Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

every.to

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 430 posts

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#81

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

barrkel wrote: post #69
eecc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what Wiener suggests in Uncanny Valley, when she describes the windfall when Microsoft bought the GitHub shares she had the option to buy during her time there. It wasn’t life-defining, plus she noticed that many other employees didn’t have enough savings to actually exercise.

The way it should happen with a liquidity event is that you simultaneously exercise your options and sell them, pay off the taxes and bank what's left over. Savings should only come into it if you're leaving before the liquidity event.

> Savings should only come into it if you're leaving before the liquidity event.

Which is another way some startups screw people. If the company is not willing to budge on the "standard" 90-day exercise window, there shouldn't be any negotiation. Just walk away.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#82

Post by _9rq6 »

This is india specific, I chase startups which are best bet at implementing govt policy or is it a problem that I am facing.

1. One was recruiting phase as median age of India is low and adds overwhelming number of new workers every day. Google uses it. 2. Second one was a fintech during digital india phase. 3. SAAS with global sales and high scale (rpm)

All three were hard and very fullfilling. I made a lot of money with fintech one and learned a lot on engineering at scale with third one.

In the first one, I made lifelong friends and got to meet important people, attended VC talks and part of decisions like hiring PM as new grad, VC was very involved with CEO about it. Something my salary could not quantify.

If I were to do it again, do it well with patience rather than arrogance and anger against founders.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#83

Post by hellcow »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #36

I think this is a really good article, but I think that one of the things it misses is that a huge reason the math works out so badly for startup employees is because founders and VCs take the lion's share of the gains. I mean, in my experience at startups, founders typically own around 40% of the equity. The option pool for all other employees is around 10-20%. Now, I certainly believe startup founders deserve far m…

> what founders risk in terms of opportunity costs and lower wages is usually only slightly more than very early stage employees

Maybe this is different for others, but my co-founder and I spent 2 years bootstrapping before we got our first customer. We gave up 2 years of wages and consumed our savings to do this with no assurance of success, and even after that first customer it was another full year before we had any sense of stability.

Years of time and money. I consider that quite a bit more risk than our first employees who got stable income, healthcare, 401k's, etc. on day one.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#84

Post by break_the_bank »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #36

I think this is a really good article, but I think that one of the things it misses is that a huge reason the math works out so badly for startup employees is because founders and VCs take the lion's share of the gains. I mean, in my experience at startups, founders typically own around 40% of the equity. The option pool for all other employees is around 10-20%. Now, I certainly believe startup founders deserve far m…

Also it's impossible for me to tell whether my below market base salary startup offer from a seed/series A startup is at market or not. Especially the equity bit, is 1% equity enough for the second employee(and engineer)? Especially when I am taking a 50% cut on base salary in addition to losing some very real liquid stocks.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#85

Post by vmception »

selimthegrim wrote: post #66
jsonne wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic because Utah is becoming a tech hot spot driven in part by the large Mormon presence.

How so? Recursion doesn’t scream full of Mormons to me.

It does to me.

Their support system and rigid structure is unparalleled for such a large scale in the US. Their funding church is very wealthy, and the discipline churns out people that are very effective in high growth industries, which is just a convenient side effect relevant right now.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#86

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

mad_ned wrote: post #6

It also makes a huge difference if the startup is your primary source of income or not. My wife worked for several startups, all of which failed. But since I had a more stable paycheck, it wasn't so bad, and we just treated the extra startup income as a bonus, and had very low expectations on cashing in on the equity.

Problem is, how do you support this? You must have made a lot of money to both (a) support your family, and (b) pay for the childcare that your wife would have been too busy to help very much with. Either that, or you lived in a low cost of living area and were able to do some kind of price/salary arbitrage. And if the solution was "make a lot of money", then that again makes childcare doubly important, because if you also were focusing on work, then you wouldn't have had much time to raise your kids either. Right?

Ah. I've left out the obvious option: You don't have kids, and don't plan to?

I bring this up not to be snarky but because this feels like a very real Catch-22.

(Deleted weird coda with mythological references and stuff.)

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#87

Post by ghaff »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #42
ghaff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoy working on your hobby on the government's $1,000/month because that's what any remotely plausible basic income is going to be like.

UBI is not about working on any hobby you want. It’s about redistributing wealth so that people can negotiate for more of the pie since the current system relies on using the cumulative wealth of one’s ancestors to determine their bargaining power.

At least you're candid that it's about taking money from people against their will. Most advocates couch UBI in terms like unleashing individual creativity and things like that.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#88

Post by kingsuper20 »

I was just musing about how the definition of 'startup' has changed. I've worked in a couple plus a few post-startup small companies, but they always involved a fairly expensive piece of boutique hardware. At best, stock options might mean a decent bonus after a few years and you work as long as they pay you. You take the job because it's interesting and because it's more fun to lay track than to fix it. Using folding tables is always better than dealing with some middle managers three ring binder of yearly performance review.

Seriously, just how many startups in the last ten+ years involve anything but some sort of internet service/social media/advertising software construct with (usually) the hope of selling the company? It all sounds kind of depressing.

Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

#89

Post by parsley27 »

podric wrote: post #73

I heard that being an early startup employee is also a great way to fast-track to a leadership/management position, as compared to working at a big corporation. Is there any truth to that?

I think that is true in the case of the growth startup I work at; probably 25% of the leadership started out as early individual contributors, and if things go as expected over the next few weeks, I will be making my first big step toward leadership after just six months at the company.

I never had any internal career growth at other jobs in larger or more established orgs.

Post reply on HN