31–40 of 87 posts
What really is a startup, these days? A handful of hackers in a garage or a co-working space? Somewhere established but still youthful and fresh- Path? Square? Quora? Someplace much older but with a sense of dynamism and a startup ethos- Google? Apple?
If there's a chance your paycheck won't clear, it's a startup. /I kid, I kid. Sort of.
in retrospect it was a pretty brave/risky thing to do, but it didn't feel like it at the time. money came, money went. simple as that.
to a certain extent, i feel the same way now. if everything went to hell tomorrow, i could just get a job and probably earn in the neighborhood of $150k/year on salary.
we, the founders, have 100% ownership of our company, which is profitable and growing at approximately 75-100% a year.
5 years spent in megacorp life versus seeking funding and giving up ownership was well worth it.
I used to advise people to go work for an existing company for a few years before trying to start their own, but I now think that was bad advice. It's true that you learn things working for a big company, but you learn more, faster, starting your own. A lot of people we've funded have said they wished they'd quit their corporate job sooner. I don't remember any saying they wished they'd stayed in it longer. The one p…
The article, and others like it, are nefarious corporate PR pieces put out by Microsoft, Google, Apple and others designed to trick us into not realizing the tremendous power we now hold. With the advent of internet,, the transaction costs that first led to the corporation have almost disappeared. This is 'The Age Of The Virtual Corporation'.
Work for The Man and you'll just make Larry Ellison, Steve Balmer, Tim Cook richer.
I used to advise people to go work for an existing company for a few years before trying to start their own, but I now think that was bad advice. It's true that you learn things working for a big company, but you learn more, faster, starting your own. A lot of people we've funded have said they wished they'd quit their corporate job sooner. I don't remember any saying they wished they'd stayed in it longer. The one p…
What are your thoughts on joining a big company vs joining a startup (as opposed to starting a company yourself)? On average, it seems one would still learn faster and be able to take on many new roles as an employee at a startup, but an employe also is in a chaotic world that he or she doesn't completely control (and often working with incomplete information). Do you think this trade-off is worth it? And, since I'm…
Some drawbacks so far are the politics it takes to get a project going and the maze of people in a large corporation. Many times it takes several meetings just to find the right person to answer a question. Also having to interface with people around the globe to get sign off on things pose a time zone conflict and more hours are wasted.
Sometimes the answers to the problems that I face are not known to one side of the business because they have no idea how the other side does things. There are massive silos of information and systems that make it harder to navigate than a smaller shop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do learn lots of good things at companies, but you can also learn bad habits -- you can acquire a predilection for long meetings, acquire a taste for political point-scoring over (more difficult, less fun) compromise, and a default position of creating process over improving communication. Those things are survival skills at a big company, but very bad for small ones. The trick is to identify which of the skills…
Excellent point - I find the long meetings aren't such a difficult thing to avoid - but certainly politics and unnecessary process have no place in a startup. The other big lesson I learnt, the hidden cost of complexity, and importance of keeping things simple (I don't think you can get this until you meet the real world): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331082 (just submitted to HN, realised it hadn't been sha…
I used to advise people to go work for an existing company for a few years before trying to start their own, but I now think that was bad advice. It's true that you learn things working for a big company, but you learn more, faster, starting your own. A lot of people we've funded have said they wished they'd quit their corporate job sooner. I don't remember any saying they wished they'd stayed in it longer. The one p…
Just imagine how many more great startups would exist if Google (and others) didn't have 100k of the best developers strapped into The Matrix (:D)
The time window for playing the startup game is very short. Fresh out of college you don't have as many financial responsibilities as a few years down the road. Take that financial freedom as a license to risk working at or launching a startup. You won't be able to do it when you have a mortgage, two kids to feed and clothe, and college savings on the horizon.
Yep. If I had it to do over, I'd do it that way. The options are better now, though. 15 years ago, if you wanted a big software company you had Microsoft, and, uh... Sun? Oracle? Now you have Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, not to mention the in-betweeners like Square, Dropbox, and Github. It's an incredible time to be starting off in Software. Unless you're sitting on the idea of the century (hint…
I used to advise people to go work for an existing company for a few years before trying to start their own, but I now think that was bad advice. It's true that you learn things working for a big company, but you learn more, faster, starting your own. A lot of people we've funded have said they wished they'd quit their corporate job sooner. I don't remember any saying they wished they'd stayed in it longer. The one p…
What are your thoughts on joining a big company vs joining a startup (as opposed to starting a company yourself)? On average, it seems one would still learn faster and be able to take on many new roles as an employee at a startup, but an employe also is in a chaotic world that he or she doesn't completely control (and often working with incomplete information). Do you think this trade-off is worth it? And, since I'm…
Financially and over the long term, a stable well-paid job early in one's career combined with low expenses (no kids, no mortgage, often no car and cheap health insurance) results in a larger lump of money accruing compound interest over a longer period of time.