"engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company"
I stopped reading right there* . I've worked for a few big companies, a small lifestyle company, and a few startups, and I'm invariably happiest at a small company.
Financially, the book may be right: I'm not going to get rich as a startup employee, and I'll probably fail if I start my own. However, the thing I do for more than half my waking hours for the duration of my working life is something I enjoy. I get up reasonably interested in going to work, and go home feeling like I'm building something.
You can phrase it cynically if you want. You can say I'm deluded; that I'm building someone else's dream; that I could be making more money doing something else.
But I enjoy what I do, and I make enough money to support myself, so don't tell me I'd invariably be happier at a big company. I've been down that road, and it's the only time since middle school I ever considered not being a programmer.
* Ok, so I actually continued reading, but you get the point.
The whole article was filled with absurd assumptions and claims:
"...engineers tend to do quite well in structured environments, where there are clear problems to solve, and relatively badly in the chaos of a startup, where the most important skills are non-engineering ones, like being able to attract talent and investors."
What does that have to do with engineers? People tend to do well in structured environments with clear problems to solve, regardless of their background or profession. It's a small subset of people who can survive in unstructured envs, and an even smaller one that is willing to submit themselves to that masochism. If anything I would surmise that engineers have a higher percentage of that subset, but I don't have any more data than the article's writer to prove that.
"A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money."
No data presented to back that up, either.
I know it's an editorial, but if the writer wants to make such broad sweeping generalizations, he should have at least a little evidence or data to back those claims up or it's just wasted text.
Size of the company is irrelevant to me. I have found that I am happiest when I have but a single boss, and that person not only knows how to adapt people to the business and vice versa, but is also capable at least of accurately evaluating my work, even if he or she is unable to do what I do.
The worst places I have worked invariably involve a muddied chain of command, where the people with the authority to direct or redirect my work have no understanding of how or when they should do so. Often, those people are simultaneously in competition with you while you are expected to cooperate with them.
Small company size is not a guarantee of sane and rational management. Large size is not a guarantee that your bosses will be idiots. But a subunit of a larger company can fail for a much longer period of time before becoming unable to continue, so that may be what causes the perceived differential.
A dysfunctional small company fails fast. A dysfunctional unit of a large company could limp along for decades without changing. On the other side, a great small company could just never take off, and a great unit of a large company could be axed from the executive suite without any apparent reason.
I agree, that's definitely not a reasonable generalization, and "invariably" is ridiculous. Some engineers enjoy a big company more, some prefer a startup or small company, some are happy anywhere, and some are never happy.
Yep, the whole point is that it's different for different people. I've also worked for big and small companies. Personally, I'm happier at bigger companies--and not because of money. Small companies have few people and therefore more responsibilities. Some people like that kind of breadth, but I'd rather never have to write a line of deployment code. Being at a bigger company means that I can focus on my niche and the exact type of code that I enjoy.
- Assuming that engineers aren't creative, and want to work on well defined problems with well defined inputs.
- Confused our parents generation of engineers with ours.
The skills of building a good technology can also be applied to building a good company. This is one reason (intellectual signalling is another) that MBA programs like to admit engineers.
What the author does not seem to understand is that some people actually enjoy doing hard things. 35,755 people signed up for the Boston Marathon yesterday, and paid for it. Why pay to run 26 miles when you could be having a lazy Sunday breakfast instead?
I practice a form of rock climbing called bouldering. It's about walking up to a big boulder and climbing it along the hardest possible line you can. Hikers sometimes point out that "you could have just walked up on the other side."
Yes, doing a startup is hard. It can also be fun (probably type II or type III fun if you ask me). A climber named Kevin Jorgeson explained it quite well during a talk he gave at Google:
I wish some of these articles would acknowledge that you have to be a top 10-20% engineer to work for Google. A lot of us are doing ok, but don't have the talent or work-ethic or what have you to do quite that well. Regardless, great article. I personally wouldn't consider starting a company until after I was financially independent and could bootstrap it with extra money that I wouldn't care to lose. And I'd never spend more than a normal workweek at it.
For those who say that doesn't work, my Grandad started his first company at age 58 with an excess million dollars out of 5 million he had saved from working a normal job until that point. He's never worked more than 40 hours per week in his life, and 25 years later, his company is a great success, turning 1 million into 60MM and having a lot of fun doing it.
Note that for $5 million, at 58, assuming he started working at 18, is an average of $125,000 in savings per year between 1949 and 1989. I'm not sure I would call that a normal job. It's far above the median even now, much less back in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's.
Good point, if you're not at a startup, you're not necessarily going to be working for Google as an alternative. What if your alternative is to work for a stodgy non-tech firm because you're invested in a given domain (i.e., automotive, legal, biotech)?
The whole article is full of trollish comments like "There might be a generous paycheck in getting stuck on the Google bus for the next decade, but there sure ain’t any glory in it." - not all, or even most, Googlers take the bus. There is excitement and potential success stories even in large organizations like Google.
HN is best to ignore this kind of flame bait posting.
As a startup-founder (Thalmic, YC w13), I wholeheartedly disagree with the viewpoint of the author here.
Is the pressure high, and the chance of success low? Certainly.
Was the expected value of taking a Google salary rather than the risk-weighted value of starting a company higher? Again, yes.
But the missing piece here is that sometimes it's not about the money, the perks, the hours. I love doing what I'm doing today, regardless of all of the above. My two co-founders here would say the same. We get to choose exactly who we want to work with, what we want to work on, and get a real shot at having an impact on people's lives all over the world, through the products we create.
If we didn't have entrepreneurs taking this irrational leap, we wouldn't have the Google's of the world to employ those who choose the other path.
I'd recommend that anyone interested in startups download a capitalization table (Google "cap table download" without the quotes for a variety of choices), and just play with different scenarios. Plug in rounds from companies on Crunchbase (not just super-successful ones) and see what kind of money the founders are slated to get. See what happens if you don't meet expectations and go through a down round. It's better to see these possibilities before you're financially and emotionally invested in a company going through one of them.
If you still believe your startup idea is a slam-dunk after seeing how horrible things can get if there's any hiccup in the process, then you're ready to take an investor's time to give a proposal.
It seems quite obvious that if you're aiming to optimize your happiness, putting yourself into a stressful situation is never a good idea, even when you disregard the financial aspect.
As one of those young kids who've seen a lot of articles (and even HN's comments) in similar vein of this one, I'd love to see a rebuttal for those types of articles.
I know that everyone is supposed to have their own reasons, but not all of us is eloquent enough to put it into words. And some great writing to set our mind straight (in one way or another) would be great :-)
I don't know any great writing on this topic, but:
> It seems quite obvious that if you're aiming to optimize your happiness, putting yourself into a stressful situation is never a good idea, even when you disregard the financial aspect.
I disagree. For many people, to find your global optimum you have to first traverse several local minima.
In this thread there are going to be stories about people who worked a Normal Job (TM) for years and started a successful business with the savings, stories about people who bootstrapped a startup before puberty and kept it small, stories about people countering the other people with their amazing story, and stories following all kinds of patterns. And unless you're extremely fortunate, all of these stories have one thing in common: they are most likely nothing like your life and ultimately you won't be able to completely integrate them into your life story. Otherwise you'd be the one writing the story and not asking the questions ;)
While you can, and should, learn from others, at the end of the day you really do have to find your own reason to do the more difficult thing each day. If you're waiting for some magic words that are going to unlock your full potential and turn you into Time's next Person of the Year, you'll wait forever. I find it better, as I plan my day, to just think of laying on my deathbed someday, and asking myself if I'll respect the decisions I make today. (And no, the answer is not always "yes". That's life.)
I still think a lottery ticket is still has far worse ROI, than the YCombinator application and startup process.
Let's say you pony up rent for your YCombinator startup and are paying about $2400 / month + utilities for 3 months. Let's say you get your food & other necessities costs to $80 / week.
That's an $8160 investment.
What you get back are the weekly dinners with great speakers. The connections you make should be worth at least $150k if your startup fails and you have to use that connection to get a job. I'm assuming a markup in your value as an employee for just getting into YCombinator.
$8160 and you can make 20% - 35% more than your peers if it fails.
$8160 in lottery tickets will pretty much get you zero if you fail.
You're forgetting the opportunity cost of forgoing the salary of working for an existing company. Call that 10k/month for three months, and now your costs are closer to 40k.
It is my impression[0] that a YCombinator startup is a cut above other startups along a variety of criteria (they receive more support in general, they are pre-vetted). It may be perfectly reasonable[1] that forming a startup has lower expected value than a lottery ticket, but conditioned on acceptance to YCombinator, a startup has positive expectation.
[0] For reference I am not currently in SF/Silicon Valley, but my brother is, as are many of my friends.
[1] I present this as a hypothetical, I have not thought about this enough to have an estimation of the value of a `generic' startup.
If you remove tail returns and just at the financial outcomes, the roi of YC and the roi of a lottery ticket start looking very similar.
The labor market signal (plus network) is another thing entirely, YC alum is probably more valuable than Harvard or MIT in certain circles so if you just look at it as an $8k credentialing, it is an easy thing to justify.
For a first time YC founder, you get both. For a second time YC founder you would only have the financial return traits.
"No Exit makes it very clear that the life of a startup founder is a miserable one, and that engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company."
Any book that tries to tell me how I'm supposed to be happy is automatically placed in the same category as religious texts.
I'm not supporting this particular book, but there is plenty of great research about what correlates to happiness. Here's a great post to read that links to tons of research on the topic: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/
That argument is a step away from arguing that incubator companies are taking advantage of the younger tech generation. Along the lines of... by selling the illusion of likely startup success, and offering support in startups and entrepreneurship, incubators basically decrease their own investment variance and increase their own odds of successful investment performance, while the younger founders will usually (outside of the rare big winners) lose out on a few years of earning potential in a temporarily hot economy.
The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum. Even on a purely financial basis, if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones. A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money.
If it's true, that will strongly influence my opinion of the startup scene.
I'm always deeply suspicious of "statistics" that claim startups only have a 1 in 10 chance of success. From the article: "if 90% of startups fail, it simply can’t be the case that all of the startups they know are succeeding."
But it looks like that may not be so far from the truth: "About three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don't return investors' capital, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School."[1]
The thing these aggregate statistic ignore are the quality of the founders.
Let me put it concretely.
When Sebastian Thrun decided to launch Udacity I suspect the chance of failure was less then 90%. OTOH, I have 2 non-technical friends who managed to raise money to develop 2 more social networking app. I think the chance of failure there is easily 90%.
So maybe another way to put it is 'don't fool yourself'.
If you have Thrun-esque talent, start a company. If you don't, think twice, then think a third time for good measure before starting a company.
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures has blogged that even with their impressive track record, it loosely correlates to a 1/3rd rule for them. Of their investments:
1/3rd lose money,
1/3rd (mostly) break even,
1/3rd make profit.
There is a massive gulf between "winning the lottery ticket" and failing.
There are many many many startups (or whatever term you want to give them) that create a good living for the founder, and perhaps a few employees as well. Not all startups have to (read: the vat majority don't) get VP funding et-al in order to be enjoyable and provide an viable level of income.
Start a business, not a startup. You will have much more control and independence if you aren't desperate for funding and growth, not to mention you are much more likely to succeed. Startups(defined as extremely risky, high reward, growth oriented businesses) are not a very rational option for most people unless you have circumstances that mitigate the risk/stress. Also don't start yet another social/cloud/education/trendy thing here business, start something allows you to leverage your unique set of skills/knowledge/interests and experience.
Also, give up early! When you don't think something isn't worth pursuing anymore, figure out why, and don't be afraid to give up and try something else. Not every project is going to be successful and there is no shame in failing unless you have badly/unrealistically set expectations to the people you work with, in which case they are going to be rightly pissed.
One problem with the article is that is blurs the line between "founder" and "startup employee". The majority of startup employees are getting a paycheck on top of options - paycheck at lower rates than mainstream corporate work, but with a potential payoff if it succeeds. And if it fails, it's not hard for an experienced programmer to find another job.
Founders are a breed apart from programmers. If someone has that drive to create their own business from scratch, telling them that it's economically foolish to do so is like telling Van Gogh that he'd be better off painting houses - technically true, but irrelevant to the motives of the artist.
Very true. Most of the people I know working at startups, myself included, had no delusions of becoming Mark Zuckerberg or winning it big. Startups can provide a great quality of life with good benefits for employees and the big pay off can be a very small motivation for some.
> The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum... if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones
That's a very strange definition of "zero sum". The fact that VC investment is barely profitable does not mean the industry is zero-sum. There is the potential for huge value creation - the very opposite of zero-sum
Well, I'm an engineer who quit my cushy job at Google to go it alone. So, I suppose this makes me an idiot.
I think the big question the author fails to address is: Do these deluded engineers end up regretting their decisions in the long-term?
I think most people in the startup community understand that failure-- and the misery that comes with it-- comes with the territory, and the key is whether you can learn with each failure. And I would argue that there's no better to place to learn than an environment where your income depends directly on whether you're genuinely solving a problem for people (the people who "run the lottery" are your target customers, not the VCs, by the way). In my case, I've failed at over a dozen projects (some prior to my time at Google) while finding a few moderately successful ones along the way, and I'm continuing to fail, learn, and grow.
And I like to think that this better understanding of harsh realities of how the world actually works gained from doing a startup-- whether you succeed or fail, whether you end up at a small company or a large company-- is a return on your investment that continues to serve you for the rest of your career.
As someone who started a company articles like this make no sense to me.
There's money-driven people everywhere, but if you want to get rich, your best bet isn't to start a company. Work at a hedge fund and work your way up. People makes millions a year. Way easier than starting something. That being said it's also soul sucking and absolutely mindless. Provides little value.
Perhaps there's more to starting company than ecosystem?
Starting company allows you to address a problem directly. Whether that addresses a real problem, or is a cash grab, depends on founders.
Most "good founders" do it because they want to make it real. That articles propagates some kind of wannabe culture as being the real value of starting a company. Which is so lame.
Life is short and starting your own company is way better than being an employee at a big company in my opinion. If you are young you are undervalued.
Obviously it's more nuanced then this comment and not everyone is in a position to start a company or work at a small company, and hell no is it a meritocracy, lots of problems, but damn, do your own thing.
I'll tell you from experience there is a fate worse than your startup failing. That is that your startup bumps along neither making it big nor having the good grace to go out of business. You just have the monthly stress of making payroll with no end in sight. (Thankfully I'm out of that and working for The Man, and never happier)
Some people prefer to aim at the moon rather than look at the ground. The issue with this article is that even if 5% startups will succeed - thats OK. Lets create 20 startups over next 20-30 years then. Because once you succeed - you are way ahead of anything that could happen in your life when just simply working for big company. Yeah, its hard work. Yeah, you will fail few times. So what? At least you learn invaluable things.
Author seems to be missing the point... Not everyone is afraid of failure and not everyone wants good pay every month. Some people wants to fulfill their ego, needs, dreams and the price tag over this is well above living on the edge of poverty.
If author is happy to live in safety of his job and security - great. But dont judge, or try to teach people that dont want to. Its very close minded by him to do so.
[+] [-] fishtoaster|12 years ago|reply
I stopped reading right there* . I've worked for a few big companies, a small lifestyle company, and a few startups, and I'm invariably happiest at a small company.
Financially, the book may be right: I'm not going to get rich as a startup employee, and I'll probably fail if I start my own. However, the thing I do for more than half my waking hours for the duration of my working life is something I enjoy. I get up reasonably interested in going to work, and go home feeling like I'm building something.
You can phrase it cynically if you want. You can say I'm deluded; that I'm building someone else's dream; that I could be making more money doing something else.
But I enjoy what I do, and I make enough money to support myself, so don't tell me I'd invariably be happier at a big company. I've been down that road, and it's the only time since middle school I ever considered not being a programmer.
* Ok, so I actually continued reading, but you get the point.
[+] [-] bicknergseng|12 years ago|reply
"...engineers tend to do quite well in structured environments, where there are clear problems to solve, and relatively badly in the chaos of a startup, where the most important skills are non-engineering ones, like being able to attract talent and investors."
What does that have to do with engineers? People tend to do well in structured environments with clear problems to solve, regardless of their background or profession. It's a small subset of people who can survive in unstructured envs, and an even smaller one that is willing to submit themselves to that masochism. If anything I would surmise that engineers have a higher percentage of that subset, but I don't have any more data than the article's writer to prove that.
"A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money."
No data presented to back that up, either.
I know it's an editorial, but if the writer wants to make such broad sweeping generalizations, he should have at least a little evidence or data to back those claims up or it's just wasted text.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|12 years ago|reply
The worst places I have worked invariably involve a muddied chain of command, where the people with the authority to direct or redirect my work have no understanding of how or when they should do so. Often, those people are simultaneously in competition with you while you are expected to cooperate with them.
Small company size is not a guarantee of sane and rational management. Large size is not a guarantee that your bosses will be idiots. But a subunit of a larger company can fail for a much longer period of time before becoming unable to continue, so that may be what causes the perceived differential.
A dysfunctional small company fails fast. A dysfunctional unit of a large company could limp along for decades without changing. On the other side, a great small company could just never take off, and a great unit of a large company could be axed from the executive suite without any apparent reason.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praxulus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkjv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
- Assuming that engineers aren't creative, and want to work on well defined problems with well defined inputs.
- Confused our parents generation of engineers with ours.
The skills of building a good technology can also be applied to building a good company. This is one reason (intellectual signalling is another) that MBA programs like to admit engineers.
[+] [-] ZenPro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diego|12 years ago|reply
I practice a form of rock climbing called bouldering. It's about walking up to a big boulder and climbing it along the hardest possible line you can. Hikers sometimes point out that "you could have just walked up on the other side."
Yes, doing a startup is hard. It can also be fun (probably type II or type III fun if you ask me). A climber named Kevin Jorgeson explained it quite well during a talk he gave at Google:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsl4evw0a7Q
[+] [-] scrabble|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|12 years ago|reply
For those who say that doesn't work, my Grandad started his first company at age 58 with an excess million dollars out of 5 million he had saved from working a normal job until that point. He's never worked more than 40 hours per week in his life, and 25 years later, his company is a great success, turning 1 million into 60MM and having a lot of fun doing it.
[+] [-] sbov|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|12 years ago|reply
The whole article is full of trollish comments like "There might be a generous paycheck in getting stuck on the Google bus for the next decade, but there sure ain’t any glory in it." - not all, or even most, Googlers take the bus. There is excitement and potential success stories even in large organizations like Google.
HN is best to ignore this kind of flame bait posting.
[+] [-] srlake|12 years ago|reply
Is the pressure high, and the chance of success low? Certainly.
Was the expected value of taking a Google salary rather than the risk-weighted value of starting a company higher? Again, yes.
But the missing piece here is that sometimes it's not about the money, the perks, the hours. I love doing what I'm doing today, regardless of all of the above. My two co-founders here would say the same. We get to choose exactly who we want to work with, what we want to work on, and get a real shot at having an impact on people's lives all over the world, through the products we create.
If we didn't have entrepreneurs taking this irrational leap, we wouldn't have the Google's of the world to employ those who choose the other path.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gpcz|12 years ago|reply
If you still believe your startup idea is a slam-dunk after seeing how horrible things can get if there's any hiccup in the process, then you're ready to take an investor's time to give a proposal.
[+] [-] NhanH|12 years ago|reply
As one of those young kids who've seen a lot of articles (and even HN's comments) in similar vein of this one, I'd love to see a rebuttal for those types of articles.
I know that everyone is supposed to have their own reasons, but not all of us is eloquent enough to put it into words. And some great writing to set our mind straight (in one way or another) would be great :-)
[+] [-] ryanjshaw|12 years ago|reply
> It seems quite obvious that if you're aiming to optimize your happiness, putting yourself into a stressful situation is never a good idea, even when you disregard the financial aspect.
I disagree. For many people, to find your global optimum you have to first traverse several local minima.
In this thread there are going to be stories about people who worked a Normal Job (TM) for years and started a successful business with the savings, stories about people who bootstrapped a startup before puberty and kept it small, stories about people countering the other people with their amazing story, and stories following all kinds of patterns. And unless you're extremely fortunate, all of these stories have one thing in common: they are most likely nothing like your life and ultimately you won't be able to completely integrate them into your life story. Otherwise you'd be the one writing the story and not asking the questions ;)
While you can, and should, learn from others, at the end of the day you really do have to find your own reason to do the more difficult thing each day. If you're waiting for some magic words that are going to unlock your full potential and turn you into Time's next Person of the Year, you'll wait forever. I find it better, as I plan my day, to just think of laying on my deathbed someday, and asking myself if I'll respect the decisions I make today. (And no, the answer is not always "yes". That's life.)
[+] [-] barce|12 years ago|reply
Let's say you pony up rent for your YCombinator startup and are paying about $2400 / month + utilities for 3 months. Let's say you get your food & other necessities costs to $80 / week.
That's an $8160 investment.
What you get back are the weekly dinners with great speakers. The connections you make should be worth at least $150k if your startup fails and you have to use that connection to get a job. I'm assuming a markup in your value as an employee for just getting into YCombinator.
$8160 and you can make 20% - 35% more than your peers if it fails.
$8160 in lottery tickets will pretty much get you zero if you fail.
[+] [-] bcbrown|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesteamboat|12 years ago|reply
[0] For reference I am not currently in SF/Silicon Valley, but my brother is, as are many of my friends.
[1] I present this as a hypothetical, I have not thought about this enough to have an estimation of the value of a `generic' startup.
[+] [-] thatthatis|12 years ago|reply
The labor market signal (plus network) is another thing entirely, YC alum is probably more valuable than Harvard or MIT in certain circles so if you just look at it as an $8k credentialing, it is an easy thing to justify.
For a first time YC founder, you get both. For a second time YC founder you would only have the financial return traits.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _Adam|12 years ago|reply
Any book that tries to tell me how I'm supposed to be happy is automatically placed in the same category as religious texts.
[+] [-] webwright|12 years ago|reply
I'm not supporting this particular book, but there is plenty of great research about what correlates to happiness. Here's a great post to read that links to tons of research on the topic: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/
[+] [-] tunesmith|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cousin_it|12 years ago|reply
The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum. Even on a purely financial basis, if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones. A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money.
If it's true, that will strongly influence my opinion of the startup scene.
[+] [-] mhartl|12 years ago|reply
http://avc.com/2013/02/venture-capital-returns/
That's pretty bad, and it's even worse when you consider that VC is a lot riskier than buying an index fund.
[+] [-] edj|12 years ago|reply
But it looks like that may not be so far from the truth: "About three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don't return investors' capital, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School."[1]
1: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-ex...
[+] [-] riggins|12 years ago|reply
Let me put it concretely.
When Sebastian Thrun decided to launch Udacity I suspect the chance of failure was less then 90%. OTOH, I have 2 non-technical friends who managed to raise money to develop 2 more social networking app. I think the chance of failure there is easily 90%.
So maybe another way to put it is 'don't fool yourself'.
If you have Thrun-esque talent, start a company. If you don't, think twice, then think a third time for good measure before starting a company.
[+] [-] dalai|12 years ago|reply
Anyway I think the 90% failure rate might be based on this: http://www.wamda.com/2013/02/90-percent-of-tech-startups-fai...
[+] [-] Twirrim|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonoBB|12 years ago|reply
There are many many many startups (or whatever term you want to give them) that create a good living for the founder, and perhaps a few employees as well. Not all startups have to (read: the vat majority don't) get VP funding et-al in order to be enjoyable and provide an viable level of income.
[+] [-] soup10|12 years ago|reply
Also, give up early! When you don't think something isn't worth pursuing anymore, figure out why, and don't be afraid to give up and try something else. Not every project is going to be successful and there is no shame in failing unless you have badly/unrealistically set expectations to the people you work with, in which case they are going to be rightly pissed.
[+] [-] gms|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beat|12 years ago|reply
Founders are a breed apart from programmers. If someone has that drive to create their own business from scratch, telling them that it's economically foolish to do so is like telling Van Gogh that he'd be better off painting houses - technically true, but irrelevant to the motives of the artist.
[+] [-] codystebbins|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomblomfield|12 years ago|reply
That's a very strange definition of "zero sum". The fact that VC investment is barely profitable does not mean the industry is zero-sum. There is the potential for huge value creation - the very opposite of zero-sum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_sum
[+] [-] iddav|12 years ago|reply
I think the big question the author fails to address is: Do these deluded engineers end up regretting their decisions in the long-term?
I think most people in the startup community understand that failure-- and the misery that comes with it-- comes with the territory, and the key is whether you can learn with each failure. And I would argue that there's no better to place to learn than an environment where your income depends directly on whether you're genuinely solving a problem for people (the people who "run the lottery" are your target customers, not the VCs, by the way). In my case, I've failed at over a dozen projects (some prior to my time at Google) while finding a few moderately successful ones along the way, and I'm continuing to fail, learn, and grow.
And I like to think that this better understanding of harsh realities of how the world actually works gained from doing a startup-- whether you succeed or fail, whether you end up at a small company or a large company-- is a return on your investment that continues to serve you for the rest of your career.
[+] [-] riggins|12 years ago|reply
If the failure rate for all start-ups is 90%, I'm betting its lower for start-ups founded by ex-google engineers.
[+] [-] smattiso|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmitri|12 years ago|reply
There's money-driven people everywhere, but if you want to get rich, your best bet isn't to start a company. Work at a hedge fund and work your way up. People makes millions a year. Way easier than starting something. That being said it's also soul sucking and absolutely mindless. Provides little value.
Perhaps there's more to starting company than ecosystem?
Starting company allows you to address a problem directly. Whether that addresses a real problem, or is a cash grab, depends on founders.
Most "good founders" do it because they want to make it real. That articles propagates some kind of wannabe culture as being the real value of starting a company. Which is so lame.
Life is short and starting your own company is way better than being an employee at a big company in my opinion. If you are young you are undervalued.
Obviously it's more nuanced then this comment and not everyone is in a position to start a company or work at a small company, and hell no is it a meritocracy, lots of problems, but damn, do your own thing.
[+] [-] rwmj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funkyy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmitri|12 years ago|reply