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Ask HN: Why did every YC startup move to hiring Founding Engineers?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Why did every YC startup move to hiring Founding Engineers?

#11

Post by dang »

YC doesn't do memos, and I doubt that partners have been telling founders to do this. Some of the lingo around startups can be fashion-driven.

Personally I find the term "founding $employee" a bit oxymoronic and I tend to take it out of job ad titles on HN when I see it.

FWIW (Sometimes engineers want to work at an existing startup for a while, in order to learn things before starting their own. That seems legit to me. But you can also found your own startup without doing anything like that. Plenty of founders do, and YC is happy to fund them.

Re: Ask HN: Why did every YC startup move to hiring Founding Engineers?

#12

Post by marssaxman »

ciguy wrote: post #8
marssaxman wrote: post #6

> just building it for themselves and retaining 100% equity I tried that once, and once was enough. It's not very rewarding to own 100% equity in a failed startup, especially when it failed because you were too focused on building the product to also build the business around it.

Fair enough but wouldn't it make sense to find a co-founder vs getting paid a relatively small amount to build someone else's thing?

If I had an idea for a business I wanted to create badly enough to go through all the stress, effort, and risk of starting a company, then yes: it would make more sense to find a co-founder.

In practice, I find business matters generally tedious, and I prefer to think about money as little as possible, so I would rather be an early employee than a founder. The reduced equity does not matter, because startup equity is generally worthless anyway.

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