
Questions to Ask Founders Before Joining a Startup - bkohlmann
https://blog.cardash.com/7-questions-to-ask-founders-before-joining-their-startup-5c197f6d6233
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dpcx
In my case, the founders answered all of these questions in a manner
sufficient for me to still take the job.

If only I had asked the employees what they thought of the founders, I would
have saved myself a lot of headache, heartache, and stomach ache.

~~~
randycupertino
> If only I had asked the employees what they thought of the founders, I would
> have saved myself a lot of headache, heartache, and stomach ache.

The problem is, if you asked current employees what they think of the founders
during an interview, they're going to give you a party-line everything here is
awesome drinking the kool-aid answer. The only way to really be privy to the
honest answer is to back channel it, but hard if you don't have a large
network or don't have any contacts there. I don't know the solution.

------
imh
>The top funds can return a rate of over 20% while the median is close to 10%
and the bottom venture capital firms may produce a negative return. If
startups were all just lottery tickets then there wouldn’t be such a
consistently different rate of return among venture capital firms.

That makes no sense.

For an easy kind of counter example, suppose I have two kinds of $1 lotto
tickets, A and B. Both are incredibly unlikely to pay out. Ticket type A
returns about $12k one in 10k tickets, resulting in a 20% rate of return.
Ticket type B returns $8k one in 10k tickets, for a negative 20% rate of
return. Being able to distinguish between them doesn't make them any less of
lottery tickets.

Being able to distinguish between these is great if you're an investor buying
tons of tickets, but if you only buy a handful in your lifetime you probably
won't win, so maybe it's good advice to treat these lotto tickets as what they
are and focus on other things that matter like happiness and salary.

~~~
yweiss
Maybe, but that would assume you have no ability to differentiate between one
startup or another no matter what signals they give, who founded them, or what
their traction is. If one really can't differentiate one company from another
whatsoever, even after interviewing the founders, then I agree that person
probably should focus on something.

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afinlayson
I usually ask: * What does success look like to you? (Do you hope to be bought
out by Google/Apple, IPO, or remain private * What are you most worried about
at the moment?

It's important to know what the motivations of the founder are, and what areas
I can help make success happen.

~~~
twobyfour
These are excellent questions.

The first one will also likely tell you something about the company's culture
and its approach to work-life balance.

The second may give you some insight not only into what the company's current
areas are where you can make an impact but also whether they're poised to
fail. Not to mention whether the founder is worried about the right things
(either in general as a businessperson or for their stage of growth, or given
the information you've gleaned from other discussions).

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tptacek
At least one of these 7 should be evicted for "what was last year's number,
what's this year's number, what's next year's number, and has this year's
number changed at all this year?"

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twalla
I've found asking about runway during the interview process turns off some
hiring managers. Fortunately, the kind of employer that would hold that
against you isn't one you'd want to work for anyway.

~~~
keyle
Ditto actually. Seems like some don't like employees that know too much. They
see it as an impediment, they'd rather have little sheeps drinking the
coolaid...

~~~
randycupertino
Or they just blatantly lie. I had a founder triple their runway when I
asked... three months later we ran out of runway and everyone was like, "what
happened, why were you lying about this?" Turns out founder was factoring in
POTENTIAL runway in their head that they thought would happen but never came
through.

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rwallace
> Alternatively, the startup may not consider you to be a core team member,
> which is also an important takeaway.

This is the most important sentence in the article. The answers to the
questions may or may not help you predict the success of the startup, but the
willingness of the people in charge to give you the answers, will surely give
you some insights into their attitude to employees, which in turn will go a
long way to predicting both what it will be like to work there, and whether
they will pay out on your stock options if there is a successful exit.

~~~
nytesky
yes, so basically it's only worthwhile to join a startup when you a single
digit employee or perhaps a rock-star hire; as a senior software engineer,
they would not answer ANY of these questions for me. I took the hint that I
was not core and it wasn't a good fit for me.

------
stanleydrew
The author spends a lot of time justifying why he thinks it's possible to pick
"winning" startups, but then readily admits "it’s true you will probably not
be better than the top individual venture investors."

So why not ask only one question of founders: "Are you backed by one of the
top individual venture investors?"

~~~
tptacek
Careful. The top venture investors are also disproportionately likely to back
only companies with a clear argument for a billion dollar valuation. That
argument is accompanied by commensurate risk. The VC doesn't care that the
startup is far more likely than not to fail; failure is accounted for in their
portfolio math. But you might!

Depending on the structure of your comp package, the interests of the top
investors are not necessarily aligned with those of a software developer.

~~~
r_sreeram
> failure is accounted for in their portfolio math. But you might!

Exactly. Assuming the common claim of "90% of startups fail" (i.e., assuming
each startup is IID with 90% chance to fail), an investor that invests in 7 or
more startups has a more than 50% chance of seeing at least one succeed (1 -
0.9^7 > 50%), whereas as an employee of one of those startups, you still have
a 90% chance of failure.

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lazyant
"do you have paying customers?"

~~~
tptacek
Repeating myself: you want more than the binary answer. You want to know the
company's _number_. What's their revenue target this year? Do they generally
hit targets? Is this the first year they've actually had a cash money target?

Unlike runway and percentage ownership questions, which you are always
entitled to, companies can be justifiably squirmy about providing these
numbers to candidates. If so, can you get a commitment to get the numbers once
you accept an offer? With that commitment in hand, can you talk _in
generalities_ about their numbers? Do they have targets? Does everyone know
what they are? Do they change often? What happens when they miss?

We talk a lot on HN about cap table questions, but not so much about the nuts
and bolts questions of what makes a business successful or not. I'd start with
those before getting to the equity numbers, as they'll inform a lot of your
negotiating position. "How much risk am I taking? How critical is my role to
the performance of the company? How sensitive is the company likely to be to
performance, including mine, in the next 9 months?"

I'd be really hesitant to take a job at a company that (a) should at this
point be thinking in terms of revenue rather than metrics but isn't, and (b)
has a number that management knows about but rank-and-file employees don't.

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penglish1
>You may have heard something along the lines of “Most >startups fail, so just
join a team you like and enjoy > wherever it goes.” or “The equity is just a
bonus in case >something comes of it.” These assume you are incapable of
>assessing a startup’s potential, which is an incorrect > assumption.

Really? Yes, as the article points out, SOME VCs do actually manage to
correctly assess startup's potential. But that is literally their entire job -
40+ hours/week. And a breathtaking amount of VCs fail at that. What hope do
you have, as a prospective employee?

Do you think the VCs limit themselves to those quick questions? No. They get
full financials, projections etc. And still get it hella wrong.

The article fails to mention ALL the engineers who went to work for startups
that failed, thinking that they had evaluated it correctly. I bet the failure
rate here is significantly worse than for VCs, who at least can demand much
more detail than can a job candidate and spend (paid, working) hours assessing
those details!

Does that mean you shouldn't ask good questions? Of course not. Ask ALL the
questions you can get away with. Ask the hard ones.

You should ask good questions of any prospective job, and these are
particularly well suited to a startup.

You should ask a lot more than that. You want to make sure that not only is
the company not completely unlikely to succeed, but ALSO a decent working
culture, good people to work with etc. Gates, Zuckerberg and Kalanick revealed
themselves pretty early on to be horrible people. IF you're going to work
with/for someone like that, and you're saying to yourself - this will work out
because I'll get hella rich and retire in a few years... well, how much worse
will it be in the MORE likely outcome that the company fails AND you invested
years working with someone like that?

If anything, this article reinforces my belief that equity should be treated
and viewed as a bonus in the form of a lottery ticket. Get yourself paid a
reasonable, if not above market salary for the risk and opportunity cost, not
to mention the extra work you expect to put in at a startup.

Surely a reasonably skilled engineer has options these days. So yeah - ALSO
don't go work for a startup whose product/service you don't believe in -
either economically OR morally. But don't delude yourself that your belief in
the product/service gives it anything like a higher chance of succeeding, even
as a skilled "in the industry" person.

Remember all those engineers who believed in all those failed startups.

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kecoco0207
There are currently possible ways for early employees in start-ups to cash out
their stock options, which further incentivizes talents to work for start-ups.

EquityZen is a platform that lets start-up employees sell shares before IPO:
[https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comm...](https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comments&utm_term=shareholder)

~~~
alpha_squared
Your comment history leaves a lot to be desired in regards to value that can
be added to conversations...

~~~
kurusii
It's just growth hacking. You'd think here, at least, people would be used to
it by now. /s

~~~
yweiss
If it's something people are "used to by now" then it's not really a hack
anymore. It's just spam.

