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The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

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Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#111

Post by crame »

bitL wrote: post #42
staunch wrote: post #18

There are millions of people in the US alone that would jump at the chance of taking a good startup job or creating a startup themselves. They don't need convincing. But startups don't want to hire them and investors don't want to fund them. Because they're poor, under-educated, and different. They also make up the majority of the smart and talented people. It would require actual effort and understanding to work wit…

I am searching for a business partner for eCommerce that would do the whole business part while I will be plugging in and extending automated sales technology I created and use in my other companies, with 50/50 equity split and the initial operating capital provided by me if necessary. However, almost nobody wants to start from scratch, growing the company as their baby (despite having the benefit of immediate use of…

Done this once and happy to do it again. Send me a note: cram@openmailbox.org

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#112

Post by rralian »

courtson5 wrote: post #30

The author sells equity as a main motivator in joining a startup. But if you believe in equity, you are far better off being a founder than an early employee Being the first employee (or an early employee) of a startup seems to be the worst possible choice. * none of the stability of a larger company * a salary which is likely less than market * 10 to 100 times less equity than a founder (So, in an exit, you'll make…

Having been both a founder and an early employee, I wholeheartedly agree with this. Early employees really do wind up working nearly as hard as founders and the payoff is extremely disproportionate. The most likely scenario by far is failure, so your equity will be worth nothing. Your next-best hope is a moderately-successful exit, where the investors get their money back, the founders get enough to have made the endeavor worth their time and the early employees walk away with a few thousand. Hardly a year-end bonus at a bigger company (which you can expect _not_ to get at a startup). The Facebooks and Twitters of the world, where many/most early employees become millionaires are few and far enough in between to be essentially lottery tickets.

However, if you are totally fresh and want to gain some experience, it can be worth your time. The market for developers right now is such that you may not need to take such a pay cut vs a bigger company. This is the real variable. What are you giving up. And while you may work about as hard as a founder, you aren't as likely to wind up ruining your credit and destroying relationships with family and friends due to the incredible stress.

So it may be worth it for the experience. Just don't get sold on being an early employee as a path to riches via your equity. That path is vanishingly rare.

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#113

Post by jgroszko »

tomlock wrote: post #40

I think startups can be romanticized so I'm sharing my startup story and some of the things I did do and some of the things I should have done. When I was 23 I joined a startup as employee number 4. We did Salesforce implementations for small businesses using freelancers. At the time it was the CEO, Director of Sales, and another Project manager. I was originally hired as an admin assistant but after I taught the oth…

This post looks like it could be an awesome blog post and thread on it's own!

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#114

Post by ffumarola »

bitL wrote: post #42
staunch wrote: post #18

There are millions of people in the US alone that would jump at the chance of taking a good startup job or creating a startup themselves. They don't need convincing. But startups don't want to hire them and investors don't want to fund them. Because they're poor, under-educated, and different. They also make up the majority of the smart and talented people. It would require actual effort and understanding to work wit…

I am searching for a business partner for eCommerce that would do the whole business part while I will be plugging in and extending automated sales technology I created and use in my other companies, with 50/50 equity split and the initial operating capital provided by me if necessary. However, almost nobody wants to start from scratch, growing the company as their baby (despite having the benefit of immediate use of…

Surprised you're having issues filling this. I come from a Supply Chain and Ecommerce background. Currently VP Product for an ad tech company. Let me know if you'd like to chat. My HackerNews username @ gmail, or on Twitter.

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#115

Post by geebee »

courtson5 wrote: post #30

The author sells equity as a main motivator in joining a startup. But if you believe in equity, you are far better off being a founder than an early employee Being the first employee (or an early employee) of a startup seems to be the worst possible choice. * none of the stability of a larger company * a salary which is likely less than market * 10 to 100 times less equity than a founder (So, in an exit, you'll make…

I agree with you about equity, and I'd go one step further - if you're inclined to work for a startup, you're better off in almost every way being a founder rather than an early employee.

For instance, one thing people mention here is "experience" - that you gain experience working for a startup that you wouldn't get at a big company. You only might.

Ask yourself: Are you pitching investors and making contacts? Are you meeting with the lawyers to nail down legal issues? Are you negotiating office space? Setting up equity arrangements and deals? Managing PR? Getting users? Or are you mainly just handling technical issues, while those tasks are kept from you. I know a lot of managers like to say they handle the business side so that engineers can focus on the important stuff, but keep in mind, when the storm hits, you may find, as you stand in the rain and 70mph winds without roof or even an umbrella, that all you were really protected from seeing was the forecast.

I've worked at a couple of startups, and they really didn't expose me to much about running a business. They did expose me to new and interesting technical challenges, and to that extent, I did get something out of it, but certainly nothing more than I would have gotten out of working for a big name company like Google or Facebook.

Really, if your big goal is to learn how to start a startup, I doubt you'll get that by working for one as an employee, even an early one. If you want to prepare for your second startup, I doubt there's better preparation than starting your first one.

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#116

Post by marcosdumay »

GotAnyMegadeth wrote: post #105
derefr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a market for lemons, you'll get two types of people: people who realize it's a market for lemons and stay clear of it—and people who don't realize this, and end up exploited by the market. Tu quoque: "If you find out the car has water damage, don't buy it. If you find out the car was in an accident, don't buy it. If you find out the car was stolen, don't buy it." Nobody wants to buy such cars; people are e…

Sorry for the OT. > The good cars (and jobs) sell and sell quickly, while the bad cars (and jobs) stay on the market—so the market becomes saturated with bad cars/jobs, and the actual good cars/jobs become so rare that people invest more in pursuing them than they're worth, creating a sort of dollar-auction market failure. This, at least in my experience, is exactly what happens with musicians seeking bands.

You can bet that for bands seeking musicians it look exactly alike.

The market for especialized labor is full of lemons on both directions. Yet, we don't get any coordinated action to increase transparency.

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#117

Post by taternuts »

amirmc wrote: post #69

Honest question. How many 'early stage' startups would hire an English major straight out of college? The only way I see this working is if they already know the founders beforehand or if there are varying definitions of 'early'.

This was what I was thinking as well. The article is written as if she had turned down the option to join a startup or even had a chance to join one with her skillset, and I have a hard time believing that is the case.

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#118

Post by ryanSrich »

sireat wrote: post #109
ryanSrich wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with around 20 startups in the Valley about a year and a half ago. Hands down every single startup that made me an offer had a shit salary. After I ditched the idea of working in the Valley based on my experience interviewing there I decided to focus my search on distributed teams only. What I found was surprising. Not only were these new startups outside the Valley offering remote work but almost all h…

What kind of skillset do you have though? Here on HN there has been constant bemoaning over difficulty of finding good remote work. The biggest issue has been that remote work pretty much requires living in low cost of living locations.

I mostly brand myself as a Product Designer. That job typically requires a decent knowledge of both design and development. As far as me specifically: UI, UX, CSS/SASS/HTML/JS, Rails & Ruby, Design tools like sketch and CC and some working knowledge of iOS development.

Re: The Career Path I Didn’t Consider, But Should Have

#120

Post by londonymous »

pkaye wrote: post #97
Blackthorn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During my last job search, I was contacted by several companies with seed funding (not even series A). They wanted to lowball a salary and then give 1% or less equity to "make up for it". Hahahahahahaha. Haha. Ha. Are you serious? For an early non-founder employee, startups might as well be scams.

How does on balance the lower salary with the increased equity in making a decision?

A company today is worth however many billions it will be worth if it succeeds, discounted by the risk that it won't succeed. That's an incredibly difficult calculation to make, but fortunately you don't have to do it if the company recently had a funding round, just use the value the other investors decided on.

So if the company raised money at $10MM and you're being offered 0.5% equity, then treat it as a $50,000 bonus that you get for being a loyal employee over the vesting period.

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