271–280 of 431 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone: Big Tech ruins news/social media/small businesses/democracy! Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else!
> Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else! Rather: FAANG employees are pushed into startups by VCs.
I think the bigger issue is that most of the financial upsides of startups were illusory Unless you're a founder, you're unlikely to make any money, and predatory VC/backers using convertibles/senior debt to turn your equity into Zimbabwean dollars. Thats before any stats are calculated for lasting long enough to either IPO, make money or get bought out. As someone who did successfully exit, the stories of multiple-m…
I was the ~15th engineer at a YC startup that had a very big exit. Over 4 years I made less than $80k total (20k/yr) from my options while the founders made high 8 figures. Had I joined BigTech I would have made over $1 M just from stock and I would have worked less. Back during the dot com days, everyone from the secretaries to the chefs to the founders were getting rich but nowadays YC teaches their founders to kee…
They first told us we were in, but that we would need to adjust our cap table so that only 2 founders would have equity. They gave us a phone call, we pushed back, and later they sent us a rejection email
Earlier quoted context omitted.
levels.fyi will give you some confidence in the wage. Google, Meta, Amazon & microsoft all do banding, so the base wages is mostly public (hence why its all bollocks about wage negotiation, there isn't any.) The first level of senior for most of these orgs will tip the scales at around $300k Having worked at both startup and FAANG, I don;t think startups actually give you the skills to flourish here in corp land. Sur…
Wage negotiation means getting to the top of the band sooner. Other people might have to perform well at the level to get to the band, but a wage negotiator might just get there on their first day.
Spend your time instead on getting more vacation from the start. If instead you ask for 25 days of vacation per year instead of the default 10 you have a deal (or maybe they bring you down to 20 days). You can't get 50 days of vacation (there is a company max they can't go beyond), but you can get a lot more time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was always me, and I've been here 15 years. It was pretty much a tech forum then (arguably more then than now, there's much more discussion of culture war issues now, even when stories are flagged it's ever-present in the comments). I think the time when HN was primarily startups was much further back and much briefer than most people nostalgically remember.
I mean, it’s not called Startup News. There’s a group that assumes real hackers all want to do startups (and the site is run by some of those), but that isn’t really the culture. We mythologize Woz and Gates and Page, but also K&R and Knuth and Dijkstra.
Well, not anymore it isn't: https://web.archive.org/web/20070601184317/http://news.ycomb...
I think the bigger issue is that most of the financial upsides of startups were illusory Unless you're a founder, you're unlikely to make any money, and predatory VC/backers using convertibles/senior debt to turn your equity into Zimbabwean dollars. Thats before any stats are calculated for lasting long enough to either IPO, make money or get bought out. As someone who did successfully exit, the stories of multiple-m…
I was the second engineer (series A) at a company that IPO’d at a unicorn valuation. By all rights that’s a great outcome. I made about as much in that exit as I would have if I were just at a FAANG instead
Most engineers figured out that the options/stocks of startups are worthless.
I certainly did. I have options/stocks from 3 different companies, all vested, but zero expectation of seeing any money out of it. One of them recently went belly up and had an exit for peanuts. I didn't go for big tech but I did pick a job on a YC startup that, while demanding, allowed me to purchase my own house and work on my own stuff in the evenings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's probably true. Investors, or people who take a risk, get the payoff from the risk. If you join as a salaried person, you're taking zero risk (other than that you might need to get another job if the place folds, but then all the money's gone anyway), as you're just getting paid a salary each month regardless of how the company's doing, so you don't get an outsized reward.
Generally this is not true - the "risk" taken by these people is very small, because of how wealthy they or their parents are. If I had $1M and lost it, I would be devastated. If I had $1B and lost $1M, it would be a rounding error. I don't have any money, so how do I even get to $1M? And neither does my parents.
VC invests $1M in a startup, they are risking $1M. You just work at a company, get paid every month, and don't buy any stock, you are risking $0. That's all.
If the company does well and the VC makes $5M back, it probably won't mean much to them, either. But that's how the contract was written, because the company needed that $1M.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there's still a ton of innovation going on in cars. Tesla and BYD are some of the biggest companies in the world. And conversely, rockets was regarded as a sleepy, government contracting business for a long time. I don't particularly understand why (some) people say X technology has stagnated, like web or apps. There's a ton of innovation going on - off the top of my head, WebGPU and WASM will unlock huge amounts…
There is innovation, but you’re operating within the same business domain. I wasn’t talking about stagnation but addressing the point made in the article as a software-based founder: will you compete with NVIDIA? Highly unlikely. Will you create an AAA game? Unlikely. Will you advance AI at a fundamental level? Again, highly unlikely. When I said “no way” I meant the chances are close to epsilon. In the past, there w…
Not me personally because most of what you listed requires deep expertise and founder fit. But certainly a lot of people are. It was always unlikely a startup would succeed, but from a technological perspective, the opportunities have just blown up because of AI. For example compiler/programming language startups like Mojo are back in vogue (the last major one being Java) because of the increased demands of AI/heterogenous hardware. There's many hardware startups like Cerebras. There's people trying to find use cases for AI - education, healthcare, automation, etc. Several incredibly successful games were startups recently - Genshin Impact, Black Myth Wukong.
Yes you're unlikely to make an impact in a very specific field - like going head to head against OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthrophic etc on SOTA models. But there's these hundred other innovation opportunities opening up precisely because these models do so well. Historically the greatest errors in thinking about innovation have been thinking about it like a linear progression of increasing the supply of a commodity to meet demand, like if you have enough computers that's going to be it. It's really like a tree, with an exponential explosion of the surface area of innovation opportunities. If you want a forward looking model, you need to think this technology X has gotten huge, what other technologies will this lead to?
I think the bigger issue is that most of the financial upsides of startups were illusory Unless you're a founder, you're unlikely to make any money, and predatory VC/backers using convertibles/senior debt to turn your equity into Zimbabwean dollars. Thats before any stats are calculated for lasting long enough to either IPO, make money or get bought out. As someone who did successfully exit, the stories of multiple-m…
This. FAANG and adjacent pays so well, it's a better and more guaranteed outcome than startups - for people that have that option. Dan Luu wrote about it over a decade ago: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ The math is not in favor of working at a startup, if you do it, don't do it for the money. People finally wised up to this. Even as the founder, working at a FAANG usually works out better financially and is m…