Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

miguelcarranza.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 152 posts

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#71

Post by eptcyka »

moomoo11 wrote: post #59
lizknope wrote: post #48

I had never heard of the company RevenueCat. It looks like a system for mobile app developers to make in app purchases. A few Internet sources say that RevenueCat has about 120 employees. I'm in a completely different field so I'm not going to claim to understand all of that but I have worked for 2 startups. The author talks about himself and his co-founder Jacob and they went back and forth on whether to sell or not…

Startups (businesses in general) are a game and the employees are resources. Don’t take it so personally. I did once too. If the employees think they know better, there’s nothing stopping them from starting their own businesses and destroying their boss.

Yeah, just don’t get emotionally invested in a chance of paying off your mortgage immediately. Don’t get your hopes up about materially bringing down your retirement age.

It isn’t reasonable to expect the founders to do an employee’s bidding when it comes to selling a company, but it is reasonable for the employees to feel emotionally invested.

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#73

Post by airstrike »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #67
airstrike wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that isn't all you said and it isn't even right. Public shareholders generally don't insist on anything as they are dispersed. They may elect directors to the board, but that question gets into all sorts of dynamics about who actually really votes when annual meetings come around, board independence, activist shareholders and whatnot. Put all of that aside and assume for a second that directors are a perfect…

How many times have the board refused a sell for the right amount of money.

That is not "insisting on a sale". Selling for the right amount of money is literally the right decision to make!

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#74

Post by scubbo »

jonas21 wrote: post #66
ryandrake wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand the mentality of the author. 9 figures is generational wealth, potentially perpetually with good multi-generational money management plan. With that kind of money invested, you have beaten the game, and can literally do any side quest you want to do, forever. This is the biggest no-brainer ever. What the fuck are you waiting for? Similarly, I don't understand why the CxOs in my current (BigTec…

> Similarly, I don't understand why the CxOs in my current (BigTech) company still work. You're done. You can do anything you want Has it occurred to you that perhaps what they want is to be the CxO of a big tech company? There’s a lot of power, prestige, and impact on society that you can’t easily have if you quit. Maybe they really enjoy the work itself too.

You can just say "sociopath", it's faster.

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#75

Post by scubbo »

fragmede wrote: post #69
ryandrake wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand the mentality of the author. 9 figures is generational wealth, potentially perpetually with good multi-generational money management plan. With that kind of money invested, you have beaten the game, and can literally do any side quest you want to do, forever. This is the biggest no-brainer ever. What the fuck are you waiting for? Similarly, I don't understand why the CxOs in my current (BigTec…

Because it's genuinely not about the money for them. It's hard to believe, but some people really do want to make the world better in their way, with whatever tools they have that their disposal.

Companies do not make the world better.

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#76

Post by theptip »

ridruejo wrote: post #61
throw03172019 wrote: post #54

I’d take the money, spend time with family (he mentioned toddler) and then figure out what to do next. Retiring isn’t everyone’s dream but at least having generational wealth is a big relief.

The secondary provided that relief. Continuing to work on the company makes perfect sense if you enjoy it, which he clearly does (with the inescapable ups and downs of every start up of course).

I dunno man. A useful psychological trick in this scenario is to imagine you were on the other side of the transaction.

Say you have nine figures in your account. Would you push it all into this company to be able to have a fun job? Seems completely insane to me.

F You Money means you can spin up whatever projects you want for the rest of your life. Even if your dream job is worth $100m to you, is the delta between this job and your realistic best alternative really worth that much?

Speaking as a co-founder CTO, I believe there is a very insidious kind of attachment that forms when you’re dancing with burnout, and working on a successful company that you’ve built from the ground up.

“I want to leave a dent in the universe” I told myself. After 3 months in a hammock decompressing, I very quickly realized that there is more to life than work, and it’s really easy to find fulfillment building things if you get bored. But this viewpoint is really hard to hold onto when you’re buried in the day to day excitement of the job.

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#77

Post by elwatto »

orliesaurus wrote: post #31

The wild part to me isn’t 9 figures is good/bad, it’s that in year 8 the company still has a single human as the default DRI for culture, zero‑to‑one work, and existential decisions. If you’re going to turn down generational wealth, the least responsible version is keeping everything psychologically and operationally coupled to you; the grown‑up move is making yourself cheap to replace and designing a succession plan…

That was the whole point of writing this series: to show how my role evolves and what I’ve had to give up. Trust me, if it were up to me, I’d still be having fun coding (even more so these days). There’s an entire section on delegation in this year’s post.

I’m not the single DRI for culture at all. We have many strong culture carriers, which has made scaling to 100 people much easier than scaling to 20. That said, culture is still one of the core responsibilities of founders, in my opinion.

Also, OCTO isn’t about me wanting to innovate. It’s about giving certain engineers permission to not be tied to a roadmap and to stay fluid.

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#78

Post by cj »

theptip wrote: post #76
ridruejo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secondary provided that relief. Continuing to work on the company makes perfect sense if you enjoy it, which he clearly does (with the inescapable ups and downs of every start up of course).

I dunno man. A useful psychological trick in this scenario is to imagine you were on the other side of the transaction. Say you have nine figures in your account. Would you push it all into this company to be able to have a fun job? Seems completely insane to me. F You Money means you can spin up whatever projects you want for the rest of your life. Even if your dream job is worth $100m to you, is the delta between t…

> Even if your dream job is worth $100m to you, is the delta between this job and your realistic best alternative really worth that much?

At least for me, regular financial decision making breaks down once the numbers are above a certain amount.

E.g. You won’t feel 10x better about a $100m windfall vs. a $10m windfall.

The best case scenario for a lot of founders is to do a secondary, cash out / de-risk, and keep on building.

That’s the route I took. Paired with obsessive focus on work/life balance, I don’t regret taking this route.

Re: My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

#79

Post by stoneforger »

scubbo wrote: post #75
fragmede wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's genuinely not about the money for them. It's hard to believe, but some people really do want to make the world better in their way, with whatever tools they have that their disposal.

Companies do not make the world better.

The Kool Aid is strong, remember this is the forum of an incubator. One has to believe to drink the whole cup.
Post reply on HN