Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad • Hacker News Board

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#121

Post by UweSchmidt » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #43

ohaideredevs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly a unique experience, but my .05 - I started of at a startup with a "lol just do it" attitude to whatever the problem was. Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Got to see all aspects of the products and the consequences of the decisions we made early on.…

FWIW, I've worked with a lot of entry-level people at normal companies over the years and would estimate that noob gainz are 30-50% higher in startup land for the first 1-2 years of career, maybe 10-20% higher the next two, then flat or actually lower than corporate thereafter. I think it comes down to 1) startups pile a lot more responsibility onto their young hires than normal companies are comfortable with + 2) st…

Just pointing out that noob gainz would be the easily-attained gains at the beginning (of a weightlifting program), suggesting that maybe you learn so much basic stuff at the beginning of your first job, regardless what job it is.

http://nattyornot.com/bodybuilding-basics-noob-gains-explain...

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#122

Post by enjo » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

ohaideredevs wrote: post #11

seibelj wrote: post #3

Valid reasons to work for a startup: - You are a cofounder. - You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats"). - They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else. - You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach…

Not exactly a unique experience, but my .05 - I started of at a startup with a "lol just do it" attitude to whatever the problem was. Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Got to see all aspects of the products and the consequences of the decisions we made early on.…

"A friend grew from junior developer to director of IT at that startup, so there's that aspect as well, though I have also seen a number of startups hire leadership outside."

This was the main benefit I got from a startup, but that also required winning something of a startup lottery. I was at a company that went from two to 200+ engineers. I was able to grow into the tech lead of the entire thing.

That put me into a leadership track at a relatively young age at larger companies. Which has been great. Financially, however, I suspect I would have been better off working at a FAANG from day 1, even being a very early and key employee for a company that exited at 9 figures.

Still I now know how fortunate I was. At my current gig we routinely hire startup "tech leads" for non leadership roles. They're probably generally thought of as a tier below a mid level IC coming out of a FAANG company.

Startups are a huge gamble. It worked out for me but even the inflated titles are only valuable if the company itself proves to be a winner.

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#123

Post by x0x0 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

rooam-dev wrote: post #27

dleslie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route. This is me. I quit my well paid job and took a massive pay hit so that I could work from home and so be able to spend more time with my daughters. Absolutely worth it.

At a start-up? How do you manage live/work balance? Are there any on-call duties? Thanks in advance.

Eng at my startup (I'm a founder) can work a straight 40-45 hours per week, which translates into probably about 30h/week of heads-down coding, and be highly appreciated.

We rotate on-call duties, but seriously, if you're fighting fires all the time, it's because you're bad at computers. Get some discipline about writing code that doesn't blow up constantly, get good at blue-green deploys, do code review, run post-mortems, etc. Basically, exercise some professionalism.

We definitely have fires, but it's not a weekly event. Or monthly.

Now, not every company is going to be professional, but as a software engineer in this market, where you work is your choice. You can work at a startup building comparatively boring software (like mine!) that sells to enterprises, for founders who don't work 80 hour weeks, and have a good working environment. Or you can not. But now, perhaps more than any other time ever, the choice is yours.

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#124

Post by dnautics » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #77

brootstrap wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the opposite side of this argument. I was there. I was shit in college but managed a degree and self taught programming. I was hustling hard to graduate and convince someone to hire me as a programmer even though I had no degree. I was 23 at the time. If you are in this scenario, just you, no wife kids etc. What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? I loved the startup and it fit my perfect niche. I woul…

> What is wrong with working really hard on a problem? Because you're normalizing abusive workplace practices. Need I explain further? It's not right, it's not okay, and if you tolerate it, you do a disservice to your colleagues. Maybe you don't care, that's fine. But when you say "What's wrong?" I will point out that it is not to be commended or supported. If your employer encourages, supports, or allows this sort o…

It seems like what's wrong is if it's not telegraphed that this is expected beforehand. We're all adults here and should be able to make informed decisions about how we want to live. Some of us want a lot of pressure and to not sit around bored wondering what to do with our lives.

When I was in grad school, 100 hour weeks and working 100 days straight was the norm. Also I made 25k a year. And I loved it, because I loved doing science and I got to be paid to do what I loved. And also, it's maybe worth mentioning that your experiments don't give a damn about labor laws. There really are some important societally beneficial things that simply won't get done if there aren't crazy fuckers like me around (not necessarily the projects I happened to work on, they all turned out to be crap)

Honestly what made me mad was that there were a lot of kids who got out of college, and went to grad school because they didn't know what to do next and nobody told them how crazy grad school was. These jokers depressed the asking price for a grad school salary.

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#125

Post by dgudkov » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

>VC’s typically have pro-rata rights to keep their percentage of ownership intact, but employees don’t

Either all shares must be diluted, or none. When someone's shares are diluted but someone's not, it's a scam. The concept of privileged shareholders is just wrong.

The whole system looks overly complicated and corrupted.

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#126

Post by AlexB138 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #110

deanmoriarty wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my 10 year career, I've done 2 startups in the Bay Area (both early, one I left after Series A, another one I left after Series C) and more recently Google, and I can say the level of talent doesn't even compare in my opinion: from my experience, the engineers were so bad quality that I was feeling depressed and wasting my time most of the time (and constantly saying to myself "am I just a jerk in thinking of ever…

> At Google, this would never happen. At a startup, a flawed but functional deployment today is better than a perfect deployment tomorrow. I've never heard of a startup that was successful because it got software right in it's early stages.

Sure, that's generally true, but in his example the developer actually spent significantly more time and effort on their bad implementation. It was the worst of both worlds, flawed and tomorrow, so to speak.

I've seen people do things like this more than once, even talented people. They some how get an idea in their head and go way down a rabbit hole without stepping back and realizing it's the wrong design. I think that pattern is more possible in small companies because they are less likely to have their work reviewed often, do formal design sessions, or be pairing with another experienced engineer. I don't buy that things like this don't happen at FAANGs because they are just oh-so-much-better, I would guess it's mostly because they have more mature practices.

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#127

Post by sgustard » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

deanmoriarty wrote: post #85

neilv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear conflicting ideas about who's getting the most capable people, and I don't know what's true. Maybe a decade ago, a knowledgeable colleague, speaking of one of the better-regarded FAANGs, told me, "First they hired the A students, then they hired the B students, now they're hiring the C students." More recently, the sentiment I heard among CS-ish PhD students at one big university was that FAANGs (or, at least,…

In my 10 year career, I've done 2 startups in the Bay Area (both early, one I left after Series A, another one I left after Series C) and more recently Google, and I can say the level of talent doesn't even compare in my opinion: from my experience, the engineers were so bad quality that I was feeling depressed and wasting my time most of the time (and constantly saying to myself "am I just a jerk in thinking of ever…

I get it, you've been at some bad startups and choose to generalize that experience. I can assure you I've worked in some large successful companies with building after building full of the dumbest people you've ever met.

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#128

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

dgudkov wrote: post #125

>VC’s typically have pro-rata rights to keep their percentage of ownership intact, but employees don’t Either all shares must be diluted, or none. When someone's shares are diluted but someone's not, it's a scam. The concept of privileged shareholders is just wrong. The whole system looks overly complicated and corrupted.

I believe pro-rata rights are rights to invest in further rounds. They can keep their percent ownership only if they contribute more money. This is like employees on vesting schedules, who can continue to get more options by continuing to work. Startup shares are a shitty deal, but this doesn't strike me as one of the reasons.

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#129

Post by enjo » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #43

ohaideredevs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly a unique experience, but my .05 - I started of at a startup with a "lol just do it" attitude to whatever the problem was. Worked 12 hours a day a lot, was stressed out all the time, didn't have a life, got calls at odd hours to deploy...but, if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't have grown nearly as fast. Got to see all aspects of the products and the consequences of the decisions we made early on.…

FWIW, I've worked with a lot of entry-level people at normal companies over the years and would estimate that noob gainz are 30-50% higher in startup land for the first 1-2 years of career, maybe 10-20% higher the next two, then flat or actually lower than corporate thereafter. I think it comes down to 1) startups pile a lot more responsibility onto their young hires than normal companies are comfortable with + 2) st…

Yes startups will give you more responsibility, but that comes at the cost of far less mentorship. I often wonder if people only feel like they're growing faster at startups because the results are a bit more visible.

It is true that it's easier to be stagnant as an associate at a larger company. If you're not interested in taking on new challenges you can generally sort of fall through the cracks. However, folks who are proactive at a FAANG style company can find great mentors and support to develop skills really quickly. Often skills that simply aren't available to people at startups...

What's more valuable: spending your formative years working on systems at really high scale, or building a quick RoR MVP and managing 3 VM's in AWS for a startup?

Re: Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad

#130

Post by enobrev » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #3

Valid reasons to work for a startup: - You are a cofounder. - You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats"). - They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else. - You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach…

In general, I agree with this. I'm also working with a startup now, and not as a founder, and a couple of your reasons to do so resonate.

But also, as to your invalid reasons list:

- The money is good.

- The work-life balance is excellent.

- And it's perfectly stable.

This usually is not the case. But if you're in a position to negotiate for these things and the founders are in the right position to offer them, it can be.