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My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

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Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#71
This sounds like the start up I left a couple years ago. I was employee number 3. I took a deep pay cut to join them. I shared a cubicle with the ceo and cto, the two cofounders. Tight nit group.

A year later, we had our first round of vc fund. I had a slight bump in salary, but owned stocks so all is good. My role was, make-things-work-at-all-cost. I'd be on calls with customers and their engineers to make things work. I'd generate specialized reports by merging data locally, I'd get a calls on my personal phone from customers. We did the things that don't scale.

Year 2, we are 30 employees getting ready for another round of funding, the ceo and cto spent all their time in vc meetings. I worked in all my waking hours, it was unsustainable. I told them I needed a break, the way they responded showed me that I was just another replaceable employee.

I packed my stuff and left, they tried to screw with my stocks, but i fought back and got it all. They got their second funding. They never replaced me. Instead of hiring 2 or 3 people to do my job in a scalable manner, they stopped offering the service all together. Instead they went with buzzwords in AI.

Fast forward 3 years. The company was acquired, the stocks are worth 0 dollars, and most employees got fired. Though the linkedin post sounds like a success story.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#72
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone doing executive work at a massive and well-established corporation be expected to know how VC works?

That seems obvious? At least in the tech industry, I'd expect someone in an executive role to have some understanding of VC given how it influences so much that happens in the space. If you hired someone from a traditional manufacturing company, maybe not.

I think more than anything this demonstrates the “my context must be everyone’s context” fallacy.

The VC world is a little slice of the tech world. Hacker News is a wee little slice of the tech community.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#74
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed a guy the other day. CS degree. "I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams." "Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?" *crickets* We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.

The bytes it takes up and how it can be cast? What answer would you be looking for

Presumably something like "a string is a sequence of characters" would be a good first answer, though it might prompt some follow-up questions.

I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I thought through it out loud.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are supposed to do all that with other people's money, dummy.

He took VC funding so he did it perfectly right (well, depending on how much his previous job made).

Then I sincerely hope he played the kickbacks-and-favors game correctly and the reddit post is just for optics.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#76

This sounds like the start up I left a couple years ago. I was employee number 3. I took a deep pay cut to join them. I shared a cubicle with the ceo and cto, the two cofounders. Tight nit group. A year later, we had our first round of vc fund. I had a slight bump in salary, but owned stocks so all is good. My role was, make-things-work-at-all-cost. I'd be on calls with customers and their engineers to make things wo…

How did your stock wind up being worth $0? Down round or a "practically an acqui-hire" type of acquisition?

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#77
post #56

> Ultimately I ended up with a bunch of highly paid employees who don’t know how to do anything but to “build and lead amazing teams.” I've worked at a lot of startups. The worst of them were led by people who list things like "organization design" and "build and lead amazing teams" on their LinkedIn. At the most dysfunctional company, the ex-FAANG CTO would take key job descriptions and add the requirement that they…

I interviewed a guy the other day. CS degree. "I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams." "Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?" *crickets* We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.

Maybe this is a reverse fizz-buzz filtering test. I.e. they want to self-select themselves out of positions that require them knowing such basics.

Either that or they're completely incompetent. Likewise it takes a special kind of stupid to think they could wing it.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#78
post #8

Honest question: if you sell 50%, then why do what the VCs tell you to do? Beyond gaining some sort of reputation for not doing what your investors want, is there anything else?

As part of that https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wework-downward-spiral-could-...

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#79
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bytes it takes up and how it can be cast? What answer would you be looking for

"Strings are sequences of characters" or sth. like that.

It's a grab bag, tell-me-something-interesting icebreaker question. I'm looking for some evidence of the fact that you can differentiate the two in some meaningful way.

Not intended to be a gotcha question! Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#80
post #66
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed a guy the other day. CS degree. "I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams." "Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?" *crickets* We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.

What role were you interviewing for? Sure anyone with a serious CS degree at some point knew the difference between a char and a string. But if you're hiring a VP or product in a larger org, it doesn't matter whether they remember because the people they'd be managing wouldn't even need to know.

Customer-facing implementation engineer, more or less.
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