What is a startup anyway? It can be anything between a 2 people business without a cent to a company with 500 employees that raised 300 million dollars. Even Airbnb is considered a startup in the media. When talking about these things it's very important to distinguish what stage the startup is in because the experience varies wildly. A pre-seed startup is not the same as a round-X startup.
Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
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Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#792What is a startup anyway? It can be anything between a 2 people business without a cent to a company with 500 employees that raised 300 million dollars. Even Airbnb is considered a startup in the media. When talking about these things it's very important to distinguish what stage the startup is in because the experience varies wildly. A pre-seed startup is not the same as a round-X startup.
I don't think working for a big, well funded startup will be that much different than a big corp in terms of work life balance, stability etc.
You have mass firings in Microsoft too.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#793-A perspective from Chicago- Early stage engineer at startups (including a unicorn): pros: Fun work, you learn a ton, unlimited PTO (if you can actually use it), lavish benefits like free lunch, decent company culture, opportunities to try new things. cons: Poor work life balance, low chance of a bonus, low equity if any, poor management/leadership, lots of hand wavey bs about being number 1, poor career progression,…
Maybe Glassdoor and Angellist are not good sources but nowhere have I found any kind of jobs with that level of compensation. Then again, 100k-250k is a HUGE range and I imagine the distribution is heavily skewed towards the lower end.
200k is not hard to get in the bay if you have more than 4/5 years experience in a similar position or more than 8/9 years experience in the industry. For most unicorns that's the 75% percentile for base compensation in Sr. Software Engineer roles.
Edit for data: base at Google is 191k so I'm not that off with my estimation https://www.paysa.com/salaries/google--senior-software-engin...
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#794Background: Mostly startups (10 person, 30 person, 3 person accelerated at Imagine K12) but also large companies (Amazon, Bosch, Oracle)
Pros: 1. Depending on your own personality and the size of the company, regardless of your role you have the opportunity to actually drive direction across the company. 2. While titles aren't important in my opinion, startups do allow you climb the proverbial ladder faster. I became head of engineering 5 years in, that opened doors to skills I didn't think I'd pick up and opportunities I didn't think I'd have until I was 10 years in. 3. It is mighty fun to work in a small team and see results of your work everyday. You care a lot more about customers, product, your team. You learn empathy.
Cons: 1. The stock option sell - lets call it what it is, it is nothing but a justification for a pay cut with the sell of riches in the future. Every time I hear the stock spiel (shpeel?), I nod my head but I forget about it and always try and negotiate a salary that works for me in that I'd be happy to give a lot of my time for that amount of money. 2. If you start your career and remain in a startup for a long time, it is very very difficult to transition to a large company if you want to {political klout, diplomacy, all skills you pick up at a large company are harder to pick up at a small startup}. I found this very hard when I transitioned from startup head of engineering to management at Amazon and quit within a few months
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#795I joined a startup 5 years ago as a CTO for 10% equity.
Fast forward 5 years. We merged with another company and we got 60% out of that merge. So then I moved to 6% equity.
Then we raised $15m in various rounds. My equity is now at about 3%.
In our last round we were valued at $20m. Well, all the investors have preferential pay back rights.
My equity is fully vested. If we sell for $20m today I will make a grand total of $97,000. If we sell for $30m it would be $397,000 and at $40m it would be $697,000. To bring our valuation from where it is today to $40m will take a few more years and be pretty difficult.
So I personally advise you not to join a startup and instead start a small side project and take a large salary at an established company. It's actually easier to make that level of money over 5 years even with a moderately sucessfull side project and large salary.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#796Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that an exaggeration? I talked about the ability for them to go to another company. Founders cannot just leave and have a much greater lead time if they lose it all. What social connections do you think founders get that employees somehow dont? And what is this worth? So founding a company and losing everything is fine because you make some friends? If you talk to any entrepreneurs, you'll quickly realize you'…
It's only a lonely road because of decisions they made themselves. Maybe if they stopped treating themselves like some anointed class and shared the equity with their employees instead of viewing them like lower-class citizens it wouldn't be so hard to find comrades.
Employees aren't friends and really shouldn't be. Maybe you've had a bad experience with some founders, they certainly are just as varied as people, but the role itself is anything but easy.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bit more? You vastly underestimate the effort involved. And who's guaranteeing all these fallback jobs? Other founders just hire failed entrepreneurs so they can stick together? That's a great way to lose money. You must be reading about the 0.01% of founders who get all the attention and the fluffy feel-good startup posts because this is definitely not how it works. And yes, more risk deserves more reward, why is…
> And yes, more risk deserves more reward, why is that even controversial? I think the argument is that the current reward to an early employee is a joke compared to the risk their taking, given the other job options available to them. So its not that the founder shouldn't be rewarded fairly for their risk, but that early employees are not. Thus the answer to this thread is just that being an EE isn't worth it. I thi…
Sure, but that's up to the employee to decide. Forget startups, why does anyone work for any of the other thousands of companies out there then? It's just not as simple as some money metric, and either way the market will correct for it, as this entire thread shows.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#798I joined a startup 5 years ago as a CTO for 10% equity. Fast forward 5 years. We merged with another company and we got 60% out of that merge. So then I moved to 6% equity. Then we raised $15m in various rounds. My equity is now at about 3%. In our last round we were valued at $20m. Well, all the investors have preferential pay back rights. My equity is fully vested. If we sell for $20m today I will make a grand tota…
I had the opposite experience. I also joined a startup 5 years ago, and I was one of the very early employees. I received 0.5% equity as stock options, and my salary was around $120,000.
I stayed for a few years, and now I own around 0.1%. The company is now worth a few billion dollars, so my stock is worth a few million dollars. I have no liquidity yet, but an IPO is certainly on the horizon.
I don't feel like I took a pay cut. It was my first real job as a software engineer, and it gave me some good friendships and connections.
I can't say I learned a lot, and I didn't grow very much. The work was very boring and there weren't any technical challenges or interesting problems. I just got very burned out with the long hours and pressure. But it was nice to live in the Bay Area for a little while and have the "silicon valley" experience. I got very lucky and might be able to retire in a couple of years, so of course I'm going to say that the risk was worth it. But I do realize that I'm an outlier.
My advice: If you can somehow spot a potential unicorn and you'll be one of the first employees, then drop everything and join it.
Look for a YC company with some impressive investors, and try to get 0.5% - 2%. But I've noticed that YC has started funding a lot of companies that seem pretty terrible, so you have to be very careful. Don't think of yourself as a employee. You're a VC who invests their time and energy.
If the first one doesn't work out, then do it a couple more times. Work on your own side projects and see if any of those take off. The connections can be really valuable, and working at a startup is a great way to find future co-founders.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Easier said than done. Lots of people leave school without the faintest clue what they want to do. The rest of the startup game - building a product, pivoting correctly, building a team, overcoming oowerful rivals - is such a huge challenge, that gaining entry level experience before finishing school is perhaps the most straightforward piece of the puzzle.
Anyone can start a business, and anyone should. The things you mentioned - "pivoting" "overcoming powerful rivals" - goodness. How about simply starting a business that earns more money then it spends. Do that and you will learn most any lesson you need to know about being a "founder."
The economics of internet-scale software businesses make this harder than opening a hardware store and selling nails and rope for more than they cost from the wholesaler. It often does require lots of risk capital. If you don't have it, you need a rich partner who does. If you don't know any rich people that want to go into business with you, you need to employ people who provide this service at a price -- and often that price is that you, in effect, become their employee, rather than their partner. This is the silicon valley VC model.
It's possible to build "boutique" scale internet software businesses, but it's harder than ever, and you still need to be well-off enough to "risk" some time that you would otherwise be working on definitely-getting-a-paycheck type work.
In short "start a profitable business instead working for one" and "start a business that's profitable right away instead of taking VC funding" are both rather useless pieces of advice for somebody who doesn't have the means or background to do either.
There are of course more choices about what to do with your life. You should explore those too. Maybe you'd be happier as an auto mechanic or a nurse. That kind of work is available almost anywhere in the country so you won't have the "three body problem" of having to live away from your or your spouse's family, or both.
Re: Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
#800Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked here during the years when the stock was in the toilet and managed to get some retention grants that have turned into a tidy sum. Plus I joined as a SWE1 so there are two promos in there.
After your startup and Google experience, you were hired as an SWE1? Also, curious if the experience of the startup or subsequent integration was perhaps more valuable than the opportunity cost.
I never went to Google, I left the startup a year before that happened. That startup was pretty much my first job out of college and I was there for about two years.
In that specific case, I believe the startup was worth the opportunity cost. I was coming from San Antonio, not exactly a tech hotbed, and from a small liberal arts school nobody's heard of. I'd interviewed at a bunch of companies out the Bay and was rejected by all of them. A friend was an investor in TechStars' seed fund for their San Antonio program and he put me in touch with the founders of one of their companies. Those guys took a chance on me and hired me on a contract to solve some scaling issues while they were still in the program.
Once they graduated and raised a series A, they brought me on full-time. I worked remote for another six months after they moved the company up to Boulder, eventually following myself. They let me go after about two years but during that time I gained a ton of StackOverflow reputation for Scala and Akka, which led me to one of Twitter's open source advocates who made the intro for Twitter's Boulder office. That was back in 2015. About a year later the company sort-of sold to Google, who then fired almost everyone and re-sold the IP (or something, it was weird and I wasn't there, but my investor friend gave me some of the details).
So, in my specific case, the startup was worth the opportunity cost because my opportunity cost wasn't that high. I didn't have a six-figure SV job as a backup, but I was able to leverage the risk I took into that sort of job.