

Your well-funded startup is already dead - thom
https://medium.com/@paul_a_smith/your-well-funded-startup-is-already-dead-fcd8976487c1

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lsc
Where does this guy find people to work for him? I'd only work for him as an
absolute last resort; if I had no other options... but that doesn't describe
anyone who is remotely qualified to run a funded startup.

This is the major reason I have turned down investment (even when it looked
like I was worth it) - you get some asshole like this whining about how you
aren't pretending to work enough, about how you aren't neglecting your family
enough, about how your house isn't as tiny and cheap as it could be.

You know what? I have options. There are thousands of employers within easy
bicycle distance, all who will pay me very well, many who will even cook me
pretty good food. Most of them will give me stock options with a higher total
expected return (even before accounting for the diminishing marginal value of
money) than a funded startup.

That's the problem, from the perspective of people like OP, technical people
have choices. Technical people who have the social skills to even have a
chance at getting money have huge numbers of choices.

If I am going to live in a tiny house while working ridiculous hours (which,
incidentally, seems to be what I'm doing lately) there's still no real reason
for me to let some asshole come in and start complaining about how hard I'm
working... fuck, I can support like three people off what I make as a
contractor at one of the more comfortable area employers. Why do I need to
deal with this guy?

~~~
thom
In his defence, he's mostly talking about founders, not employees. Wherever
you choose to work, whatever the culture today, his point is that it's
unlikely that the founders worked 9-5 at the beginning, or reverted to 9-5
after their seed round.

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rdlecler1
Datapoint: We came out of Batch 12 @ 500 Startups. I don't know anyone
shifting gears to 9-5, and although I'm sure it happens, I haven't seen
founders take on a big raise unless perhaps the round size was extraordinary.

I think scaling challenges and hiring talent is a far more common issue.

------
thom
The author runs the UK's most successful pre-seed accelerator. I've wondered
for a while if accelerators could get away with gathering far more structured
(and invasive) analytics about their cohorts to measure things like this.

