Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission • Hacker News Board

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#261

Post by ellisv » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

rpm33 wrote: post #255

jatins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the OP. I think it was because I was an overseas employee and the founders just didn't shell out equity to people who were not based out of US. I saw the equity distribution sheet that was disclosed after the acquisition as part of legal requirements and that was indeed true. IMO, equity represents ownership in the company and should not depend on purchase parity.

>I think it was because I was an overseas employee and the founders just didn't shell out equity to people who were not based out of US. Isn't that illegal ?

Why would it be illegal?

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#262

Post by xemdetia » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

throwaway74688 wrote: post #43

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, and as someone who has hitherto largely worked at startups (2/3rd of my career), let me tell you the counterpoint. There is not a lot of risk from your perspective, but there is a large amount of risk for us . At a startup, you push all you can towards steering the ship in the right technical direction. For example, unlike at a BigCo, you are likely to be that person who will write the technical debt that later…

> So to "make it," you effectively have to grow into a BigCo employee anyway. Currently at a startup that is angling for IPO and it got very corporate in a hurry. I'm finding it fascinating to experience, but it has more in common with a BigCo now without as much of the upside.

I think that's the other thing that happens, the transitioning to normal corporate practices ends up being a culture shift that ends up breaking a lot of people's interest in an organization. There is a reason why some of the bureaucracy exists at BigCo and people have to experience that in a culture that may be hostile to it. It also in those early stages doesn't have the years or decades of practical application of BigCo processes that have been figured out and tailored specifically to a company in question and there's just teething problems all over that make the whole effort more frustrating as these new business processes get figured out.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#263

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

bluquark wrote: post #238

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just adding to your point: in all of the start-ups I worked for, the main selling points were (a) more responsibility sooner and (b) chance to drive decision-making about tech stack and/or work with the best tools (new or old) without red tape. I’ve never seen (or heard of) any start-up actually fulfill these selling points any better than medium-to-large companies. More responsibility sooner typically just translate…

> I’ve personally seen this happen several times with ex-Google employees who join as the earliest engineers and insist on setting up copies of what they recall from Google, mostly insisting on a monorepo regardless of any use case details, insisting on using Bazel or a similar homebrewed build file system, insisting on the same style of canary deployments. I'd be interested to hear more details of what winds up goin…

Many things go wrong. Monorepos + bazel is an approach that’s well-suited for some use cases but poorly suited for other use cases. The problems usually happen when some early engineer “knows it all” because they saw these tools in action in a different use case (such as inside Google) and incorrectly assert they will be good solutions in some other use case (e.g. a start-up with very different reality than Google).

If the company is healthy, there will be a give and take, people will acknowledge that e.g. monorepos are not universally always a good or workable choice, and compromises or trade-offs will be analyzed in earnest.

If the company is not healthy, which happens often in start-ups that are forced to adopt a monoculture or extreme philosophy of the founder or early engineers (and enforcing dogma may even be a main reason why those people left other jobs to be early employees in a start-up), then usually by some argument from authority or poorly conducted confirmation bias blog post competition, the dogmatic choices about monorepos or bazel tooling (just as common examples I’ve seem turn out poorly) will just be mandated and all intellectual integrity about it will be shut down.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#264

Post by ibarea277 » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

everdev wrote: post #79

acconrad wrote: post #21

As someone who was a 1st engineer of a startup that successfully exited I had what would be considered a good payout. When looking over the course of my career, however, it simply made up for the reduced salary I took for the years I worked there. It was a net-neutral outcome to be the 1st engineer at a startup that actually exited for a substantial (8-figure deal) outcome which already puts me in the minority. So no…

> I had what would be considered a good payout. When looking over the course of my career, however, it simply made up for the reduced salary I took for the years I worked there. This is such an important point for people to know when they're joining startups. You're basically investing in the startup. If you're going to be an investor it's good to know what your alternative investments are. If you put $50k in the sto…

This people do not understand the math of startup comp. If you get equity instead of cash, you could have taken that cash and just put it into as high a risk investment as you want. As such, startups are really offering access to an illiquid investment (but how sure are you it's better than other options), and forced risk-taking with some short-term tax benenfits (most people wouldn't put 10-20% of their income into one stock and you pay tax up front). You could go to google, put 30% of your income into crypto, and have some thing a lot like a startup risk/reward profile w/ a lot more liquidity. It's just that that feels riskier to people. Startup is only a great deal financial for the founders.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#265

Post by alexanderdmitri » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #214

luminati wrote: post #141

Honest question: Why does every blog post that talks about working with a startup, always pick Facebook and Google for the comparison? Both these companies are extreme outliers (probably in the history of business!). Their outsized pay comes from their outsized profits, which comes from selling your data. I find it very ironic, that these very same people who diss startups love dissing Google and FB as being evil, bu…

Facebook and Google are so big they pretty much set the standard for what people talk about. You might prefer to say, I dunno, AirBnB, but that detracts from the point people are trying to make, which is that a bigger de-risked company is better on financial terms.

Isn't Airbnb still technically considered a startup (albeit a profitable one as of 2016)?

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#266

Post by acjohnson55 » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #120

angryasian wrote: post #97

I've worked everywhere from small startups, to big FAANG companies and big enterprise companies. I am in the very same opinion as op. 1. Financially the exits weren't worth it. The amount you actually learn is incredibly questionable. 2. Working at bigger companies I learned a hell of a lot more, from the mere fact that there are a bigger pool of resources with a lot of experience to go get help from. This is just no…

Just adding to your point: in all of the start-ups I worked for, the main selling points were (a) more responsibility sooner and (b) chance to drive decision-making about tech stack and/or work with the best tools (new or old) without red tape. I’ve never seen (or heard of) any start-up actually fulfill these selling points any better than medium-to-large companies. More responsibility sooner typically just translate…

> Just adding to your point: in all of the start-ups I worked for, the main selling points were (a) more responsibility sooner and (b) chance to drive decision-making about tech stack and/or work with the best tools (new or old) without red tape.

> I’ve never seen (or heard of) any start-up actually fulfill these selling points any better than medium-to-large companies.

I've had that work out for me. But that was also specifically what I was hired for. Definitely, you have to look before you leap.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#267

Post by whiskyant » Sat, Mar 30, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

everdev wrote: post #79

acconrad wrote: post #21

As someone who was a 1st engineer of a startup that successfully exited I had what would be considered a good payout. When looking over the course of my career, however, it simply made up for the reduced salary I took for the years I worked there. It was a net-neutral outcome to be the 1st engineer at a startup that actually exited for a substantial (8-figure deal) outcome which already puts me in the minority. So no…

> I had what would be considered a good payout. When looking over the course of my career, however, it simply made up for the reduced salary I took for the years I worked there. This is such an important point for people to know when they're joining startups. You're basically investing in the startup. If you're going to be an investor it's good to know what your alternative investments are. If you put $50k in the sto…

How'd you do your math? 50k every year @ 8% would result in 317k and 782k in 5 and 10 years respectively.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#268

Post by davidjnelson » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 1:13 AM UTC

autotune wrote: post #256

eldavido wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what language and data stack they're using? Asking because I've seen real scale (billions of devices running our software) and the real leverage is in how you architect your application (software and how the data is stored, retrieved, moves around) and things like choice of language. Not where it's hosted. Languages like Python and Ruby are just grossly inefficient. Single-threaded, huge memory profiles,…

This isn't just one startup, these are multiple startups I have talked to that all end up deciding to move off the platform due to cost. Solid containers orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are slowly reducing the need to have one specific cloud platform, but cost control is still extremely relevant with architecture design choices. As far as language is concerned, Ruby and Ruby on Rails is the usual choice with…

I feel you both have fantastic insights in this. Thanks for the discussion.

My take is it’s great to use ec2 pricing, likely with beanstalk, and aurora or perhaps aurora serverless for sql. There’s room for moving fast with rails. Then as things grow, splitting off a microservice with the same url via your proxy server which uses go and redis. This way you are not over optimizing one data model before you know exactly what its schema is.

Re: Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are into the mission

#269

Post by cik » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 3:11 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #137

cik wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This number makes complete sense. I was a 'key employee' once upon a time - in a startup that had just raised f&f, and I received a FULL 2% (unheard of for Canada). Fast forward through the (usual) reality of 6 rounds of dilution, and my 2% was worth less than 0.02%. If the startup went from a $2M valuation to $200M (as it did) then my take would have been $40K. Do with that what you will.

Something I am always curious about is, was your company / CEO open and honest with you about how your shares were doing? If you worked somewhere for 5 years, it could be easy to think you're safe but meanwhile the CEO is diluting your equity to fractions of what it originally was? Don't they have to report that to employees?

In my experience both as that employee, and sometimes the executive - they're not. There are frequently legal, secrecy, or other corporate reasons for the lack of disclosure. It kinda sucks - but it's understandable.

To be fair, I'm someone who has never chosen shares over base salary. The equity slot machine is fine, but I (firmly) believe that over the long haul, the only thing that matters is index investing. Benjamin Graham is always right.

I appreciate shares - I work either way. They're just not my motivation. If that works for others - great.