171–180 of 245 posts
From what I can gather from the article, the author has neither been in a startup, nor in a marriage, yet they feel qualified to mentor people on both :-)
On a flip side working for a large company has different challenges and limitations. They tend to be bureaucratic and have been moving in the direction of avoiding risk and increasing control over employees. Once this reaches a certain level, dancing to the HR tunes while in the straitjacket of 20 policies can get very taxing.
Separately, I wonder why the 14-hour workday is the norm in startups. What would happen if founders try to get somewhere in four months instead of three and have a firm agreement between founders of "no more than 10 hour work days; at least one, preferably two days a week of no work"?
It seems everyone agrees that "it does not work this way". Can someone explain?
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Hm okay, thanks for acknowledging! I guess the reason I had strong words for this was that the mental bias I observed is actually extremely pervasive among people here in the bay. In fact the first question I get about my firm is whether/how much I raised.
I'm afraid of Bay-Area-view-of-the-world-being-inaccurate sorta things, was kind of sad to see it in myself (though my scope was narrowed partially because my only experience was choosing between industry vs startup)
They are probably closest to the Silicon Valley startup world in the kinds of businesses being built.
Getting further away you have things like affiliate marketers and drop shippers. The "Tropical MBA" podcast (https://www.tropicalmba.com/) is more in that space.
Isn't this based solely on the equity makeup? If an investor only has 10%, but me and my co-founder share 90% then what absolute power does the investor really have?
> The VCs are your "bosses" as you answer to them (though much less than a regular "boss") and to the ones you hope to raise capital from in the future. Isn't this based solely on the equity makeup? If an investor only has 10%, but me and my co-founder share 90% then what absolute power does the investor really have?
> The VCs are your "bosses" as you answer to them (though much less than a regular "boss") and to the ones you hope to raise capital from in the future. Isn't this based solely on the equity makeup? If an investor only has 10%, but me and my co-founder share 90% then what absolute power does the investor really have?
Investors' job does not stop with giving the money. Very often, on the contrary, they are the people who will help you with connections to next round investors, will help with IPO, etc. They will not do any of this if you don't do what they want :)
An investor is only a boss if they have more equity or voting rights, correct?
I enjoyed this article, but I think it glosses over a very important part of my (and my cofounders') own motivation for starting a company: vision. Sometimes you see or believe something that others simply can't or don't, and you want to do something about it. Trying to find a (usually narrowly-defined) job that lets you work on these things can be very hard because there usually has to be someone looking for solutio…
"[..] while still allowing for a decent income even in the event of failure." How does this work? You're just taking enough of a salary as an early stage C[X]O/founder that your downside is limited?
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Investors' job does not stop with giving the money. Very often, on the contrary, they are the people who will help you with connections to next round investors, will help with IPO, etc. They will not do any of this if you don't do what they want :)
yeah i get that, that sounds more like a "partnership" , though. I was mostly talking about the "boss" verbiage. An investor is only a boss if they have more equity or voting rights, correct?
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The difference is in the HN-style (and Bay Area) understanding of the word "startup", which is focused on hyper growth at all costs or bust. Starting a small business in something like HVAC is very different in that you typically start small, with relatively low ambition, and grow the business organically over a long period of time. The latter is definitely difficult and sometimes stressful, but not in the same way a…
There was an article on HN about extremely successful Mormon startups. Interesting that they all manage to leave the office at 5pm (because they all have 6 kids) and build multi-billion dollar businesses.
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Yes, all the low hanging fruit has been taken but why would you want compete on that anyways? Being a solo founder doesn't mean you can't solve hard problems. “You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve”
> “You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve” No, you really don't. Your "pay" is a function of the market size, your market share, the budget of your customers, the amount of perceived value you create for them, your ability to sell, your costs, and probably some other minor factors. The difficulty of the problems you solve is – if at all – only indirectly related to some of those fac…
Less competition naturally leads to a higher premium you can charge. Businesses typically set aside a static budget for software that solves a "low-hanging fruit problem" (e.g. invoicing software). Because a business doesn't have a set budget for problems that they themselves aren't used to having solved, this also feeds back into being able to charge a higher premium. It's also much easier to get traction when solving a hard problem, which is another function of getting paid. Of course, this is all dependent on actually solving the hard problem :)