The Problem With Founders • Hacker News Board

Re: The Problem With Founders

#21

Post by gipp » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 1:25 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

TheBiv wrote: post #3

I have to commend TC for writing an article like this, as they are largely the biggest vehicle for turning founders into Hollywood-esque stars and boasting founders as being disruptive (heck, their own conference is called Disrupt). The central principle of realizing that there are more people behind a startup and we should cherish them as well, is an absolutely awesome thought!! I just hope that the vision for how w…

I like your idea. I expect if they implemented it they would see that the article gets it wrong on a number of levels. Take any successful company, Google, Intel, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Boeing, any of them. Now compile a list of the first 10 - 100 employees. Now take the net worth for those individuals and compare it to the rest of the world. You'll find it lands north of the 99th percentile. Y…

What’s a shorthand way to see this? Credit really only goes to founders when a startup exits for less than $250 million. Under a $1 billion, a handful of the early employees will be able to receive credit. And above $1 billion, the number of early employees who can claim credit continually increases with exit value all the way up to a Google or Facebook, where people will mention and receive acknowledgment for even their triple-digit employee number.

It's right there in the article. This is about startups, not monoliths.

Re: The Problem With Founders

#22

Post by mikeleeorg » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 2:07 AM UTC

I'd like to add that while I totally admire Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Nikki Durkin for the struggles they went through, their stories aren't the average experience of a founder in today’s Bay Area ecosystem.

For every founder that has gotten seed funding, there are several times that number that haven't gotten anything. I made it to a startup accelerator, so I know that already puts me above the average experience. But for the others...

Maybe they tried it for a year and burned through their life savings. Maybe they worked on nights and weekends and are still struggling. Maybe they quit their jobs, talked to every investor they could, and are still trying. That's the average experience.

And don't forget about the world beyond the Bay Area...

Re: The Problem With Founders

#23

Post by nemothekid » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 2:12 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #8

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your idea. I expect if they implemented it they would see that the article gets it wrong on a number of levels. Take any successful company, Google, Intel, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Boeing, any of them. Now compile a list of the first 10 - 100 employees. Now take the net worth for those individuals and compare it to the rest of the world. You'll find it lands north of the 99th percentile. Y…

The Valley has changed. If you started in the 1990s, you got real equity and housing costs were low. You could get into the low millions just by working hard and living frugally. It was a different time-- more egalitarian and far more engineer-driven. The question is: if you're 22-25 now and move into the Bay, do you have a good chance of ending up a made man (or woman)? The answer is "no". It's been overrun by MBA c…

>if you're 22-25 now and move into the Bay, do you have a good chance of ending up a made man (or woman)? The answer is "no".

Of myself and all my acquaintances in the 21-25 age range, most grads are either:

1.) Working in SV/Tech for Corp X, making 6 figures, and independent

2.) Working in NYC/Finance for Corp Y, making 6 figures, and independent

3.) Post-grad (masters, medical, law)

4.) Back at home with mom & dad, with crippling debt, bombarded with the rhetoric that "millennials don't want to work, can't move out of their parents homes, are selfish," and so on and so forth.

So I'd say it depends on what means to be a "made man." Did the workers who worked for Ford and GM aspire to be the Zuckerbergs and Brin's of their time, or were they just happy to have a relatively stable, high paying job? Were the auto workers of the 50s and 60s made men?

Re: The Problem With Founders

#24

Post by bryanh » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 3:32 AM UTC

thecage411 wrote: post #12

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your idea. I expect if they implemented it they would see that the article gets it wrong on a number of levels. Take any successful company, Google, Intel, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Boeing, any of them. Now compile a list of the first 10 - 100 employees. Now take the net worth for those individuals and compare it to the rest of the world. You'll find it lands north of the 99th percentile. Y…

Do founders get the 'fame' ? Sure, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Sometimes it makes you a target. I was amazed at how much Eric Schmidt paid for personal security (its in the 10Q) he can afford it of course but really? You have to hire ex-special forces types because you're too tempting a kidnapping target? I personally would much rather be anonymously wealthy than 'target on your back' wealthy. Eric Schmidt a…

> He does it because it makes him feel/look important, or he's paranoid, or he may as well because he has the money and the company may pay for it anyway.

Unless you have internal knowledge, for all we know he and his family had dozens of anonymous threats due to his role and the company insisted they provide security. Or not. Who knows?

Re: The Problem With Founders

#25

Post by TheBiv » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 4:13 AM UTC

te_chris wrote: post #6

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your idea. I expect if they implemented it they would see that the article gets it wrong on a number of levels. Take any successful company, Google, Intel, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Boeing, any of them. Now compile a list of the first 10 - 100 employees. Now take the net worth for those individuals and compare it to the rest of the world. You'll find it lands north of the 99th percentile. Y…

I think you are correct about the big companies, but I didn't get the feeling that's who the author was addressing. They seemed to be addressing the new up and comers with founders who are stingy with equity and bad at sharing the limelight with their staff.

Agreed! I was just addressing the type of startups you mentioned!

Re: The Problem With Founders

#26

Post by mathattack » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 4:39 AM UTC

TheBiv wrote: post #3

I have to commend TC for writing an article like this, as they are largely the biggest vehicle for turning founders into Hollywood-esque stars and boasting founders as being disruptive (heck, their own conference is called Disrupt). The central principle of realizing that there are more people behind a startup and we should cherish them as well, is an absolutely awesome thought!! I just hope that the vision for how w…

Definitely goes against the grain of their usual writing.

Re: The Problem With Founders

#27

Post by alexthomas » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 5:36 AM UTC

TheBiv wrote: post #3

I have to commend TC for writing an article like this, as they are largely the biggest vehicle for turning founders into Hollywood-esque stars and boasting founders as being disruptive (heck, their own conference is called Disrupt). The central principle of realizing that there are more people behind a startup and we should cherish them as well, is an absolutely awesome thought!! I just hope that the vision for how w…

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Re: The Problem With Founders

#28

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 5:42 AM UTC

TheBiv wrote: post #3

I have to commend TC for writing an article like this, as they are largely the biggest vehicle for turning founders into Hollywood-esque stars and boasting founders as being disruptive (heck, their own conference is called Disrupt). The central principle of realizing that there are more people behind a startup and we should cherish them as well, is an absolutely awesome thought!! I just hope that the vision for how w…

[deleted]

Re: The Problem With Founders

#29

Post by ykumar6 » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 6:02 AM UTC

I agree mostly with the article, but early stage employees are also investing in themselves.

Young product managers at Google or Microsoft don't get the opportunity to work on big problems. The few young people I've met tend to lack the macro thinking on what makes a product successful. Why talking to users is so important. Why defining a problem is so important. Why retention is more important than growth. Why cohorts are so important and why analytics can be misleading.

With young engineers, they tend to lack the understanding on why striving for simplicity is important. Why thinking in iterations is important. Why writing tests are important. Why the best engineering in the world can't save a product that doesn't solve real problems.

Big companies do teach you these things, but not at the pace of a real startup.

Re: The Problem With Founders

#30

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jul 21, 2014, 7:07 AM UTC

ykumar6 wrote: post #29

I agree mostly with the article, but early stage employees are also investing in themselves. Young product managers at Google or Microsoft don't get the opportunity to work on big problems. The few young people I've met tend to lack the macro thinking on what makes a product successful. Why talking to users is so important. Why defining a problem is so important. Why retention is more important than growth. Why cohor…

My experience - having worked at both Google and in the startup scene - is that young PMs at Google/Microsoft actually get to work on much bigger problems and have a much better understanding of the macro scene than startup founders. At Google, it's not uncommon to hear "Can't we just buy [famous startup X]?" or "Figure out the benefit for users, and if it turns out to be useful for a large number of people, we'll see if the lawyers and lobbyists can get the law changed" or "We'll just throw 65,000 machines at the problem." As a result, there's a presumption that problems are solvable if we just think really hard and identify the incentives of everybody in the system. Few startups have this privilege.

Where Google really falls down compared to a startup is in micro-level thinking. A PM at Google may understand how a hundred million users behave in the aggregate, but fail to understand how to change one user's behavior. When your sole work experience is at a powerful corporation, you start assuming that people will take your phone calls, and you don't develop the skills of how to cold-call an ambivalent prospect, or how to empathize with a minority user who is really frustrated, or how to focus and prioritize on only the tasks that you can make a real impact on.

For engineers, I'd say Google (and presumably Microsoft) engineers understand far better than a startup why simplicity is important. The codebase, after all, is orders of magnitude bigger and harder to understand. And iterations and tests are common practice as well. What a Google engineer does not know is how to stare at a blank editor window and, in the next 3-4 hours, get something cool up on the screen. They don't know how to duct-tape open source components together into a working, if imperfect, system.