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Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

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Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#161

Post by machomaster »

robertlagrant wrote: post #130
neilv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So anyhow, this guy who I’d worked alongside for years, who’d seen plenty of my code and wanted me to join his company, was going to make me do this homework to get an offer. Had your friend delegated the engineering hiring decisions/process to someone else, and was trying not to step on their toes? Or friend had instituted the process, and didn't think it would go well with the other people, if you looked like a n…

> Or friend was trying to put you in your employee place (where you had to meet his process), or otherwise was getting a bit full of himself, or a bit sleep-deprived and nutty? This would be a strange take. CEO shouldn't be letting people in on the nod. If hiring is someone else's job, CEO shouldn't be overriding. At best suggesting candidates but saying that it's totally the hiring manager's call. If a candidate did…

The purpose of a hiring process (as in take home assignment) is to see that the person is competent to do the job. It was already established that he was. So following a formal process is a stupid waste of time (on both ends) that has nothing to do with strengthening the company and is simply an unnecessary ego trip. The company disqualified itself.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#162

Post by navane »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #151
jongjong wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If I start a company on my own and I provide all the equity then I own all the "shares". What would it mean for those shares to "be on the open market"? If I'm not selling them then no one can buy them. If you own all the shares initially, it means you get to set the price to whatever you want (and hope that someone is willing to pay that price), or you can just hold them and keep them all to yourself. BUT, if you…

>BUT, if you decide to sell them, you can't just sell them to a specific person over the counter. You'd have to sell on a market so that anyone can potentially buy them and potentially outbid your intended investor. So if I was looking for someone who would build a company with me, someone who would take on an entrepreneurial role, provide expertise, labour or personal connections, I wouldn't be allowed to do that. I…

>>BUT, if you decide to sell them, you can't just sell them to a specific person over the counter. You'd have to sell on a market so that anyone can potentially buy them and potentially outbid your intended investor.

>So if I was looking for someone who would build a company with me, someone who would take on an entrepreneurial role, provide expertise, labour or personal connections, I wouldn't be allowed to do that. I wouldn't be allowed to give shares to employees in exchange for labour either. Nor would there be any family businesses.

A good market is an open market. If you look for someone with "certain expertise", you can offer that for money, while at the same time putting shares of your company on the market. The person could then buy the shares for money, and you can give him that money for his "expertise". But if someone else outbids that person on the shares, he will still get the money, but someone else gets the shares. If the person ONLY wants to work for those shares, and not for money, he will have to outbid the market price. If he doesn't want to outbid the market price, and you agree with that, you actually want to give him shares for free.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#163

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Saint Augustine:

"If two friends ask you to judge a dispute, don't accept, because you will lose one friend; on the other hand, if two strangers come with the same request, accept, because you will gain one friend."

It sort of applies, here, as well.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#164

Post by geryon8772 »

As a side-gig I've helped out a friend who's a solo developer of a small platform. Set up parts of his infra and implemented some good security and devops practices. On one side he's a friend so I want to make things properly. On the other side he's a friend and I freel bad charging him a decent hourly rate. Handed stuff over in the end.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#165

Post by machomaster »

golly_ned wrote: post #58

Two similar situations: - a coworker and close friend was moving into management. Went poorly. We both left within six months. We had worked incredibly well together as peers. - I joined a startup where, unbeknownst to me, the engineer who became CTO and an early hire were best friends since college. The early hire became an engineering director. He was awful. His reports knew it. We had to humor him and stop him fro…

What is CP?

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#166

Post by michaelt »

geraldhh wrote: post #116
xrd wrote: post #31

It definitely ruined a friendship of mine. His startup was making insane amounts of money. He offered me a position, then his business priorities changed and forced me into a poor role with no long term prospects. I struggled in that new role and he noticed that. He then terminated our agreement two months early. There are reasons he's right about what he did and there are reasons I'm right about being upset about it…

> As it was it left me scrambling with three small kids. you did not mention whether this early termination was communicated beforehand. nevertheless this person probably never was your friend. sry

> nevertheless this person probably never was your friend. sry

No, it's completely common for friendships to break down over business.

Very few friendships are robust enough to survive one party costing the other $20,000.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#167

Post by rgblambda »

randerson wrote: post #62

Poorly. I did all the work while my friend goofed off and ran personal errands all day. The friend eventually made a fortune selling their equity and retired young. I did not get awarded the same privilege. We no longer speak and I still get angry when I think about that. On the other hand, I have made good friends through the workplace who I would start a startup with in a heartbeat.

>while my friend goofed off and ran personal errands all day.

"A CEO's high compensation is justified by the skills, experience, and dedication they bring to the role."

I doubt this is only an issue at startups. I've noticed that the higher up the rungs of the corporate ladder you climb, the easier it is to get away with doing nothing all day.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#168

Post by funnystories »

I have been in both sides of the equation.

As an employee, it happened three times.

1. I got fired when the product got acqui-hired. I didn't have a significant exit or anything like that. He explained to me that they could only keep the most senior guys and I was ok with that. Was during college. Learned a lot during the time. (My friend was like 10 years older than me)

2. I joined a "dev collective shop" basically we were something about 10 devs and designers that would run gigs and make mvps for startups and share the profits. We had a leader (close friend of mine), very idealistic and charismatic. After a while we noticed that there were some transparency issues about money and how the projects were picked. It was very stressfull, I ended up breaking relationship with my friend. Shortly after everyone got pissed with him, he got me and some others jobs at his brother's company (a big industry) as a form of compensation. His brother was way crazier than him.

3. I worked for a friend of mine that has a small telecom company. Worked for some months, then went to a better paying job because I needed the money at the time. After that I did many consulting gigs to him and we are very close to this day (remotely, but we always talk)

As an employer, many times, but two in special:

1. I hired a close friend of mine as the tech lead. I was the CTO of a startup and it came to a point that I couldn't handle both the business side and the technical (code) side, just architecture and infrastructure. He had a very senior position at a really big payment gateway. He joined us and really gave his best to the success of the company. When we exited, we gave him lots of options so he could exit well with us.

2. At the same company, we hired a friend of mine (not very close, someone I met in college) to be a regular dev. He was a very smart guy, you know, that use his own distro and coded his own crypto wallet and the such. The thing is that he was never pushing code. Later we found out that he was doing other 3 jobs at the same time. The CEO and everyone complained a lot with me. When we were almost firing him, we noticed by his surname and after some social media searches, that his father was one of our major clients (like 30% of our revenue). So we kept him and turned him into a tech evangelist kind of guy (he ran a technical twitter for the company). Surprisingly, it yielded a lot of new clients and helped a lot with recruitment.

My takeout is that the relationship should be equivalent. You should not be "helping him" or "understanding a difficult phase" and he should not be "helping you grow" or something like that. You both are professionals that by chance are friends. No more, no less. And that your work ethic should always be high, but with friends, double or triple that.

Also, I never seen a couple that worked together and maintained a healthy relationship at the same time. It can happen, but I've never seen it.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#169

Post by fendy3002 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #130
neilv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So anyhow, this guy who I’d worked alongside for years, who’d seen plenty of my code and wanted me to join his company, was going to make me do this homework to get an offer. Had your friend delegated the engineering hiring decisions/process to someone else, and was trying not to step on their toes? Or friend had instituted the process, and didn't think it would go well with the other people, if you looked like a n…

> Or friend was trying to put you in your employee place (where you had to meet his process), or otherwise was getting a bit full of himself, or a bit sleep-deprived and nutty? This would be a strange take. CEO shouldn't be letting people in on the nod. If hiring is someone else's job, CEO shouldn't be overriding. At best suggesting candidates but saying that it's totally the hiring manager's call. If a candidate did…

Tbf the hiring already said they don't have the position open, and rather than doing something about it, the CEO asked OP to make another homework, which is also not a guarantee. Another round of interview may be fine, but another homework, that's laughable.

OTOH, it may be that the company already have one or some super programmer, that he/she carry the company to success. Having OP, if we assume is another super programmer, may halt the company rather than improve it.

Re: Ask HN: Those who've joined a friend's startup as an employee, how did that go?

#170

Post by asjir »

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #38

Didn’t end up going to work for the friend, but the situation still strained the friendship. An engineer I worked with for several years (and became friends with outside of work) started his own company, a couple of years later he recruited me to join as his business was taking off. He’d also brought in a business guy who seemed to put in lots of processes including a mandatory take-home coding assignment as part of…

Was it 10, 100 employees at the time?
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