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There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

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Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#221

Post by ojbyrne »

fallingknife wrote: post #127
ashtonkem wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when they’re not worthless, most startup options end up being worth less than the salary that one could’ve gotten at a non-startup. Last time I looked into it, and it was a while ago, the median startup option package was exercised for a profit of $30k, not nothing but far less than what one could’ve gotten at a large company like ... Microsoft. Arguably the existence of several different types of stock options…

Are you sure that's the median? I would think that they are worth 0 >50% of the time.

0 doesn’t fit in the category “exercised for a profit.”

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#222

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

nojvek wrote: post #77

When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like. The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microso…

Monetary compensation is only part of the equation.

Having "the guy who made PowerBI" on your resume can be worth more than some stock options.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#223

Post by g9yuayon »

nojvek wrote: post #77

When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like. The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microso…

Many comments below focus on failures with a single startup. I think it misses the point. Working for startups is risky, but the key is to build a system that increases your accumulated probability of success -- this is exactly why it's important to live in the bay area and work for some startups there, at least before the Covid-19. You get to see a large number of people who didn't fund any company, but still became financially independent by choosing to join the right companies at the right time. You get to see how those people make their choices. You get to see how those people decide to jump ship. You get to build a social circle where you learn lots of first-hand information about startups. There are a few simple steps that worked well for many people (again, no guarantee of success, but they do increase accumulated probability of finding the right company).

- You bet on product you love. Airbnb/Pinterest/Uber before 2013, Netflix before 2010, FB before 2009, Google before 2003, Databriks before 2017, Tesla before 2017.

- You bet on sectors. SDN, gig economy, search, big data, and etc.

- You bet on company's productivity - the customers/engineer grows exponentially without Uber-style marketing cost - Instagram/WhatsApp; the company releases features faster than they hire - Google; people deliver without working like a dog - Netflix

- You bet on people you know or you admire

- You bet on the leaders in each sector

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#224

Post by [deleted] »

vmception wrote: post #208
spaetzleesser wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“except that I knew that I didn't get to keep any upside. L Same at my company. They have similar programs but you also don’t get any stake in the outcome and are still controlled by executives who in the end get the credit. Same for hackathons they tried to organize. The idea quickly turned from fun projects basically into overtime to check off Jura tickets quickly but with the addition of free pizza. I think leader…

Pretty much all company hackathons are just tech debt day At startups and big companies

[deleted]

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#225

Post by Animats »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #218
np- wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People doubled their money on paper in unrealized gains. But since Bitcoin is being sold as a store of value and not as a medium of exchange nowadays, if you want to realize that value you need to sell. Where's that cash coming from? Other buyers, i.e. the next layer of suckers as indicated in OP's post. And if enough people decide to sell, then those doubled/tripled/etc values aren't going to last very long. Note I'…

The stock market is zero sum as well... When one person wins, another loses. Are people buying Google, Facebook and Amazon stock suckers as well?

Stocks have dividends. The value of a stock is the present value of all future dividends. Otherwise you're hoping to find a greater fool.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#226

Post by rgblambda »

nojito wrote: post #52

This isn’t true. The digital service team for the US Government is indistinguishable from a high quality startup/consultancy that goes around and solves pretty cool problems in modern ways.

Can you give some examples of those projects? I would have thought a government in house software team would be doing things like replacing paper forms with web forms and replacing old COBOL applications with Java, along with being an approval board for government contracts.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#227

Post by jjeaff »

wpietri wrote: post #209
DebtDeflation wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock. I joined a startup in 1999. There were 3 founders and I was employee #2 after that. I received a ton of options (this was before RSUs became popular). We had a great product and a great team, but 18 months later ran out of money and unfortunately it was right after…

As somebody who also has a bunch of lottery tickets that didn't pay off, I feel your pain. But I think there's a bit of hindsight bias to your conclusion. I think it's entirely reasonable for people to trade salary for equity. I also think it's reasonable to stick with cash. As long as people are making well-informed choices, I'm entirely fine with gambling on a positive-sum effort. That said, there are good question…

There is also something to be said for the information asymmetry between employer and employee. From the outside, it is hard to know what the odds of winning really look like. Founders are always painting a rosy picture of how close we are to breaking out or getting that next huge round of funding. The reality may be totally different. Things may actually be rather bleak and they are hoping to just limp along, paying low salaries and giving out worthless stock in hopes that just maybe they will hit the startup lottery.

At least with gambling, the house has to post the odds.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#228

Post by [deleted] »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #150
aerosmile wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I didn't want to make too much of a point of that, because if you filtered just for founders with prior exits, you might have a hard time scoring early opportunities with them (they usually have plenty of people to fill the first 20-50 jobs). But yes - joining Square the day it was announced that Jack Dorsey started another startup would have been a no-brainer for that career path (same with Max Levchin's Af…

This is very cherry-picked. Actually research has found that prior business success does not predict future success at all. Though failure does predict failure, so at least avoid that.

[deleted]

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#229

Post by aloukissas »

It's interesting that nobody has yet to bring up all the Cisco startups (ok, ok spin-offs), i.e. Andiamo, Insieme, etc. Yes, typically they were all independent companies but the people there all but wore Cisco badges (they mostly used Cisco buildings, too). Very successful model to bypass issues e.g. hitting quarterly earnings goals, while innovating at startup speed.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#230

Post by ignoramous »

lamontcg wrote: post #207
sixhobbits wrote: post #5

I mean, sure, but it also misses the point a bit. "Startup in a big company" doesn't mean "yo take some cashdollar and try build and release something to the public", but it does mean "hey, take a small team and do your own thing with less oversight and process overhead from higher-ups". The team I worked in at AWS was like this and it felt a lot like startup teams I've worked with. That didn't mean we could take 'br…

The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. That team was very, very far removed from Amazon proper and actually delivered. That's probably the only time I've seen that kind of startup-with-a-large-corporation work. I can think of other ex…

> The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa.

AWS did indeed start out with E-commerce Services (2002) and Alexa Internet APIs (2004), but in mid-2003, when Andy Jassy took over AWS from Colin Bryar, he completely changed its charter to build an "Internet Operating System" instead. EC2 happened in South Africa in 2004 after Jassy and others had ear-marked compute as one of the key building blocks, along with Storage (S3) and Database (RDS / SimpleDB). In fact, S3 launched before EC2 did. SQS launched even before that, in 2004, though in limited beta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History

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