This is very US-centric advice. Outside the US, getting VC funding results in a stark difference in quality of life for founders
Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
381–390 of 398 posts
Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to say exactly this. There are many talented engineers for whom compensation is not their primary motivation. Working on interesting problems, working in specific domains or working for a mission-based company trying to make the world a little better are all strong motivators. I suppose the overall pool of available candidates is smaller, but I don’t think the pool of candidates with strong skills is nece…
>I was going to say exactly this. There are many talented engineers for whom compensation is not their primary motivation. I presume those engineers and their families already solved some problems like having what to eat and having where to sleep, so they have the luxury to pursue other objectives. I also presume only a small number of engineers are in that position.
All software engineering jobs pay far more than enough to live a comfortable life; even with a family.
Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#383Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did you do after? If I give up on this, I'm not sure I'd want to do it again. I don't know what I'd do differently. Building an app and all the non-programming junk that goes into running a business is just a lot. I could rise the corporate ladder. I'd be fine but never rich.
Working at a corporation and making a reasonable engineer's salary will make you basically rich. Not like rule-the-world rich, but rich enough to do anything you ever wanted, which I think is pretty much as rich as anybody needs to be.
I'm experiencing this now since I've been doing both for awhile now. It's enough to not worry whether or not I should buy that $10 beer with my dinner but not enough that I don't have to debate with myself if I should be ordering 2 or 3 of those $18 cocktails every day on my first ever euro trip. Not a bad life for sure but there's quite a few things that still feel out of reach. Like private jets or even just first class
Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#385The article has a lot of interesting points, but seems to miss out on one of the main reasons (IMO) that startups take funding, which is to grow faster than (or as fast as) their competition. Unless you're lucky enough to be in a market segment without competition, you need to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. If they can expand faster, add features faster and get more customers than you, it damages you…
> Taking VC money could provide that velosity.
Could you provide a few real examples where VCs money helped companies making better product and moving faster than self-bootstrapped competitors?
Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know if you have a Rocket? Many (most?) VC funded companies are just appearance, no substance and it’s all very apparent. All the new AI ‘products’ for instance. So those are clearly not rockets, just blah and hype. Maybe we had rockets before, but I don’t want to lie and cheat like some of our vc invested companies did (most are gone). Never were rockets, just hype, Twitter presence and faking all around.
> How do you know if you have a Rocket? That’s the trick… you don’t. And neither do they. I believe it’s a pretty well-understood statistic that most VC-funded businesses are not successful, and the VCs are only successful because a small number of investments are massively profitable. Neither VCs nor companies know for sure if they _will_ rocket. VCs are looking for businesses and founders who _could_ rocket.
That's indeed what I understand. And in that case, if you believe in your business, statistically, it's a much larger chance your dream will tank when going for a VC. Which does convince me, as I said, that people going for VCs, don't see this as something too important in their life, just something they try and see what happens. Can say whatever bad about Musk (and I do these days) be he seems to be (used to be?) different in that regard. Most would've just given up after a few years and few 100m$. And most do. The world changers won't hang their dream on a practical 15/1 VC.
It's not necessarily better to be one or the other, I just don't like people who work solely for the money. And people scamming VCs (who want to be scammed) are not people I choose to hang with, even though I met quite a few.
Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#387I think it's factually false that lottery winner end up mostly broke and miserable. Patrick Boyle (youtube) analyzed some of the research on the topic which seem to mostly say the opposite (I didn't double check any of his work).
Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working at a corporation and making a reasonable engineer's salary will make you basically rich. Not like rule-the-world rich, but rich enough to do anything you ever wanted, which I think is pretty much as rich as anybody needs to be.
I'm experiencing this now since I've been doing both for awhile now. It's enough to not worry whether or not I should buy that $10 beer with my dinner but not enough that I don't have to debate with myself if I should be ordering 2 or 3 of those $18 cocktails every day on my first ever euro trip. Not a bad life for sure but there's quite a few things that still feel out of reach. Like private jets or even just first…
Yeah but like.. who gives a fuck about private jets? It's a good way to burn money and be more wasteful at the same time, great.
First class, meh. I could afford it if it was something I wanted to spend money on, but it feels pointless.
Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#389Re: Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly not 1 billion, which is what the lottery chances would be to win 25 times. (1 in 42m)
I don't understand this logic. The US has the Powerball lottery. So far it has been won 403 times[1] what seems around 20 year time span. With a US population of around 360 million. So not sure why 25 winners would require a population of 1 billion. [1] https://www.powerball.net/winners
I was using some state odds. Ok so 1 in 1m for Powerball, yet HN is ~3m, so we have 1 in 100k on HN. Already an order of magnitude difference. Then, of course, not even 1 in 100 here are actually giving a startup a serious go. So comparing successful startups to the lottery is easily 1000x off.