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Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#2Managing hypergrowth. Especially if it is investment-driven rather than customer-driven. But either way, it's hard to watch your fun and quirky little company become just another profit-motivated machine.
Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#3I'll take a wager and say it's overwork. If you're a startup, and a successful one, you're probably very busy. Busy doing a lot of things, wearing a lot of different hats. Many startups can be victims of their own success, and don't necessarily scale up well, or at least well at first. There can be some real ups and downs. If you get traction but then are in a hiring frenzy, that can be hard, since you have your normal workload, plus the additional workload of interviewing.
Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#4The dark side is probably the equity - how to actually cash out on that. For example, employees at Gilt were expecting an IPO and then eventually it got acquired by another company and devalued their stock, yet they paid taxes on the earlier value of it, and ended up losing money.
Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#5I think it's important to recognize every startup is different, some may have dark sides others will be wonderful place to work. Furthermore, people are different, and what might be a dark side to some would be attractive to others.
If you're asking HN, does that mean you feel something bad in your gut? If so, just talk to people who hired you or reach out to existing employees and try to get your questions answered. They'll help a lot more than people on HN who aren't familiar with your exact situation.
Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#6[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#7The dark side is probably the equity - how to actually cash out on that. For example, employees at Gilt were expecting an IPO and then eventually it got acquired by another company and devalued their stock, yet they paid taxes on the earlier value of it, and ended up losing money.
Assuming you get any? There are plenty of 'startups' that offer none.
Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#8Success can hide a lot of problems. Companies with wildly successful products have a strong bias toward "we must be doing everything right," when in fact the truth is only "we did some things right at some point".
That bias can make it hard to change things, even clearly broken things. It can make it hard to introduce new products, since anything new will be tiny compared to the old successful product. It can make it hard to get rid of bad managers, since their bottom line looks great.
For a view from inside this phenomenon, read http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#9The dark side is probably the equity - how to actually cash out on that. For example, employees at Gilt were expecting an IPO and then eventually it got acquired by another company and devalued their stock, yet they paid taxes on the earlier value of it, and ended up losing money.
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Re: Ask HN: What is the dark side of working at a successful startup?
#10no clear personal growth and career growth path
company wide meetings about arbitrary things that don't matter (ie. 2 people reply to the company account on twitter and suddenly EVERYONE has to get involved)
pretending someone's use (or lack thereof) of their unlimited vacation matters, because it won't after the exit or buyout or shutdown