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

philosophyforprogrammers.blogspot.com

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

#81

Post by julian_t »

hglaser wrote: post #51
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…

This is a great comment, thank you! > I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. Can you elaborate on this? How were people "looking out for their own interests", and how did it end up helping them? Could the founders have done things differently to make the outcome more equitable? Thanks!

Not the OP but…

I took it to mean that you have a responsibility to yourself as well as the startup. You give them a lot of time and effort, sure, but you need to keep doing things like reviewing how the job is letting you develop, both technically and as a person, keeping up your tech skills by reading and playing, and building contacts and networks of your own.

The people who have done that (rather than just had their head down and working) have more to fall back on if the startup fails, and probably noticed things weren’t going so well earlier as well.

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

#82

Post by jfoster »

ttty wrote: post #55
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…

> I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. Pay attention to this.

It just confused me. How does anyone do well out of a failing startup? By jumping ship early? By going to a competitor? Surely there are no golden parachutes, right?

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

#83

Post by watwut »

hglaser wrote: post #51
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…

This is a great comment, thank you! > I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. Can you elaborate on this? How were people "looking out for their own interests", and how did it end up helping them? Could the founders have done things differently to make the outcome more equitable? Thanks!

If you do not care about yourself, you may end up doing all that super important but non glamorous work that does not sound great when looking for another job. You will not have right checks and buzzwords on resume, cause you have been too busy doing useful "normal" work.

Consider also the latest "github is your resume" hiring fad. Do you think it is possible to crunch, give everything possible to your startup employer and have a pet project at the same time?

If you do not care about yourself, you will end up tired and overworked. Another potential employer will interpret it as a "lack of passion".

The issue is not limited to startups through. The same happen in established companies.

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

#84

Post by Smirnoff »

Tloewald wrote: post #75
Smirnoff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This statistic wasn't there but one could imagine that it would be higher than 20%. Also, keep in mind that success is a subjective term -- for some people it's when you make $1M, break-even or get acquihired, for others it's at least $100M or $1B.

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

#85

Post by mikeyouse »

jfoster wrote: post #82
ttty wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. Pay attention to this.

It just confused me. How does anyone do well out of a failing startup? By jumping ship early? By going to a competitor? Surely there are no golden parachutes, right?

There definitely are golden parachutes. In my experience, when a startup is going to die, it will thrash around a bit before it quits living.

Most recently, the company was running out of money (~3 months runway), no significant progress was made on the large new funding round we were looking for, and a small round wouldn't do any good since there were big (expensive) milestones to meet. With about 2.5 months left, we laid off about 80-90% of the staff to extend the runway.

Most employees were let go with two week severance packages and about 1 week's worth of insurance. "Critical" employees stayed and were given sizable 'retention' packages with big bonuses if new funding was arranged.

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

#86

Post by 3stripe »

jfoster wrote: post #82
ttty wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. Pay attention to this.

It just confused me. How does anyone do well out of a failing startup? By jumping ship early? By going to a competitor? Surely there are no golden parachutes, right?

That's like asking "How does any do well out of failing?"

And the answer is surely the same: by learning from mistakes made.

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

#87

Post by drunkpotato »

jfoster wrote: post #82
ttty wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. Pay attention to this.

It just confused me. How does anyone do well out of a failing startup? By jumping ship early? By going to a competitor? Surely there are no golden parachutes, right?

For me, the applied skills I learned at a startup made me a much more attractive prospect. I can speak from experience about the relative strengths and weaknesses of machine learning models on real data, instead of the somewhat sterilized and over-used datasets often passed around in academia. It means a higher salary when I did jump ship into corporate-land.

Plus, it was just plain fun. Startups are the closest thing to the intellectual excitement and curiosity of grad school I've found in the private sector.

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

#88

Post by inthewoods »

I've got a full time job, and I've done startups - both are obviously valuable. A friend of mine approached me recently with the idea of doing a startup - but he didn't have any ideas. He wanted to do consulting in his chosen space to find that idea.

My problem with this is that, in my mind, it doubles the risk - you have go into consulting (which is not risk free), then hope you find an idea. There is then additional risk of starting the company and finding out if the idea is a scalable product - I've had it happen twice that we thought we had a product, but it turned out we had a product that required so much consulting to launch we were essentially a consulting company.

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

#89

Post by JoeAltmaier »

inthewoods wrote: post #88

I've got a full time job, and I've done startups - both are obviously valuable. A friend of mine approached me recently with the idea of doing a startup - but he didn't have any ideas. He wanted to do consulting in his chosen space to find that idea. My problem with this is that, in my mind, it doubles the risk - you have go into consulting (which is not risk free), then hope you find an idea. There is then additiona…

Consulting isn't all that risky depending. I never made as much money as when I was part of a consulting partnership. But the work was less glamorous/interesting. Mostly solving legacy system problems (where by definition companies might have lost their expertise and have to call in an outsider).

At least a startup is always new and fresh, at least with a good product. That's why I gave up on consulting (that and the other partners had a falling-out) and have been in startups every since.

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

#90

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jfoster wrote: post #82
ttty wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. Pay attention to this.

It just confused me. How does anyone do well out of a failing startup? By jumping ship early? By going to a competitor? Surely there are no golden parachutes, right?

Still you get paid the whole time. You meet risk-takers. I've gotten almost every job for 20 years from connections I made at my first startup.
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