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Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

vincentschmalbach.com

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Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#341

Post by paulsutter »

Everyone should follow what’s best for them. I love early stage, and venture/growth startups are exactly right for me.

I can totally understand why folks like working at FANG and it’s wonderful that software engineers can get paid proper large salaries with that lifestyle. It wasn’t always true, Google was the pioneer.

I took 5 years off to travel in 2013, and I’m starting a new company now without taking even a week off after Formlogic (my last startup) ran out of runway.

Understand what’s best for you and follow it. Happy to discuss early stage entrepreneurship with anyone wrestling with the question

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#342

Post by gnkyfrg »

tossandthrow wrote: post #232
hardwaresofton wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed. Do you think some of this is idea related? If you're building software, many new ideas are not truly innovative in a way that wou…

When I pitch my calorie counter app that uses AI - fair, that is not new. But eg. working on an idea around decentralized dating app that utilizes federated learning, blockchains, en cryptographic distributed filesystems to make a truly open and algorithmically transparent dating app - and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that" instead of starting to jam on good privacy preserving techni…

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Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#343

Post by gnkyfrg »

[deleted] wrote: post #337
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed If you're in for-profit sector, I don't see why being concerned with the main goal first and foremost would be a bad thing. No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that. So if the problem is worth solving in this ecosystem it's worth it because it does actually turn a profit instead of some fantasy that it will magically appear at some imagi…

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Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#344

Post by timr »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #313
meritage31 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career. Startups hire those people when they are risky and the future is unclear. Once there is traction, the VCs and insiders bring in friends for cush Director/VC posts. Quite often the people who took the real risks get left out.

And that seems like safe capital preserving thing to do. A director role isn’t a prize for loyalty, it’s a job with a skill set. Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where

Sorta. A very common pattern is for startups to make abysmal hires for these "executive" roles, because the people in those roles in big tech bring loads of politics and a very narrow type of experience. They bring in their friends, and it isn't terribly long before the people who got the company to the place of initial success are gone. I've seen this play out many times.

Not to say that the early employee is necessarily guaranteed to be better, but at least they're a known quantity, have demonstrated loyalty, and have loads of business context that the shiny exec hire won't have.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#345

Post by neilv »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #313
meritage31 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career. Startups hire those people when they are risky and the future is unclear. Once there is traction, the VCs and insiders bring in friends for cush Director/VC posts. Quite often the people who took the real risks get left out.

And that seems like safe capital preserving thing to do. A director role isn’t a prize for loyalty, it’s a job with a skill set. Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where

Good points about roles not being prizes (unless that was the deal, which it sometimes is), but I'll devil's advocate this anyway.

> Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where

If you hire smart people who learn, and who believe in the mission and team... that programmer might well be in the running to lead engineering.

Knowing tech industry a bit, I'd be at least as skeptical of directors from outside. Of course I'd have to consider them, at times. But I expect at least half of the outside candidates for leadership roles will be disingenuous halfwits.

Meanwhile, if you've got people who had the grit to help get you to that point, and demonstrated alignment and loyalty when it mattered, and who foster that trust in your company culture, then you'd be an idiot not to try to find a way to get rare goodness like that in your leadership.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#346

Post by zcw100 »

bityard wrote: post #316
zcw100 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learned not to expect anything from being an early employee. It's right in the name, you're an employee. Expecting some sort of consideration for being early is naive. Every time you receive a paycheck you and your employer are even and you shouldn't expect anything more.

This is true, except in the usual case where early employees are made offers that include some presumption of partial ownership of the company through stock grants or options, often with a corresponding decrease in salary that scales inversely with the strength of the founder's reality distortion field.

There's no such thing as presumptive partial ownership. Lando had a presumptive partial ownership and if you do you should expect the Vader treatment, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further".

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#347

Post by gnkyfrg »

jschveibinz wrote: post #261

Here are a few anecdotes from the U.S. that can hopefully add substance to this conversation: 1) I am an investor in startups, and I have slowed my investments to a trickle since the beginning of Covid. I have noted that this has been generally true of other investors like myself. 2) There are still tons of problems to solve through technology applications; but there needs to be a moat between your solution and what…

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Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#348

Post by viccis »

dcminter wrote: post #10

> What's changed? Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much. But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of peopl…

Yeah I'm here because reddit's programming community became unusable in the late 2010s but especially over the last few years. For example, I'd see a post about CockroachDB and every single reddit comment would be some low effort joke making fun of the name. Meanwhile I'd come here and the creator would be in the comments answering questions. When reddit changed their default sort away from upvotes and towards engagement metrics in 2021, most of the useful places there sort of withered away.

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#349

Post by ddingus »

dcminter wrote: post #10

> What's changed? Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much. But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of peopl…

Somewhat old timer here. Currently in a startup.

Frankly, the greater discussion diversity has improved HN for me.

I found the site dynamics compelling early on, bit often felt the discussion was narrow and to some degree an echo chamber.

Arguments that counted as points made then often fall flat now and that is A Very Good Thing™

Re: Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

#350

Post by kccqzy »

bluGill wrote: post #274
kccqzy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the time the wage is not up for negotiation. Forget about it, you can't change it. HR and your future boss are tied up with company policy which says you start at X and you can't change that. 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 d…

I know multiple successful wage negotiators at FAANG. Before their promotion their annual salary increase is on the order of hundreds to low thousands because they are already at the top salary for their level.
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