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I appreciate this, and am trying to take this to heart.

But it is also possible to survive. And if you do that, you don't merely survive, you thrive— that's what product market fit looks like. I've been lucky to see it dozen of times first hand, and it's nothing short of magical.

When founders and teams pursue something without product market fit, it's a high cost to pay and a terrible outcome for most everyone. This is also absolutely true.

Startups are not for everyone! I appreciate your feedback and it resonates with me.




>> But it is also possible to survive.

I think there is a big gap in how different people see this. You are right, it is possible to survive. It is also possible to fail. For some people, that is fine -- they can call up an uncle, or a friend (Thiel) and land another job quickly that pays good medical benefits.

For others, an 20/80, or even 50/50 or 80/20 survive/fail just does not cut it. Perhaps they have crushing student loans. Perhaps they have no parents to fall back upon if things go south. Perhaps they have visa issues. Perhaps they have a sick parent to take care of (my case.)

I admire your ambition (and envy it.) I hope people who have social safety nets realize it though. Because not everyone does.

It reminds me of a fellow undergraduate Senior who looked down upon me for going to work on Wall Street while he did the more pure thing of going for the Peace Corps. I asked -- so how do you land a job when you're done with the 2yrs commitment? He said his uncle was going to hook him up at a hedge fund. Nice, if you can swing that. Me? I have no uncles at hedge funds, so the on-campus recruiting super-day was my one and only shot. I dont think that makes my choice less pure, it is just one of relative necessity.


Yeah, I know. I had this problem too. I had $40K in credit card debt and $40K in student loans, when I got that offer. I probably should have mentioned that too. Having debt is a huge crushing weight and definitely prevents you from taking the risks needed to capitalize on opportunity given you.

It really did, for me, as well.


Thanks for that detail. I believe every decision needs to be made in the context of what I know at that time -- and what I decide is the best way to go forward at that time. If I gain new information later, and I can adjust great.

But if it works poorly later on, I dont look at it negatively, because short of having a time-machine it does not help me be a better person. Constantly improving the judgement framework is a good thing, but there is no point regretting a mistake you could not have seen differently.


> When founders and teams pursue something without product market fit

How do you know if you have product market fit until you pursue something though? The standard advice on this is completely contradictory:

E.g. on the one hand, you have the advice that adding more features will never result in product market fit, because most of the features will be too far down the funnel to move the needle and they won't ever solve whatever the core problem that's making the thing not successful in the first place.

On the other hand, you have the advice that you shouldn't pursue growth until you have good retention, which basically implies that you should keep working on the product almost indefinitely even without product market fit.


On a per employee basis, the overall likelihood adjusted expected value and liquidity of most startup shares generally underperforms the market, almost to zero if biased towards liquid earnings like it should be. If you end up the former employee of one of those startups (which is pretty common), you end up in a place where even if the company is booming 5, 10 years later, no liquidity event has happened nor is in sight for employees. If you ask if you could give someone $9-19M liquid evenly split over the next two decades or several tranches of $1-100M potentially forever illiquid stock and $2M liquid, which one do you think they would pick and should pick? Even if the max payout is lower, the mean payout is orders of magnitudes higher and creates access to bootstrapping. I'm not going to say you made the wrong one for obvious reasons, but do you think it's smart to attach your lifetime net worth to such illiquid assets?

Garry, you entitled your blog post "Working for Microsoft cost me $200 million" but you neglected to mention that you had debt you were paying off. For many other people, that blog post could easily have been called "Why working at startups instead of Microsoft cost me $20M and left me in the debt I started in". That debt neatly encapsulates one of the societal problems with student loan debt. It creates a caste system. The less generational wealth you are born into, the more your stepwise freedom in any direction is piece by piece restricted. You can't make choices that people born just a bit wealthier than you could make because they're cost step functions.

It would indeed have been a poor decision of you to take that Palantir job out of college with your financial situation. That smart decision would have been to keep pursuing the traditional big company engineering promotional path. Any action you take that deviates from that path towards a sustained lower liquid compensation on a year over year basis is one where you're taking a hit to liquidity by paying opportunity cost to make a default-illiquid investment (or multiple of them over time). If you combine all the post-tax income you've lost with the compounding interest it could have made, it's substantial on a career-long basis.

I would advise folks to work at startups for the same reason I'd advise them to work at a fashion magazine or work at a record label intern. It still has some cachet as culturally creative labor, and you can certainly make a living in the industry, but it's not a great place to stay long-term unless you're independently wealthy, are running the show, or you found a firm cleanly in hypergrowth and manage to grow with it. The antics and financial shenanigans take a toll on you. You can't rely on it as a sane vehicle to consistently build wealth, because it's structured like a swap heavily in favor of the company's investors, and you're footing the bill with your labor in exchange for an IOU that the company will IPO.

Tens or hundreds of millions of extra income and RSUs from their big company paycheck could be going straight into their nest egg and compounding over time, making it viable for them to make a major life decision without hardship. It's reckless and irresponsible to recommend others to engage in without a significant buffer of pre-existing wealth, and with the expectation that (like many other kinds of investing) all of participation is at risk of full loss.




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