Frequently in the UK I'm seeing options that are clawed back if you leave the company at any point. EMI options that can only be exercised under certain conditions such as an exit.
Working for a startup makes less sense
31–40 of 392 posts
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#32Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent c…
Yes, I think it's possible that you learn faster at startup. But it is ridiculous to say that you "learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company."
This just makes me think that either you are exaggerating a lot, or you were highly unproductive at the big company than most people.
In either cases, I end up not being able to take your comment seriously.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#33Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent c…
I've had kind of the opposite experience. At the startup we were really sluggish it was hard to learn anything because we were jumping into any possible business opportunity before even thinking about ROI because money was always tight. 80% of the time was wasted supporting clients and fixing bugs that were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early. I think the biggest difference is money. A well funded…
There are lots of startups that aren't doing it right. The best thing someone working at one of those startups can do is probably quit and go someplace else.
I think systemically one thing we need to do is help people make better decisions about where they spend their time. Especially for people who are good builders, they happen to also be the best people who can decide for themselves whether something is actually going to work.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#34There were a few recent Ask HNs on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21641864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21645117 a larger question is : why can't startups make money
For a lot of them that's just not the primary goal. Honestly, I expect the next big success stories to break from this pattern of the silicon valley sickness of trying to grow a company at all costs by conning VC firms until they've got enough users and then sell the company or get another round of funding to try and figure out the whole "revenue" thing later.
I think some old school thinking of more organic growth of a good idea with immediate revenue will see a resurgence.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#35I've been out of startups for a few years now, but it always struck me that there is plenty of room in the cap table for employees, if founders and VCs realize they have to cut back.
If founders and VCs gave a third to half of their companies to employees, instead of crushingly small option pools, this math would almost certainly shift. And the returns wouldn't be much worse for founders or VCs.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#36Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent c…
I worked at big companies for the first 15yrs of my career. And startups for the past 5yrs.
Firstly, startups have been an absolute delight. I very carefully chose the company and hence my boss and my co-workers and love working with every engineer on the team. It is a pleasure coming into work each day and I often cant leave because I'm excited about my work.
I have a lot of authority over what I build a much of it is "close to the metal" rather than some side system. I get to see the whole slice of cake from conception all the way to sales and client implementations and participate in all of it. At small companies, as an Engineer, I learned how to build a successful product and learned all the steps from inception to sales and production.
At every big company I was at, there was more specialization and lots of process. Process was necessary at that size. There was also a great deal of inter-departmental politics and incentives were usually not aligned at big companies, sometimes incentives across departments were even orthogonal. I spent 30% of my time on process and communication at big companies and it went to 80%+ once I was a senior executive. I made a lot of money there, but I think it was to compensate for having to deal with the inner workings of a big company (and being able to be effective at it.)
At big companies, I learned how to turn the gears of organizations and learn how to make globe-spanning change effectively.
To be fair, I took a big pay-cut to come to a startup as an Engineer. I'm happy with the choice. I dont think there is any silver bullet out there, but it is important to understand what you get with each choice. It is also important to make that choice with full intent and not be fooled or brow-beaten by anyone.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#37Use your brain, when offered a role, do you like the product ?
Do you believe in it ?
Are they paying you a nice amount of money ?
If you can only answer 1/3 please continue to the purgatory state.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#38While I understand your sentiment, there is a 2015 Dan Luu article which goes into far more depth saying basically the same thing: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ I can see you just started writing on this blog so I don't want to discourage you, but I was struck by the formatting of your notes page and this post being so similar to Dan's along with the topic and content of this post. Keep writing but I would ma…
I've always thought this problem to be overstated. It doesn't make financial sense to work for a startup, but the upside is that you get to work on something you care about (and even the startup salaries aren't that bad in the grand scheme).
> the upside is that you get to work on something you care about
As a counter example, I found this is far more true at big companies, where you can switch teams until you find one that fits your interest, then at a startup where you are expected to work on basic infra that the company doesn't handle. For the data/ML related jobs that I was looking for and the industry is moving towards, big companies have tons of valuable data that startups could only dream of acquiring.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#39Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup. I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent c…
I've had kind of the opposite experience. At the startup we were really sluggish it was hard to learn anything because we were jumping into any possible business opportunity before even thinking about ROI because money was always tight. 80% of the time was wasted supporting clients and fixing bugs that were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early. I think the biggest difference is money. A well funded…
The difference is whether you see learning to do meaningful things on a shoestring budget to be itself a useful skill.
Boeing won't care if you save the project $5k by spending a week of your time coming up with a clever workaround. The week was more important than the $5k. Same for a high level role generally. But not getting work done for a week because your boss won't approve a $500 purchase... that would be frustrating and get old fast.
Re: Working for a startup makes less sense
#40The tricks that companies have used to dilute engineers' equity and to have different classes of stock are coming back to bite those companies.
To be fair it’s mostly been the VCs learning how to extract more value and forcing that on the companies.
The VCs have naturally gotten better at what they do, which is bring returns to their LPs. The consequence is that they get more value from exits than they used to which comes at the expense of the employees and founders.