If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else • Hacker News Board

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#71

Post by notastartup » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 9:23 PM UTC

I worked for two startups. One startup was fairly large 100+, it sure didn't feel like a startup except for when it asked people to come on weekends and work or stay behind until 11pm and have the manager call at 1am about work. It also played the startup card when it came to pay. I learned that if you screw people over, they will still stay if it means they can keep a job.

Another startup I joined was small, 20 people. CEO was very caring guy. Paid people better and no crazy hours. Learned some things from the boss.

Overall, I've learned more from the second startup, but it probably won't matter in helping my own. I learned so much more about just bootstrapping my own product.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#72

Post by Xodarap » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 9:54 PM UTC

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #39

Xodarap wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. And how did you get that idea? How did you get the experience to see that there was an unfilled need in the marketplace? People who have experience in a field perceive their risks as lower (correctly!) and are therefore more likely to start a company. It is a perfectly rational decision and is unrelated to risk tolerance.

Exactly my point actually. You work in an industry, might even have a cozy corporate job and great benefits. You're on a solid career trajectory. Leaving that to start a company rarely makes financial sense. But most people aren't assessing it through that lens. They know their industry, have a great idea, and they HAVE TO DO IT. Even if financially it seems nuts!

Entrepreneurs are, in general, not motivated by money. This may be what you are saying - in which case I agree! What I object to is this statement:

> Or may you just don't have the risk tolerance for entrepreneurship.

Risk tolerance is at best weakly related to the likelihood that you will become an entrepreneur, and risk-tolerant entrepreneurs [perform worse](http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/85/66/06/PDF/PEER_st...) than average.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#73

Post by michaelochurch » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 10:35 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #45

michaelochurch wrote: post #36

These venture-funded startups make a mockery of the concept. After all, if you're a true entrepreneur, are you really going to waste 6 months of your life asking a fucking venture capitalist for permission to be a founder? The VC-funded game is just the same private-sector social climbing that a previous generation called "the corporate ladder". The real problem, the 9500-pound chain-smoking and belching elephant in…

That's just, like, your opinion man. You seem to be focusing on the glitzy veneer of the Sand Hill VCs and ignoring the fact that new capital intensive businesses almost always involve seed investment, be it from friends and family, or venture capitalists. In either case, it's almost always a good idea to use other peoples' money instead of your own. Particularly in environments like the current one where you can get…

In either case, it's almost always a good idea to use other peoples' money instead of your own.

I agree. You used to be able to get bank loans on co-investment (i.e. you put up some of the capital). Now they require personal liability. Things have gone to the worse.

You're undermining your ability to have a few failures to learn from if you put all of your personal assets on the line in one venture.

True. But in a time when (a) bank loans were available with co-investment alone (not you're-insane-if-you-take-it personal liability) and (b) people in the middle class actually had money, it was possible to get going while only putting up 5% of the seed money (and getting a larger equity disbursement, because you actually are doing the work on a low salary).

But arguing that somehow we'd be better of if people were risking massive amounts of their personal capital on their startups (vs what we have now where the risk is split between them and others who can afford it) seems wrong.

I agree. My point is that, before the VC era, people didn't have to risk massive amounts of personal capital. A 5% co-investment, and a willingness to work on a lower-than-market salary for a while, was enough to get you in the game.

Even the founders who do have money aren't so dumb as to turn away VCs out of pride of being a "true entrepreneur" if the terms are favorable.

Fair. It's not that all VC is bad or should be turned away. It's that a 6-month permission-seeking process discourages most people who have the entrepreneurial spirit, favoring social climbers.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#74

Post by enowbi » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 11:16 PM UTC

The number one rule in startups, just like any other endeavor is just do it and unleash the potentials you never knew you got. TRY is key. Very often we read a lot of rules, dos and donts from successful people and finally just get confused. A lot of them won't tell you they learned their mistakes early on, made corrective adjustments and moved along.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#75

Post by Tloewald » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 11:16 PM UTC

Smirnoff wrote: post #54

Tloewald wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing to suggest that the second cohort only includes failures, and bear in mind that many people -- having failed -- won't try a second time -- and if they've learned anything, it will be the people who figure out they're never going to succeed who drop out. Without knowing the probability that someone who succeeds vs. fails will try again there's simply no way to tell. Anecdotally, it's very common for e…

Actually, the post says it explicitly that this 20% includes only failures. --> "... entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20% chance of succeeding."

But what chance of success do entrepreneurs who previously succeeded have?

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#76

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 2:20 AM UTC

ffn wrote: post #57

Article is confusing "startup" with "small business", if your field and your methods are old enough to be tried-and-true then, yes, by all means, apprentice yourself and learn the ropes. After spending the 7 or so years working in a social-networking company, you too can create another stable small-business in social-networking that (for example) staggers users' twitter posts or sells slightly ridiculous shirts to fa…

This is a little bit out there .... I think it is kind of confused. If you are mining titanium on the moon or whatever, then this will not be your first start-up unless you are already a billionaire and are willing to throw your money away or your "mining startup" is really you investing your billions into into someone that can do it, in which case it is not necessarily you "doing the startup" so I'm not sure it is relevant to the discussion.

Also, I think you vastly underestimate what kind of business knowledge is needed in running a successful business. Take your headset into the right-eye example, if you are a fresh-faced kid with nothing but an idea of how to put music into somebody's right eye, or whatever, you may not understand much about GAAP, manufacturing, how deals are brokered, etc.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#77

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 2:22 AM UTC

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #6

It kind of drives me nuts that I've read a lot of this research elsewhere, and all of my experiences have either flew in the face of them, or there were major asterisks. It makes me wonder, who were the people being studied, because I can see all of this being true in the general population, and you can even see it in most of the valley. There is something about the results that I don't trust, much like the way that…

On the carbs thing ... I think it has something to do with "moderation" or something like that.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#78

Post by jpatel3 » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 2:29 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #5

I've done both - worked for 2 other people's startups, founded my own, worked 5+ years at Google, now founding another. My experience is that you learn something from both, but you learn different things from each, and which will teach you more depends on what skills you need to learn. Working for someone else's startup, I learned how to quickly cobble solutions together. I learned about uncertainty and picking a dir…

Very insightful. Compared to working in corporate or big org, startup can teach you a lot about yourself.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#79

Post by benjamincburns » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 3:42 AM UTC

Not that I have heaps of experience to base this on, but here's my general thoughts on a good strategy:

    while(0 == ideas.good_ideas.count ||
        FAIL == start_company(&ideas, &experience)) {

        // no ideas, or failed startup
        while(THRESHOLD > experience.why_failed.confidence ||
            0 == ideas.good_ideas.count) {
            
            // no ideas, and/or not sure why startup failed
            work_in_leadership_for_young_but_successful_company(&experience, &ideas);
        }
    }

    // would be interested to read more articles on
    // what goes here
    end_game();

I think employment for the sake of being a better entrepreneur is a great strategy, but only if you can find the right role, and only if you approach it with the correct frame of mind.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#80

Post by hoprocker » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 4:31 AM UTC

Tloewald wrote: post #2

Very informative and amusing post. My favorite statistic was the 18% of entrepreneurs succeed the first time, and only 20% succeed the second time. > The sort of person who jumps in and gives advice to the masses without doing a lot of research first generally believes that you should jump in and do things without doing a lot of research first. Like most good polemics, this one probably overstates the case. It seems…

Love these sorts of reflections -- insight about a career in software, from those that have been in it long enough to have one.