This may be an unpopular opinion here, but I'd strongly advise you against working at a startup as an employee.
Some key things to consider:
* What comp are you giving up?
* Will your options be worth more than Facebook/Google/Amazon/Apple RSUs?
* Can you even afford your options?
* Will the options ever be liquid?
* Are you willing to earn-out after an acquisition?
* Will you have to do extra work? Are you compensated for it?
Starting a startup is great and you totally should. But working at one is (on average) setting yourself up to be worse off financially than working elsewhere. Make that decision deliberately and consciously only after really running the numbers and thinking critically about it.
Financially, you're probably correct. Most people, however, work at a startup for different reasons:
* Less bureaucracy, more building
* Larger impact on a product; not just being a cog
* Generalist rather than one narrowly defined job
* Ability to learn many new skills
* Experience for starting their own startup
* Working on something they believe in
* Working with newer technologies
* Can't get a job at a larger company (due to skillsets)
* Easier place to make a jump into product management or people management
* Flexibility (work from home, set own hours, etc)
I work at one of the companies in the parent post (~1/2 year), and worked mainly at startups prior.
I have less meetings than I had at most startups by a significant fraction.
I have total technical direction on the product I work on (within reason).
I have gotten to code in more languages than at any other shop I’ve been at, most of which I had zero professional experience in prior.
I work on an internal product that excites me & is more complex than anything else I have worked with prior professionally.
I work with any technology I like that does the job, new or old.
Have no competition to jump into management because not enough engineers want to become managers.
I also have flexibility to take days off unofficially because I work hard of my own volition, as well as work from home, and almost all of the flexibility I have gotten from startups.
Not to say I don’t like some things about startups - after all,
I worked at them for about 75% of my career spanning over 5 years. There are a lot of myths about bigger companies out there though I have found at my current job, and friends at similar companies like Facebook and Netflix.
Many large corporations are structuring themselves around this kind of model. I recently started working for one of Canada's largest financial institutions and they've managed to check most of these boxes for me. I do front-end development though, so it might be different for more technical roles.
One doesn’t need to work at a startup for most of this points. My company is over 16 years old and we also meet the following bullets:
* Less bureaucracy, more building
* Larger impact on a product; not just being a cog
* Generalist rather than one narrowly defined job
* Ability to learn many new skills
* Working on something they believe in
* Working with newer technologies
* Flexibility (work from home, set own hours, etc)
Most of our engineering team has stayed for more than 5 years. Some have been there for 15 years.
Yes, that's what people think they can get out of startups. But having worked in both startups and large companies, I can say a few of those things aren't true.
Less bureaucracy, more building - Only if the founders give you autonomy. Lots of micromanagers in the startup world.
Working on something they believe in - When you're hired, they try to hook you with this line. But startups are not charities. The longer you work at one, the more cynical you get.
Flexibility (work from home, set own hours, etc) - In my experience, startups want you to work more than 40 hours a week, and expect you to check your email during your free time, in case something urgent comes up. You can call that flexibility, but it's not in the employee's favor.
I've found the rest of your points to be true, more or less.
Although I agree with your list of considerations, I'm against your advice in general terms, since I think you're only providing part of the picture people need to consider.
Here's some situations where you might prefer a startup.
1. Do you want to change career paths? A startup provides a much lower barrier of entry than traditional companies.
2. Do you want to pursue a career without having the credentials i.e. skip school completely and become a programmer, salesman, businessman? An internship or job at a startup might be a good choice.
3. Do you want less bureaucracy, a lot of ownership, challenging problems, but not have to have the weight of everything on your shoulders (like when you're a cofounder).
Monetarily, its almost always going to be a bad choice to work at a startup (unless #1 or #2 are your reasons and you want to jump into a career where you can long-term earn more). But there are a lot of other things in life to consider besides money, and money isn't a motivator for everyone, some people weight more control over their day to day work, flat hierarchies, and working on innovative products, etc. - all over money that's all. I don't think, knowing that, there's enough to make any hard recommendations for anyone.
Working at a startup is never optimal economically, especially at an early stage one. There are non economical reasons why it might make sense for someone, but EV is not one of them.
> Working at a startup is never optimal economically, especially at an early stage one.
Working at a startup can be a form of investing in yourself. Obviously you shouldn't invest in yourself unless you think that investment will pay off in the longterm. At the same time though, if you don't invest in yourself then it's almost certain that no one else will either.
Perhaps true, but there's more to life than money. The basic formula for work enjoyment is autonomy, mastery and purpose (the intrinsic motivators) and those are often much more attainable at a startup. Money and fame are extrinsic motivators that many find ring hollow after a while and they notice they don't enjoy waking up and going into the office each morning.
Everyone's situation is different so try not to assert that any choice is incorrect based on a single, somewhat vacuous metric.
It is a totally valid point, but you are jumping to conclusions if you presume that those questions will always lead to negative answers. Sometimes they will... but sometimes startups do pay market rates, and sometimes you just want to take a chance on something new.
> Starting a startup is great and you totally should.
Wouldn't you ask the same set of questions that you describe for this position as well? Why is the outcome different? Arguably, you're taking so much risk as a founder that your expected financial outcome will almost certainly be worse than working at Facebook/Google/Amazon in the early days.
You're right. The magnitude of the potential upside and the control you can influence over outcomes is vastly different as a founder vs an employee though.
> Starting a startup is great and you totally should. But working at one is (on average) setting yourself up to be worse off financially than working elsewhere.
One of the best ways to get into YC is by working for a YC startup, especially if you don't come from a top tier school or company.
If you are above a mid-level engineer the. I can agree with your point. It rarely financially turn out to be a good move.
However if you want to break into software engineering then startups can be a great place for a hungry developer to make their own waves, and potentially ride them to success.
The one thing I saw missing from the application was a salary floor / expectation. I currently support my wife on my salary, and wouldn't be able to work for less than a certain amount. I would apply through this for a lot of startups, but I wouldn't want to go through the entire interview process and realize that they can't pay me what I need to support my family.
I don't think you will encounter the following problem: "I wouldn't want to go through the entire interview process and realize that they can't pay me what I need to support my family."
After filling out an application the next step is that a YC founder will reach out to you. You can literally talk about salary requirements in the first conversation.
No thank you. I'm not 19 anymore. I'll take the high paying job, and dump the rest into Vanguard funds. Guarantee I'll make more money off of the majority of nonsense stock options.
Lottery tickets have a predictable value. Lottery tickets and cash are basically interchangeable goods, and if you have the ability to bear the risk that any given lottery ticket might not pay out then you can make money by taking on that risk. It's not really any different than being a VC, an insurance company, a movie producer, etc.
It’s not cash, and has questionable value. Equity is no replacement for cash compensation, and it’s exhausting to watch people explain it away as equal to cash comp.
Options have an expected value (EV) that isn't too hard to calculate approximately. They also have a relatively high variance. But it's trivially easy to prove they're not worthless, even if some become so when the company fails. I've personally had one "hit" and a few misses.
Whether to accept options instead of salary is an individual choice that depends entirely on their risk profile and the terms...how much salary are you forgoing, how much equity are you getting, how likely do you believe a liquidity event is.
If you could sit at a roulette table that paid 40-1 when you hit a number, would you play? That's a +EV bet despite the fact that 32/33 times that bet will lose. If you had infinite funds and infinite bets, you'd be a fool not to play. But if you're betting you last dollar, you're probably going hungry that night since you'll be losing 32 times as often as you win. And that same bet at the traditional 32-1 is a loser no matter how much money you have. The terms of the bet and the individual's circumstances dictate whether to play.
Options are the same, you just need to be familiar enough with the whole situation to judge the terms you're getting. Many startups are very good at selling the upside and underselling the risk, so people give away salary at -EV terms. But that doesn't mean that equity is worthless.
Again, much like being an insurance provider, that's how you make money off it. When I do consulting I generally aim to capture about 10% of the value I'm creating per hour in cash, leaving the client with the other 90%. (E.g. billing $200 per hour if you're creating 2,000 per hour in value or whatever.) This is basically an equal exchange because one party is getting the cash, and the other party is getting the risk, along with the potential benefit that taking on that risk entails.
The fact that different people have different economic needs and utility functions allows everyone to benefit. That's why I'm saying that if you need less cash because you don't have a family, that represents optionality, and that optionality can be used to make more money than you'd otherwise be able to make.
Asking for salary information upfront in California -- where most YC companies are -- will be illegal on Jan 1st. Many companies seem to be complying with this requirement already. In fact even asking a price floor might be illegal, as salary information can only be used in determining the salary if it was provided "voluntarily and without prompting." [0]
It sounds to me like the GP was interested in companies proactively providing the salary range for the job, which doesn't seem to fall under the new law. The new changes also wouldn't prohibit an employer from asking for a desired salary range, would it?
I'm not a lawyer, but the actual law says "An employer shall not, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, seek salary history information, including compensation and benefits, about an applicant for employment." It would probably be up to a judge to determine whether asking for a range could be construed as asking for "salary history." Considering this law is a misdemeanor, which means the potential for jail time, I'd stay on the side of caution until some test cases come out.
The original comment is about the interviewee making sure that the employer is offering a salary above a certain threshold, before going through the whole interview process. This doesn't have anything to do with the employer asking about past salary information.
Hi folks! I’m an engineer at YC and the main developer of Work at a Startup.
Startups are an increasingly popular place to work in the tech industry. At the same time, the most common problem founders need help with is hiring people. Work at a Startup is a new way to help solve this pain point for both parties by connecting people interested in working at startups directly with the founders of the 1100+ active YC companies by completing a common application.
This the next iteration of the "Work at a Startup Day" idea that YC started hosting way back in 2010 [0][1][2]!
For now, Work at a Startup is targeted at software engineers who want to work at US-based companies since that’s the most common need of YC companies. We will be expanding to other roles and countries once we've validated the product for applicants and founders.
I don't think that that is the long term goal of Triplebyte - I think their goal is to help every company hire engineers. YC companies are a convenient first set of companies for a YC company to work with, though.
(I work at Triplebyte.) Yes it was a good way to get started, though we've since grown to the point that the majority of companies hiring on our platform are non-YC companies.
The friction of entering and it demanding so much information is a killer for me.
If you do make a decision that only vetted applicants should have access to apply, you should make it way more enticing to commit. Seeing some interesting jobs and then getting excited will get the user more willing to forkout so much information.
As it is, it felt like people harvesting and I just left the site.
Thanks for the feedback. Making it more of a two way marketplace by letting companies post job descriptions is certainly something we're looking at for the reasons you list.
As for the concern on harvesting peoples' information, we try to be very open about the fact that applications will indeed be made available to founders of YC companies to facilitate employment opportunities. Are you not comfortable with the "all or nothing" nature of that?
At the point I saw it, it felt that I was giving something valuable without knowing what I'm getting in return.
Knowing that I don't have to fork out any information visiting "Who is Hiring" makes it a tough sell.
I think there is a question on why here. Lets say you add company job listings: why see them here and not on angellist (shows lots of information) or who is hiring (no commitment) or the companies job page.
The beginning of the page mentions all big name companies which I would already know and would just go to their pages for job postings where I can better prepare my CV. It might be VERY different if the companies here are small and unknown, and are somehow vetted or show unique YC information about them. Angelist is too expensive for a 2-3 man shop just out of a batch.
I guess I picture a YC official page to be about segmentation, not open-wide job listing competition with other big sites.
For what it's worth as a user on the other side of the marketplace — i.e. a founder scanning listings for prospective hires — the first thing I wanted was _more_ information.
For example, I would love to know at a glance what the applicants' interests/passions are by sector/product type — in addition to technological passion/experience.
While I recognize that each field adds friction, I'd take a high expected quality (e.g. qualified technical and passion match) candidate over a high volume of candidates any day.
Here's something to think about, if you find the perspective useful.
You are engaged in one of the more basic forms of information arbitrage: a "gather info from users and sell it as a searchable database" model. To make this work, your cost of acquiring information must be very low because the incremental value is very low (the value is in the aggregate).
Most startups like this crawl the web or otherwise index their own data from somewhere like LinkedIn because it provides an easier path to mvp/scale, but also because its a balance that HN types will respect: "I did the work finding the information and I can so what I want with it."
Asking users to provide the information that you then sell is shifting the cost of that data acquisition cost burden from you to your users, and is comparatively rather expensive in terms of the currency that you are expecting someone to spend to provide you with value, i.e. time. Its more expensive than passive data acquisition. You are, in a very real sense, charging for your users to access the site.
So when you have a link that says "Sign in with HN and get started" and that link essentially forwards to the order page, and that ordering page is (or looks) expensive, you have some sales work to do beyond "make it a bit cheaper by asking for less" or being open about what you'll do with it. You are doing almost zero sales work on your current landing and ordering page beyond adding a big sign saying "Pay".
Also, something else to keep in mind, how much information you ask for is, again in a very real sense, a form of price discrimination.
Any model which includes an element of price discrimination requires a mechanism to charge different users differently to maximize the overall profit. Otherwise you are facing an existential risk in the form of mispricing risk and have no ability to iterate out of it, because each change you make to the price will shift your entire userbase to people who are willing to pay that price, so you can't learn from it.
Just saying "most things are optional but more is better" actually hurts in most cases because it implies that you are unsure what pieces of data are actually valuable and rather than figure it out and only asking those things, you're, again shifting that cognitive/time cost to your users to figure out. A business with a sign saying "pay as much as you like and you'll maybe get more value out of it but maybe not we don't know either" does not inspire a lot of confidence.
The best companies in the business of arbitraging data explicitly provided by users charge the lowest price possible before they provide value, and then provide incremental value as the users pay more. LinkedIn has figured this out, that's why you can be in the site searching after just a very basic profile, and then they ask for more over time as users are getting value from the lower pricing tier.
By insisting on all or nothing, you are ignoring the lessons learned by arguably the most successful example of active user information arbitrage the world has ever seen.
At first I did not understand that it is built by YC - thought someone had used styling. It would be helpful to add some additional message, e.g.: "built by YC team", may be even have an alias for a while work.ycombinator.com
The main problem for me regarding this and other similar services (eg. Triplebyte) is that there is no reason to care if you live outside the US.
Gettings a visa is hard, startups do not sponsor visas and the large majority of startup roles are onsite. Unfortunately, this is yet another waste of time for me along with many other similar opportunities to find a job when you aren't part of a network of people working with startups.
That said, this seems like an interesting program by YC and I am looking forward to see how it will continue and how the other countries' expansion will actually work.
Apologies that it is misleading. We decided it was best to remain focused on single role while we work out all the kinks and make sure we're delivering a good user experience. Your point is well taken though. We fully intend on eventually supporting all sorts of roles. The demand is there now more than ever as more and more YC companies are working on things besides web and mobile apps.
Good question! We've been discussing this a bunch internally and will probably change in the near future. Doing so would provide a lot more trust that this service is indeed an official YC project. And I've I've recently learned, will do wonders for our SEO.
FWIW, the reasoning for not doing that from the start is that we wanted the site to be very closely associated with the act of searching for "I want to work at a startup". Perhaps that's a bit old school, but I still like to think there's a little bit of value in it...either way, we'll likely just redirect workatastartup.com to something on the ycombinator.com domain.
Cool, thanks for the explanation. My opinion is that from a branding perspective, a subdomain of ycombinator.com would be much better. Otherwise, it seems like a cheap affiliate website (like those search engine optimized domain names). Ironically, in your case, using a subdomain will be better for SEO (as you correctly stated).
Really cool. What niche is this serving that TripleByte doesn't? My impression was that if you wanted to apply to any YC company at once, TripleByte was the way to go.
Triplebyte doesn't work as a common app to all YC companies like Work at a Startup. Specific things that we do differently are:
- A background blind technical skills evaluation is our application process in lieu of submitting your resume.
- We don't introduce you to all the companies we work with, only the ones where our data predicts you have a high chance of receiving an offer.
- Companies expedite their own hiring process for Triplebyte candidates skipping technical phone screens/coding challenges.
- Each engineer gets a Talent Manager who offers them career advice, interview and negotiation help and general support throughout the job search process.
- Work with non-YC companies e.g. Apple, Asana and Coursera.
I'd say that Work at a Startup is a good way to get in front of a lot of startups at once and run a breadth first job search. Triplebyte is a good way to run a targeted job search optimizing your offer to interview ratio.
Right now since we only target software folks, you're correct that the two services do indeed overlap quite a bit. I think the differentiation will be more clear once we expand beyond software engineers, which we're hoping to do soon.
The two services also differ in that Work at a Startup does not attempt to do any technical vetting; simply start conversations. The reasoning for this is that when founders are hiring their first handful of employees, it's often more important to find people that believe in your company's product/mission rather than people with a particular background. Founders are often constrained by how big of a "friend tree" they have to shake. Simply put, Work at a Startup gives founders the opportunity to pitch a lot more potential early employees than they'd otherwise have access to.
All this being said, TripleByte is certainly still a great option to go with for a lot of folks and does indeed have a close relationship with a lot of YC companies!
That it isn’t TripleByte. When I applied at TripleByte I must have fallen through the cracks. My account doesn’t let me go forward it seems to be stuck in limbo. Their promise of interviewing people never occurs. They constantly change the rules for the sole reason that it’s just another staffing agency with a automated test .
Unfortunately there is no true common app that really puts you in front of all YC companies yet. Because TripleByte charges companies a fee for each person hired, not all YC companies work with them. And because Work At A Startup is so new, not all YC companies are using it yet.
There's no alternative because there's no demand. Almost no company wants to hire remotely and pay good wages, and those that do have >10 qualified candidates for each position.
I believe this means that they associate your HN handle with a workatastartup.com account by reusing your session so you don't have to manage yet another set of login credentials.
Work at a Startup serves primarily as a matchmaker for potential employees and founders and isn't directly involved in facilitating visa sponsorships or other details of employment. While YC advises our companies on how to best navigate and obtain visas, they are still ultimately the responsibility of the founders/company.
Recruiting process is so connected to applicant tracking systems, so applying via external services vs directly to career pages won't provide you benefits.
Some key things to consider:
Starting a startup is great and you totally should. But working at one is (on average) setting yourself up to be worse off financially than working elsewhere. Make that decision deliberately and consciously only after really running the numbers and thinking critically about it.