Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, where did you get these numbers and data about when Uber was offering RSUs?
People share offers all the time on Blind
Ugh, Blind has got to be the most toxic environment I’ve ever witnessed.
Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
251–260 of 271 posts
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#252VCs win if enough of their bets make it big enough to offset the ones that go under. Naturally the big hits are few and the ones that fail are numerous. That means the big hits need to be huge and the failures need to have a certain cap. The latter also means you can't run a company for 10 years in slowmo until they get profitable. And the big hits need to be huge which means they need to take over a nice chunk of a…
I'll give you another reason. VC money is geographically limited. You're essentially required to build in San Fran or NYC if you want to get your product in front of someone with the cash to fund it.
Pittsburgh has a great tech scene and a pretty good 'stable, 10 years in company' scene. It's got dick all for startups (duolingo yes there are always exceptions) because there's just no VC capital.
IMO we're mostly fine with that. It's certainly a hell of a lot cheaper to live here than San Fran.
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#253One thing that not many people talk about: there's an oversupply of VC funds spawned by the technological waves of the 90s (internet), 2000s (mobile) and everything in between. Today there isn't a clear wave, yet those funds need to deploy capital. Now there are too many funds pursuing not enough VC-worthy opportunities. The VC bubble will pop sooner or later.
Not really monotonic. A lot of funds took deep hits during dotcom.
Image processing, text processing, and the next wave of robotics/manufacturing. A.k.a., "AI".
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are 2 kinds of engineers, one kind sent rockets and recollected them, made robots run and jump. The other kind, shrank blog posts to 140 characters, or added a timeout to short messages, removed the thumb down button, and called them a new feature. Today, we still remember the names of da Vinci, Tesla, Turing, not because they had a successful family ... I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid.
I'm with you, man. I'd rather spend my life pursuing big dreams and try to do something meaningful, and leave a legacy - even if I fail and die broke, penniless and alone - then spend my life engaging in boring, pedestrian "normalcy". I can live with failing. I can't live with not trying.
Just please make sure to take breaks and recharge or you will burnout. Burnout is about imbalance, remember that this life is a marathon not a sprint.
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The idea that Founders take on so much more ”risk” than early employees, and so deserve multiple orders of magnitude more reward is laughable. There’s no difference in the risk of a founder and employee 1. They’re both out of a job and perhaps underpaid at first.
Do you consider the value add of a founder and 1st employee the same?
Yes. If the employee didn’t add a massive amounts of value, no one would have been hired.
Unless it’s a sole proprietorship, founders without employees are just masturbating until they fail. No one is a philosopher king. It’s just a self serving lie to justify gross exploitation. No one provides 1000x value.
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for saying this. The point about FAANG paying so much gets made a lot, and that employees of startups are fools for their decisions, as if everyone's handed a dozen offers and makes a choice. Most of us are lucky to get a single offer, sometimes after months of trying, so we take what we are given. The rosy picture portrayed on HN isn't at all accurate to my experience. Though to be fair my current salary,…
These two statements contrasted is pretty fascinating: > The rosy picture portrayed on HN isn't at all accurate to my experience. > I'm payed a crazy amount of money ["far more than I need to live and have a pretty easy life"] to do something I love. You're living the rosy picture portrayed on HN. You react to $400k the same way most people would react to what you're describing.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I don't make 400k per year and I've tried to work at high paying tech companies in the bay area in the past and was rejected many times.
At one point I was close to giving up on being a developer entirely after months of failing to find work, though thankfully I had a friend from a former job who helped give me a legup to a startup he was working for.
It was that painful experience which made me grateful for what I have, even if its looked down on so much by my peers. I realized how lucky I was to be working at all.
The rosy picture I was referring too wasn't so much the salary as the ability of software engineers to get these jobs. In my experience it was a lot more like a professional sport (spend decades working and practicing in this field and you still don't have what it takes) than finding a store with a help-wanted sign and filling out an application.
I guess there's something of a paradox there... its a weird industry.
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#257One problem with rejecting venture capital (or any other form of external capital) is that the founders (and likely the early employees) are investing in the company, in the form of lower pay. Which is all fine and dandy, but the founders are likely risking most of their net worth, including the potential income of some of their best years. Taking outside capital not only means growing faster, but also diversificatio…
Another problem this article misses is that it's quite arrogant to assume a founder has other means to build a company. Most founders are quite honestly usually young and that also means they lack capital, but would otherwise be brilliant and the perfect person/team to create the next Facebook/Uber.
I think most startups who don't use external money try to grow from their own cash flow. Which in turn means lower payout and wages to the founders or early employees.
"No VC" can also mean the founders take on loans, angel investors or friends&family.
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
To your point, a lot of the traditional appeal that working at a startup has for engineers has been the options. When you take that (significant) compensation away it should make the job much less appealing. I think a lot of younger ( by which I mean years of experience in the industry rather than age ) talent has forgotten or is not aware that this is why a startup job became the "done thing". For many, they'd be be…
The truth is that "significant" compensation is often worth little or nothing, and always has been. For every guy who makes $400K off his FAANG options or RSUs, there's at least 100 who made nothing off of their early stage stock options.
Even assuming this arbitrary estimate were true (I don't know what the real figures are, and doubt anyone else does, so why not) then this would mean the options were worth $4K ($400k/the 1 person who jackpots) in speculative value, give or take.
Still significant for someone just starting their career.
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree, even as a founder who bootstrapped two companies. Nowadays, software companies are capital intensive. They don't start in a garage like in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. Are there exceptions? Sure, but they are outliers. Marketing is one of the components that make your service or product capital intensive. Another is the level of details your product need to be in the market. In the past you were competing in…
The garage stage is usually the seed round, just like YC helps make it a formal process. Get a working provable prototype up and iterate quickly on your idea to something that works and can turn a profit. Then off you go to find customers till you show demand. That's when you evaluate whether a VC fund makes sense for your business. Even back when SJ and Woz were in "the garage" stage building Apple 1s, they were see…
If you look at the capital burnt by "unicorns" (e.g. Uber, Rappi) you will find that they are more capital intensive than in the 70s, 80s since they don't need to be cashflow positive for an undefined time and their product and marketing is much more complex and detailed. A clear example of this is computer games, in the 70s and 80s consumers were happy with a few "pixels moving" and now a game require a lot of people. That makes impossible to launch a new game from the garage except for rare indy outliers.
Who will win Lyft with ~$ 5b in investment, or Uber with ~24b? Those numbers are independent of the app being built.
Re: Startups Rejecting Venture Capital
#260Good for them. I'm not going to pretend I'm actually in a place where I even have the ability to make the choice that these founders made, but I've been reflecting deeply on whether I will seek VC support in the future, and I'm pretty set against it. At least I'm set against any VC's based in SV. I don't think they're bad people or anything, and even quite like some individuals who work for VCs. But the way they oper…
lol yeah if you're talking about "diversity" in terms of who VC funds I can guarantee it will be a combo of white+indian+east asian men for the next couple decades in terms of who gets the phat funding
There are a lot of women-only funds but in terms of total capital + efficacy so far they are essentially nominal