I'm at a start up and the owner has no intention of going public lol. Oops
Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
141–150 of 430 posts
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#142I 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 foldin…
Yes, for sure, back in the 90s I fantasized about getting to work for a company like that. Just working on really neat tech, and getting to have some creative input and some technical excitement. I'm sure companies like this exist still, but the term "startup" and the investment around it seems to have been swallowed up into the kinds of things you mention.
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#143Earlier 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.
There is/was a significant Mormon contingent in the Ruby community, all the way up to Matz.
I've worked with a lot of Mormons in tech. You may have too and not realized it. In my experience, they tend to not put an emphasis on it, it's a more private thing.
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#144jwz pointed this out long ago.
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 a…
It definitely is more risk. However when I evaluate startups I'm comparing them against other jobs. Stable income it may be but the runway is short, and depending on the founders it may or not be well communicated. So it is much less stable than a job in a big company. So to me I want a good multiplier. Many of the payoffs I've seen for startups that did well for early employees put earnings on par with what I've don…
Really depends on the job market though. If the startup goes belly up but you were making good money in the interim and you can quickly find a new job, it's not much risk.
A founder who eats in to savings and goes unpaid for two years is on an entirely different level of risk profile.
But yes, if your primary concern is job security, in general you should not be working for a startup, regardless of how many points you get.
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my own household/wife I have a person who's worked her ass off for a hugely incompetent CEO who has a majority stake. When I say ass off I mean 12-14 hours a day even on weekends. A promise of unlimited holidays and then coercing all employees to work during government mandated holidays and now he's trying to scam her out of her less than 1% options by coercing her to write a maternity leave policy that would ma…
They're not all that bad. I've worked in a horrible startup before and they absolutely forced everyone to work harder with longer hours instead of working smarter. We had a few ~12-16 hour deploys that started after a full work day where the entire engineering department was required to stay and the oncall was brutal 2 week long slogs because no effort was allowed to be put into actually fixing stuff. But on the othe…
If you're saying not all startups are bad, I completely agree with you, but we're talking about a specific kind here. I've worked at some really challenging startups where I also did overtime during deploys(I did get to charge the hours though) in which I learned a lot. AND THEN we actually worked on reducing those issues for the future.
They didn't actually make that part of the job either. I could have rejected if I wanted to. And there was never a vision alignment talk with miniscule equity with an unwritten agreement of doing anything that was asked otherwise I'd kiss my equity goodbye.
EDIT: I can't believe I have to clarify this. Most of the startups that would fit my above description don't market themselves as startups to begin with. I.e. they don't think their distinguishing feature is to be a startup with equity.
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#147The author also fails to mention the stock option trap. I've seen offers at early state companies like this: * $150k base (take-home $100k) * $30k/yr options that expire 3 months after you leave or 10 years. You have to either set aside 30% of your take-home to invest in a extremely high risk single stock or you're chained to your desk until the company exits. If you golden handcuff your way to an exit, you better ho…
The ten year expiry is an IRS rule for issuing an ISO.
Interesting. didn't know that.
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’ve ever taken any risk with credit and failed or simply had a disruption in income anytime in the last 10 years prior you would have been denied. Its nice everything worked out for you, that has nothing to do with your ability to perceive a simple solution available to you.
The only risk is that one exercises the options, but by the time one sells the shares (which they got as the result of exercising options), the price of the stock falls below the strike price. To avoid this risk, do a quick sell after exercise. This makes risk minimal; in case of bigger companies effectively zero. Bigger risk comes in if someone wants to do an exercise and hold to sell much later, which can bring tax…
One thing I learned during the dot-bomb era is think hard about holding too much of your company's stock and, especially, think really hard about exercising options and then not selling. Fortunately the stock drifted back up a ways over time and then my former company was acquired for a nice spike. So between that and tax loss offsets, I didn't do that bad. But I've been careful since. (Of course, more recently, I'd have been better off holding more for longer but I can't really complain.)
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#149I've worked at 3 startups, founded 2, and worked at 1 bigco.
2/3 startups had excellent returns in the form of equity. Life changing over time. Startups: 66% hit rate.
Bigco was mentally draining and sucked. Bigco: 0% hit rate.
Starting the first company was a failure, but the second one seems to be doing pretty well. 50% hit rate.
Re: Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
#150This article isn’t about if you should join a startup vs. a big company. It’s about if you should join a startup vs. a FAANG company, which offers outrageous compensation & benefits. From that perspective, FAANG is the obvious choice 99% of the time. The more and apt comparison would be if you should work at a startup vs. a corporate job at a HP or Qualcomm. At those type of companies, compensation is not competitive…
Does anyone consider FAANG to be startups? I'm confused by your comment.