier than taking this approach. You put in 60 hours a week at a startup and even in the very unlikely scenario it pays off and the startup becomes huge - at most you have a 1% stake and become a millionaire. You become a millionaire way easier working on your own project.
So my philosophy is to get a job you hate - work to build the future you want yourself - never let anyone else exploit you to the point where the only way you become a millionaire is if they become a billionaire.
Rather than treating predicting startup success as an intractable problem, I think anyone considering joining a startup should act like a startup investor making a bet on how much the value of equity in that startup will grow over time. Startup investors do this for a living and that's essentially what you are too. You're investing your time and they are investing money.
Hrm, the parallel feels really forced to me. You can invest money in multiple startups at the same time, to hedge your bets. You can't do that with your time if you plan on working full-time.
If you look at total comp as a function of preferred investment price - exercise price, startup employees are underpaid left relative to big company / deck orb employees (or in other words, are overpaying for shares relative to investors). This is of course not considering any risk premium that employees would have due to inability to diversify.
Do you believe prospective employees, often with little experience in the startup world, can do a better job of picking winners than VCs can?
Actually, what startup investors do for a living is convince rich people that they can accurately bet on the growth of the equity value. This is different from actually accurately betting on the growth of the equity value. VC firm profits can come from fees -- they don't necessarily reflect the performance of the underlying investment.
the best advice I can offer is to join a team that has deep pockets. the biggest reason my company succeeded is that they had cash to burn. sure, they were smart. they moved quickly, they dropped failing products instead of holding on to them. they made consistently good decisions. but they also were able to sink millions into the company's products and promotion thereof without going under for years, long enough to stumble upon a hugely profitable model.
no idea how to assess the size of a company's pockets. maybe one that has a founder who has already had a successful exit. every other attribute of a company is basically fortune telling.
This kind of advice is similar to the "get rich day trading stocks" narrative. It only sounds realistic if you are ignorant of the statistical probabilities involved (it seems most people are).
A vast majority of VC funds produce weak or negative returns. And this is after diversifying their fund investment across 10+ start-ups and assuming that 90% are going to be losers compared to putting that money in public equities.
You can't work for 10+ companies at once like a VC can. And even if you could, the odds are still against you. The idea that you'll be able to pick ONE winner at an early stage is, quite frankly hilarious and naive.
Another major reason that you won't be able to pick the winner is because you only get to pick once, and then you are booked for a long time. If you think a better one comes along you now have a sunk cost, and you'll be starting all over again, with a very good chance that your 'better' one will end up being worse. So the odds are very much against you if you are evaluating start-ups serially.
The better way to do it is to evaluate a whole pile of them at once, and then to pick the best one that you can find. And you're going to have to do a lot of work to evaluate those options, about as much as though your future depends on it, because it does. If you're not prepared to put in that kind of work then it really is just a lottery, and you're most likely better off to just take a job that pays you roughly what you are worth on the market, in the longer term that + a good savings regime will be a much surer path to some serious cash than buying lottery tickets at an opportunity cost of 300-500K each.
I think the right way to think about this problem is treating picking the winner at an early stage as a probability. Even though the value of the probability is small, you'd still want to maximize it when you're picking a startup to join, and you can do much better than picking randomly. You can continue to evaluate the probability after joining a startup.
tschwimmer|7 years ago
It is physically impossible to choose a startup like a VC because you cannot diversify your portfolio like they can. VCs can sprinkle (relatively) small amounts of money across dozens or hundreds of startups. If one fails then the impact to the portfolio is negligible. In fact, VCs expect that most of their portfolio probably won't pan out.
Good luck diversifying as an employee. Working part time at even 2 startups is obviously laughable.
If you're in it for the money, working at a startup is probably not for you. It really is akin to gambling. There may seem to be more information available than gambling, but there is so much unknown and hidden information it's damn near impossible to make a 'rational' decision.
That's not to say you should never work at a startup. Startups are often great learning opportunities because you usually have both broad and deep scope of responsibility. There's also often better alignment between management and employees because people tend to be working stuff that is materially relatable to the bottom line. It can also be a career accelerator if the company grows headcount rapidly and you suddenly become a 'senior person'™. YMMV.
econner|7 years ago
Stock options: for concentrating your income and your investments when you're excited and biased.
fhbdukfrh|7 years ago
VCs also get far more information about the company and can demand way more control. How many employees of a startup get a board seat, even if you're non-founder employee #1?
Even those diversified portfolios aren't going to have huge returns in most cases.
I think the lesson is that if your value proposition is exchanging your skills and time for money (ie, an employee) you can't parlay that into startup style returns without essentially winning the lottery. If you can pick the next unicorn for employment purposes don't waste your talents on actually being an employee
Alex3917|7 years ago
As an employee though you can contribute your sweat equity on a daily basis, rather than needing to make your contribution upfront. So if you figure out the startup is a scam after day 3 of working there full time, you're free to quit immediately with basically no sunk cost. If investors could drip out their cash on a daily basis then most probably wouldn't put in the work to be fully diversified. So yeah, it's a difference, but I think it's a little overstated if you're just comparing the raw numbers of startups each group has equity in.
What I think is a bigger difference is that employees don't have to worry about IRR. If as an employee it takes you an extra two years to get to liquidity, that makes basically zero material difference in your quality of life. Whereas as a professional investor that can destroy your business. On that basis I think this piece may overstate the value in looking for signal. As an investor, placing your bet on someone who is going to be successful but not for another couple years is basically the same as a loss. But that's not really true as an employee.
fizx|7 years ago
As a potential employee, you can see a company wildly succeeding (twitter in 2009, uber in 2012-13, slack, github, etc) and yet they will have <200 employees and their stock options will be granted at a 409a valuation around ~100million. Its a pretty reasonable bet at that point.
You will hit some underperformers/duds (coinbase? bird?), but you will have worthwhile stock options a good chunk of the time.
sbilstein|7 years ago
Engineers spend a grueling month or two getting onsite offers from maybe 8 companies at the most and one or two offers.
Agree 100%, a very misleading metaphor.
xivzgrev|7 years ago
No one can predict with certainty which startups will fail and which won’t. If someone did there would be just one VC firm that grossly outperformed everyone else. The truth is you get the smartest people out there, make the most careful bets you can, and you still lose or break even 9 out of 10 times.
Anyone who is joining an early stage startup primarily to get rich has got their eye on the wrong prize. Join because you like the early stage craziness. Join because you care about the mission. Join to learn. If you want to get rich, work at Fang for 10 years. That’s a lot more certain.
throwaway9128|7 years ago
Between my wife and I (both software engineers), we have played this VC startup game 5 times. Never again.
imh|7 years ago
gaius|7 years ago
This isn’t really true. The experience you can only get at a startup is learning to work with VCs, the board, early strategic partners and so on. This will be dangled in front of you like a carrot but as a mere employee you will never get meaningful exposure here. Unfortunately, like “dilution”, this is something that founders hope you don’t know so they can exploit you.
sharkweek|7 years ago
With that being said...
All three times, despite considering myself a pretty rational person, I got this strange psychological delusion when joining the startup that it was going to somehow magically make me rich. I think it's probably the "honeymoon" stage of joining any company. Things are awesome! The culture is fast-paced, chaotic, and offers plenty of opportunity! This is a rocket ship! It kind of matches the "what if" feeling of buying a lotto ticket. It's impossible not to imagine what might happen.
I think if I jump back into startupville, my cynicism toward the "get-rich-fast with these private options" will outweigh the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed sensation of my 20s.
dawhizkid|7 years ago
Joining a "middle" stage co where you are offered expensive options is the worst, since you've missed out on the early upside and you take on a ton of risk due to cost of exercising.
mrnobody_67|7 years ago
Thousands of execs doing that around Silicon Valley working through Daversa and other executive recruiters (who themselves get $85K-$100K per executive hire).
kkotak|7 years ago
BadassFractal|7 years ago
naveen99|7 years ago
lpolovets|7 years ago
For example, as a seed VC there are now about 80 companies at various stages that my fund works with. If someone emails me and says, "I'm a good engineer who wants to join a Series A startup in SF or Oakland that has characteristics X, Y, and Z," there's a good chance I can make a few useful recs.
There's nice incentive alignment here: the VC doesn't get any compensation, they just want their companies and the prospective employee to do well. That means 1) we won't recommend a bad fit to an employee because we want the employee to join and be happy and get their friends to ask us for company recs; 2) we won't recommend a bad fit to a company because we want founders to like us and not feel distracted by us. We're going for quality, not quantity -- and you're welcome to ignore our suggestions. So if you're good at what you do and are looking to join a startup, consider soliciting recs from a few investors with large portfolios.
I wrote a short post about this a few years ago: https://www.codingvc.com/using-investors-to-find-the-ideal-s...
I might regret posting this invite on HN, but if you want to join a startup and want recs, my email is in my blog's header.
techslave|7 years ago
smack forehead Yes, what ever could I have been thinking before! Yes, yes, I should only be joining a successful startup, not an average one!
> steep career trajectories, like Jeff Dean, Marissa Mayer or Chris Cox.
Yes yes! New plan: be Jeff Dean!
> Next, you need to evaluate the strength of the team and market
Unfortunately, this is not realistically possible for most non name-brand candidates. The company is not going to entertain the amount of inquiry (due diligence) you would need to pursue.
> Evaluating the relationship between founders is as important as evaluating the founders themselves.
Indeed it is! Good luck getting access to do that ...
This article is just more hyperbole from triplebyte. I wonder how their business is doing ...
https://triplebyte.com/careers:
> We've already achieved profitablity
But if I may quote from this article:
> one thing we learned at YC was not to be fooled by large absolute numbers. What matters most is the growth rate.
triplebyte, put your money where your mouth is and advertise your top line growth rate, not the fact that you are profitable. When your fee is on the order of $30k per hire and your infra and operating costs are low, I expect you to be profitable.
sulam|7 years ago
Getting a sense of founder dynamics can be harder, depending on stage, but it's easy if you're early enough. I interviewed at Dropbox when it was 20 people and it was obvious what roles Drew and Arash played, as an example. At a larger stage this is harder, but you have more public sources of information at that point.
Regarding Triplebyte's profits, you should be asking how fast they're growing.
Finally, we should all be Jeff Dean. :)
lordnacho|7 years ago
So there's a few considerations:
- Have you got some savings, in case it dies suddenly? You need to be able to pay rent until you find another job. Hopefully the startup is located near these other jobs.
- Does it allow you to build on existing experience? If you can claim you're in the same industry, you're not losing much (perceived) seniority by trying your luck for a bit.
- Does it give you an easy promotion? This is probably one of the main things a startup can offer. Just being able to add "Senior" to your name or "Team Lead" a few years before you would in BigCo might be worth it.
- Do you get to work with the tech that you want for your CV? You probably have an idea of what's hot to have on a CV, and a startup is relatively new, so maybe you can direct things that way?
ken|7 years ago
The number of people with these sort of "career trajectories" is vanishingly small. This reminds me of what Phil Greenspan wrote (2006?), mocking the college student's career evaluation process:
"I can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."
qaq|7 years ago
microtherion|7 years ago
ryandrake|7 years ago
dabockster|7 years ago
kkotak|7 years ago
kbutler|7 years ago
kelp|7 years ago
The rest basically failures or zombies that made me no extra money.
Probably a little more lucky than most.
BadassFractal|7 years ago
Seems like a much healthier risk profile unless you ONLY want a huge Google-like unicorn outcome as an early employee.
owyn|7 years ago
sciencewolf|7 years ago
artiscode|7 years ago
However I do see a lot of benefits that come with working for a startup. You can voice your opinion and be heard. Pushing code to production on your first day. Owning what you do and being able to make decisions. Creating your own environment in which you can learn and become a better developer.
And, most importantly, startups are more open to remote than BigCo Inc.
Monetary compensation might be less, but freedom has a price. If I'm able to work remotely, I can move to a place that is cheaper to live.
fyfy18|7 years ago
throwaway190107|7 years ago
The author may sincerely believe in his own advice, but we should note that he did not, himself, get rich this way.
A dropout from elite UK universities, he founded a startup and exited for a small amount of money. Since then he has worked for Y Combinator, invested, and also founded a few companies.
Taggar has never, himself, been anything like a startup employee. And great for him; he seems extremely talented and maybe that route isn't for him. But his company (TripleByte) profits from directing talented people into these kinds of companies.
acconrad|7 years ago
davidw|7 years ago
Honest question; seems like it's a tougher thing to get access to than for a VC, but maybe I'm wrong.
xiphias2|7 years ago
It's sad that Jeff Dean is the last example the article can give. When evaluating a startup as an investor, I see that while investors get great terms, employees get junk options. So until it changes, I'm just staying with big companies, thank you very much.
jorblumesea|7 years ago
Does the work look interesting? Will you learn new things?
Do you like the problem space the startup operates in?
How is the culture? Fit or not?
Will you be happy there?
tinyhouse|7 years ago
The asking hard questions is very important. I once interviewed with a startup that just raised $3MM. You pay them a small fee and if your flight gets cancelled they find you a new one for free. I pressed the founder hard on why someone like me would buy that insurance and his answer eventually was for the same reason you buy insurance for your car or house. Once he gave me that answer I knew I'm not going to work there. And this was actually a nice startup with some good people. There are much worse startups with founders who have no clue and god knows how they managed to raise money. One founder once told me he is well connected and one phone call and people write him checks (red flag). Then there are the ones who are really shady and will lie about everything. Be very careful and don't ignore the red flags!
Another important point is that you need to make sure the startup really needs you. In the past I talked with two startups that built their pitch around AI but they had very little knowledge of AI so what they had in mind wasn't really possible and even if it was, the product had millions of other things to succeed before AI was even needed. The problem is that founders sometimes focus too much about their pitch and how to impress investors rather than on their product.
sampo|7 years ago
Unless you're a valued, seasoned industry veteran, joining a very early stage startup founded by 20-somethings, would you really be able to access all that the author suggests?
sjg007|7 years ago
JohnFen|7 years ago
But then, my goal is primarily to do meaningful work on interesting projects. I have little interest in getting rich.
halfjoking|7 years ago
There's another option. You can pick a job that isn't a startup, that makes you hate your life, and phone it in every day just to get by. You save your energy and grind away at night on your own company. I say "company" instead of startup because I don't think venture capital is the right thing to pursue for a single founder doing this.
Just have a goal to build a product that has at least 1000 customers paying $10/mon so you can quit your dayjob. The hatred of your dayjob will fuel your motivation to work at night.
A startup is much riskier than taking this approach. You put in 60 hours a week at a startup and even in the very unlikely scenario it pays off and the startup becomes huge - at most you have a 1% stake and become a millionaire. You become a millionaire way easier working on your own project.
So my philosophy is to get a job you hate - work to build the future you want yourself - never let anyone else exploit you to the point where the only way you become a millionaire is if they become a billionaire.
shoo|7 years ago
See Dan Luu's articles about "big company vs startups" and "options versus cash"
https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
https://danluu.com/startup-options/
Harj|7 years ago
arachnids|7 years ago
ummonk|7 years ago
Do you believe prospective employees, often with little experience in the startup world, can do a better job of picking winners than VCs can?
asdfasgasdgasdg|7 years ago
wolco|7 years ago
nadim|7 years ago
At a bare minimum. Probably more often.
raygelogic|7 years ago
no idea how to assess the size of a company's pockets. maybe one that has a founder who has already had a successful exit. every other attribute of a company is basically fortune telling.
nikanj|7 years ago
takanori|7 years ago
https://medium.com/@therealpankaj/interview-questions-to-ask...
rohithb|7 years ago
known|7 years ago
throaway9999|7 years ago
pembrook|7 years ago
A vast majority of VC funds produce weak or negative returns. And this is after diversifying their fund investment across 10+ start-ups and assuming that 90% are going to be losers compared to putting that money in public equities.
You can't work for 10+ companies at once like a VC can. And even if you could, the odds are still against you. The idea that you'll be able to pick ONE winner at an early stage is, quite frankly hilarious and naive.
jacquesm|7 years ago
The better way to do it is to evaluate a whole pile of them at once, and then to pick the best one that you can find. And you're going to have to do a lot of work to evaluate those options, about as much as though your future depends on it, because it does. If you're not prepared to put in that kind of work then it really is just a lottery, and you're most likely better off to just take a job that pays you roughly what you are worth on the market, in the longer term that + a good savings regime will be a much surer path to some serious cash than buying lottery tickets at an opportunity cost of 300-500K each.
echevil|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
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seretogis|7 years ago
dawhizkid|7 years ago
general8bitso|7 years ago