51–60 of 88 posts
I admire so many of those companies listed that I'd highly consider applying. Problem is, I'm in Toronto and only through a NAFTA VISA I can work there. I highly doubt many of the jobs are open to this Visa. That's frustrating.
This comment will sound a little confrontational, but here it goes. Why would anyone competent enough to work at one of these companies choose that path instead of being a founder?
That's actually a good question. There are several answers. One is that being a founder is not merely a matter of competence. It's also financially risky, and very stressful. So someone who was just as competent as the founders but wanted less risk or stress might prefer to be an early employee. You can titrate the amount of startupness you get in your job by the size of the company you join. If you're the first pers…
Business is a very particular discipline in its own right. While the technocrats and bureaucrats of corporate America's professional management and executive corps have certainly done enough to exaggerate its exclusivity and idiosyncratic character, the fact remains that it's a rather distinct kind of thing. The qualities that make one a good programmer, a good technologist, a good innovator, etc. aren't necessarily the same qualities that make one a competent or happy business owner, especially when, as a matter of practical necessity, much of the everyday workflow is tedious administrativia or other things banal to engineers.
I'm all for the idea that intelligent, confident and well-rounded people are better off doing something more interesting than fighting mediocre fights in the cubicle trenches, but that doesn't mean they're all--or even a majority of them--are entrepreneurially disposed per se.
Plus, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this post, joining early often brings equity with it, which, from a certain point of view, is quite an entrepreneurial proposition.
If nothing else, it's simply not mathematically possible for everyone to be the chief in the driver's seat; many technical endeavours seriously require people to build out and scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just want to code. I'm okay with the risk and glory going to someone else.
Is that attitude common, or are you one in a million? (Serious question)
The latter requirements (interesting project, high amount of autonomy, non-capricious requirement) does, however, exclude the typical "I'm an alpha-male with an MBA who can't code, I need a beta-male coder to implement my vision" situations. I have a very strict requirement when joining other companies: I can't absolutely be the smartest or most technical person in the company.
Several times I've worked on side-projects/ideas that could bloom into something and I am not opposed to starting a company to pursue that, along with another technical founder. Being a founder also means the ability to completely set the technical direction, something you can't quite get when joining as an employee (corollary: if you can't set the technical direction of a company, you're not a founder).
Success in a start-up requires drive, solving fascinating technical problems drives me. I've absolute zero interest in being involved in media or enterprise-y start-ups (either as a founder or an employee), no matter how much money is dangled in front of me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually the investors, founders and board members fuck around with the corporate structure, option splits and preferred vs. Common stock so that the employee options are worthless, anyway. That's not common in successful startups. No successful startup would want to alienate their employees this way. It wouldn't be worth it, just to recapture a few percent of stock. Common stock only gets massively diluted when a com…
Work at a Startup is a brilliant move and I'm looking forward to learning from it. I don't agree that "usually startups in trouble end up dying, or getting bought in a fire sale." I don't know if anyone has a big enough data set to give us the "correct" answer. But if you talk to thoughtful, experienced VCs and entrepreneurs who have seen many companies through their whole lifecycle (birth to IPO and beyond), I think…
FYI: Zumodrive's link at the bottom of the page is broken (zumodrive.om)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's actually a good question. There are several answers. One is that being a founder is not merely a matter of competence. It's also financially risky, and very stressful. So someone who was just as competent as the founders but wanted less risk or stress might prefer to be an early employee. You can titrate the amount of startupness you get in your job by the size of the company you join. If you're the first pers…
It doesn't seem to me that a lack of interest in starting a company is simply indicative of a lack of tolerance for stress or financial risk, nor the absence of an adventurous spirit or anything like that. Business is a very particular discipline in its own right. While the technocrats and bureaucrats of corporate America's professional management and executive corps have certainly done enough to exaggerate its exclu…
I have never worked for anything but early stage startups and wonder what it is like on the other side where pay is (almost) always certain, you can't drop into the CEOs office at a moments notice and everyone just works 9-5. It is like a foreign country to me, but one that is on my list of places to visit eventually.
Enter the Golden Handcuff phase - definitely my favorite in many ways! We were treated like royalty for a while - given lots of nice benefits and some very interesting and challenging problems to work on, with resources to match (we purchased more than 1000 powerful servers and put them in a huge cage in a colo!). We had nice offices with windows. I had a nice apartment in Palo Alto and a rental car paid for by the company for about a year.
After about a year things started to tail off. Our project became less strategically important to the company that had acquired us. We were gradually starved of resources and attention. The perks went away one by one.
The transformation was slow, but sure. Eventually even the offices with windows went away, and we were moved to crappy cubes where you couldn't see windows even if you stood on your desk.
In the end, the daily routine for everyone on the team was something like a 10am-4pm work day, filled with browsing reddit and playing ping-pong or air hockey. Nobody noticed, or if they did, they no longer cared.
Finally my Green Card arrived (after three years). As soon as it did, I quit and joined my next startup (Justin.TV).