61–70 of 90 posts
Fuck money. Hacking is about the novel manipulations of technological systems, and you're supposed to be poor while you do it.
I always thought of hackers as people who loved various forms of freedom, including but not limited to economic and technological freedom.
In between GlassDoor data he talks about founders being the Lords of the Startup Feudalism and I kinda agree, companies used to pay 25-40k to an employee, a programmer/engineer can take several jobs from the industry henceforth the salary is 3x the regular salary. However the successful founder become rich and invest in other companies small, medium, big and help raise the inequality.
That is the broken narrative. An employee can get stock in 5 different companies in 5 years, a founder is, at best, able to get one company off the ground in 5 years. An employee can move change jobs (and often get a pay raise) when the unexpected hits a company puts it on the skid. A founder will never be invested in again if they jump ship on the company when it hits a big problem. An employee can work for a cash s…
Is that really true? What about all the "fail fast" mantras we hear so much about? It seems like I read about plenty of founders who have run three or four companies into the ground before finally having a success?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(2) As a very early employee in a hugely successful startup. But this is roulette, since most startups fail and some only succeed after so much dilution that your share ends up tiny. This is a very poor way of describing the risk / upside of joining a startup. In the aggregate, the odds of any randomly selected startup may present odds similar to roulette, but practically, you have the ability to choose who you work…
If you can predict company success, why would you be a developer? Technical prowess, does not actually mean company success. Some really successful companies, have had some really bad software practices. And companies with really good developers have failed.
Technical prowess does not mean company success, but if you are able to identify a company that with significantly higher comparative odds of success, in which your technical prowess can directly impact the success of the product, you are in a much better position to achieve a positive outcome than if you had joined a company at random where your talent didn't have significant incremental value-add.
With regard to your prowess adding significant value-add, I think it is easiest to give a counter-example / example.
SnapChat's success likely doesn't ultimately lie in their ability to create beautiful HTML5 landing pages for their app on the web, so their front-end web developers likely don't add huge incremental value.
Conversely, Google's success largely hinged on their ability to return highly relevant search results with great speed, so early developers with talents in these fields had a much larger impact on the eventual success of the company. - This is the kind of situation you should aim to find.
That doesn't mean the only choice is to become a founder, not everyone is there yet. Looking at the article though, you see the bias that defines so much of the literature: despite the fact that we're creating software that reaches the world, the only place to get a job is the west coast of the US, right?
Wrong. There are tons of places doing 7 and 8 figures in industries driven by software. Small businesses. Be prepared to rethink how your career works. If you want to just hack and live in your little hacking world with your fellow hackers drinking hacker beer and listening to hacker music, then you're just an employee. If you're willing to stretch, and embrace what makes business happen, and apply your technical skills to those problems, and tie your success to the success of the business, there are some tremendous opportunities to be had. There are plenty of non-VC'ed businesses owned by people making real money who are more than happy to reward those who help them make more.
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Silicon valley startups are good at redistributing the money from the top to the bottom.
Great point. Startups are one of the only mechanisms doing that in our contemporary financial pyramid economy. They are one of the only true class mobility engines left.
"Yet on close inspection, the evidence suggests that the keys to success in the start-up world are not much different than those of many other elite professions. A prestigious degree, a proven track record and personal connections to power-brokers are at least as important as a great idea. Scrappy unknowns with a suitcase and a dream are the exceptions, not the rule.
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That means the founders had held a senior position at a big technology firm, worked at a well-connected smaller one, started a successful company already, or attended one of just three universities - Stanford, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/12/us-usa-startup-con...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the broken narrative. An employee can get stock in 5 different companies in 5 years, a founder is, at best, able to get one company off the ground in 5 years. An employee can move change jobs (and often get a pay raise) when the unexpected hits a company puts it on the skid. A founder will never be invested in again if they jump ship on the company when it hits a big problem. An employee can work for a cash s…
> A founder will never be invested in again if they jump ship on the company when it hits a big problem. Is that really true? What about all the "fail fast" mantras we hear so much about? It seems like I read about plenty of founders who have run three or four companies into the ground before finally having a success?
For a founder who fights hard, they put in the work to make it happen and try various approaches when adversity strikes until they, and their investors, agree they have done everything they can to try to make it fly. That person will get another shot, because investors do realize that this is a gamble but they know that if there had been a way to make it work, this person probably would have found it.
Then there is the founder who never varies from their day one tactics, against advice from advisors, and then decides, when it is clear the company is going no where, to resign and go somewhere else. That person rarely gets a second shot at the prize.
There is a third category of founder who, and this is almost literally true, curls up in the face of all the stress and shuts down. With luck, their investors replace them quickly and they get early treatment to avoid PTSD. Folks rarely talk about them. Their best outcome is to move to a stable, low to moderate responsibility position in a large company.
If you're a fighter, you can get funded as many times as you can afford (remember pre-seed is all on you). If you're a runner you get at most two shots at the game. And if you're not cut out for the life, its important to find that out and deal with it early, even one person taking the short exit, is too many.
I have a term I call "win at money". You've won at money when you have enough capital to live comfortably for the rest of your life just on the interest from low-risk investment. Can you win at money in software? Yes, but pretty much only by founding your own company or being among the first handful of employees at a startup that gets huge. On the other hand, you can make a comfortable middle-class living at software…