I've had a related discussion with a few VCs in recent months. Some kinds of startups are effectively impossible to build given current structural constraints on financing them, creating an adverse selection for startups that fit the classic model rather than startups with the highest expected ROI.
Broadly speaking, engineers will work at a discount to market-clearing wages of maybe 20% if they really like the startup. This is not necessarily an issue if you are well-funded and require ordinary levels of skill from your engineering team, which is most startups. Some types of software startups can't be built without a team of engineers where the market-clearing wages are typically more like $500k-1M. Even at a 20% discount to market, the amount of capital involved just for headcount is far too large for early stage investors, and startups that try to fit within the capital they can raise by getting by with less qualified engineers always fail at technical execution. Consequently, startups that have this property are effectively un-investable because there is not enough capital available in the early stages to achieve technical viability even though they may be great investments in the abstract. This wasn't a serious issue a decade ago, but it is spreading to a larger set of startups as wages rapidly escalate.
Given a long-term glut of capital, this could be addressed in principle by designing a model that modifies the distribution of capital/equity over time to accommodate startups that have difficulty financing the initial wage gap. As the startups grow, one would expect the average wages to start reverting toward the mean, but these startups won't get out of the gate without that initial investment in capable and very expensive engineers.
I've had interesting and productive discussions around this, it is seen as a way to bring fresh blood into an early stage pipeline that is drying up. It is obvious to almost everyone that the classic model of how you finance and build a startup team is breaking down in the current market environment, with an adverse impact on expected returns.
This is a good summation of the current challenges with startups that are attempting to compete on technical merit. I know this first hand as I started a computer vision company right around 2012 when the "AI" boom was really picking up steam. I would never dream today of starting a very technical company because every major will poach your talent (happened to me), invest in your competitors or attempt to acquire you (some people don't want to be acquired).
Contrary to your points, I don't see any way this will change until some big technology revolution happens that puts power back into the hands of creators - though that might be a pipedream.
Note, that doesn't mean you can't start and be successful with a company. What I'm trying to point out is that the days of a scrappy upstart coming along to "unseat the leaders" doesn't seem anywhere near realistic.
The only counter to this might be worldwide competition - so for example I could see Tencent getting bigger than Facebook in total user numbers. I'm not sure if these are comparable because they are in segmented markets.
Your points are well taken, and I have thought about them at length because I like to build startups in areas where this situation is the norm.
One unorthodox strategy, which I've discussed with investors, is funding early stage such that you can pay comp that BigCo can't easily compete with -- their scale works against them. In early stage, the absolute amount of capital is trivial (and there are trillions sloshing around these days), but the quality of the initial engineering team will have an enormous impact on the success probability of the investment. A few extra million in wages can have enormously high leverage in generating billions in returns. Imagine poaching literally the best engineers in FAANG and the kind of core team that would give you to attack markets no one has attacked before.
I'd like to see top engineers in tech compensated like top professional athletes. Investors pay the wages for athletes because the returns justify it, the scale of the wages is not material if you are chasing results. I believe that model applies in tech as well.
I think we may be past the point where even this would work - too many startups are offering deals that are transparently awful in a way that discredits the startup ecosystem at large. I've gotten a few early-stage startup offers recently and every single one came out to be over a 50% paycut (even accepting their generous valuations) despite the fact that I made it relatively clear where the total comp needs to be for me to move forward and I was assured that at the end of the process they would be willing to make it work.
Meanwhile, if you apply the same math to the founders and their equity, in every single case they are paying themselves multiples of what they are offering me and significantly above their own market value, despite them not having done anything yet beyond getting seed funding.
What then happens is that startups like these end up getting what they pay for - they get the appropriate level of talent at market price. This maybe a market-optimal result but the cumulative effect of all these startups doing this is that most top people have sort of written off "working at a startup" as a reasonable career option, because of pay and what pay implies about the talent level of the people they would work with. This hurts all startups, even those that are willing to pay up to get the right talent. And if top engineers won't even consider your company, offering top-tier comp may backfire - you run the risk of overpaying for the same talent you could've gotten at a lower price. It's hard to break out of this cycle - consider how the same few schools are able to persistently attract the best students - and I suspect the entire startup ecosystem is trapped in it.
You are not wrong, and FWIW I am a force for sanity on the boards I am on. I am a comp realist and I will always pay for quality, I am strong advocate for that.
The behavior of startups is not intrinsic, it is the product of incentives. If I created a startup tomorrow, I am confident that I could pull world-class engineers out of FAANG. But to your point, I would not play games with compensation. I hire the people I would hire because they are clever, they aren't going to be fooled by bullshit nor would they respect me if I tried that. That is an essential quality of good startups that should not be lost in this mix.
> If I created a startup tomorrow, I am confident that I could pull world-class engineers out of FAANG.
This is easy. Offer relatively competitive TC with a real potential upside to the equity package and a work environment that's attractive. BigCorp is mired in politics and decision-making that's grounded in risk mitigation. Do something legitimately interesting and folks will come. Give them some agency and the ability to really get things done and they'll stay.
I read an article a while back that described one trait of the "10x" engineer as dispassionate curiosity. Setting aside the argument of what a "10x" engineer actually is, I'm sure those of us working in the field can recall folks that were exceptionally talented. Every one of those people that I can recall have exhibited this trait.
It's easy to deduce that those folks would be more interested in hard tech than any paint-by-numbers startup. I've worked at startups and well-established companies, and have found it surprising how easily really good engineers will turn down lucrative but uninteresting opportunities at well-established companies and how readily they'll take an "interesting" role for less or sometimes way less money.
I may be confusing the term with "disinterested curiosity". Wish I could fine the article if only to refer to again. Here's a bit of an explanation that seems to match my understanding of the concept:
I don't feel like a top engineer. I think am no way near that tbh. I rank myself as an ok-ish engineer.
I feel more like a hybrid though and I feel like I am valuable to a startup as I can bring on the table several things which include some photoshoping skills, being able to build a comprehensive front-end, can contribute to ideas as well as manage a db, build an api etc (to a level).
The past 2 years I was working part-time for a startup as I am running a business of my own which is almost on autopilot and allows me time to work on other things as well.
After 2 years I realized the positive and negative sides of working for a startup that is hard to find out before working for one.
First of all there were 3 main guys running the show. Only one of them was a tech guy, the other two came from a business background with no tech knowledge wanting to build up a tech startup. Joining that startup as an early employee didn't mean much apart from getting close to 1% in options (which is nothing considering my contribution to the cause was worth way more but obviously 1% is an industry standard).
The work became increasingly more demanding, although they knew I had other things to do and I was part-time, I was asked to work more than what was normal and almost reached working full-time helping them out (which was stupid of me, I was sacrificing time that I could be doing other things).
The paycut I took also from my previous part-time gig was about 40% which is almost half.
The cause of the startup also started changing increasingly and although at the start I was keen to have the paycut etc it felt like I didn't belong anymore (thats important for others wanting to work at a startup to know. The idea is not gonna remain the same as it is especially with business people driving research all the time).
The only positive was that I got some more experience on as a fullstack than before as I had to work a bit more on aws and backend systems and also was using "newish" tech.
My honest opinion and advice to anyone that is willing to try out working for a startup is:
Don't compromise your salary and well-being.
Startups will offer you options which is usually crap unless you are a co-creator. If you are taking a paycut but you support and like the cause of that startup then ask for a bigger %.
Realise that most likely the startup is not gonna vest or sell and generally think of your options as a gamble.
Its most likely that the chances of you making real money out of your options is the same as you winning the lottery.
If you are asked to work hard and stupid hours, then reconsider your well-being and ask yourself if its worth it.
Also look at the composition of that startup. For me personally it was stupid thinking that 2 business guys having the biggest % in the company would ever work for a tech startup. They contributed in writing long essays and doing research all the time, but at the end they couldn't attract more engineers by paying shit salaries and giving out 0.2-1% in options. The product failed because it couldn't be delivered on time due to having less people working on it than it initially required, and because those business people in order to justify their own % to the company were going on heavy research and constantly deciding shift changes on the product completely out of the blue just because they had nothing else to work on. (we were supposed to release within the 1st year which would be a year ahead of our competition. We released after 2 years which gave competition the lead of releasing before us and a much better product)
All in all - don't sacrifice your salary, thats how you feed yourself and your family and someone elses weird-ass dream is not gonna make you silly money out of the blue. And also remember that working should be taking some part of your day, but you also have one life and working your ass off for someone elses shitty dream aint worth it.
Thank you for your detailed take here. I'd like to nuance this a bit to a more general rule.
Every person taking equity needs to justify their value now
This means that a setup with two "business people" founders need to justify their worth immediately. Not with promises of future sales. Not with vague research.
Worthy ways to prove their worth could be raising a giant amount of funding, or putting their own money into the startup as a sign of skin-in-the-game, or purchase orders standing ready to purchase the product once it is complete, or paid PoCs. Or serious track record of delivery/wins.
If you find a setup where engineers are taking all the initial risk while "business founders" stay on the sidelines waiting for a product to be built until they start to work -- run away. Think about it this way -- they have all the upside (they can choose later to work or to flee) while you have all the risk (you invested your pay-cut for vague promises of future work.)
> I would never dream today of starting a very technical company because every major will poach your talent (happened to me), invest in your competitors or attempt to acquire you (some people don't want to be acquired).
Damn, this is exactly what I want to do. Computer vision too.
Do you have any advice other than "don't"?
Would basing the company on the East coast near a tier-1 research university help with talent?
Could you have strong software engineers support the research roles? Does that pattern work effectively?
Another thing I really want to do is offer a 4-day work week with the promise of sabbaticals and/or remote work. That might not be attractive to everyone, but it's something that would speak to me and that I would want in addition to equity and salary.
Are you still interested in computer vision? Want to chat sometime?
>Another thing I really want to do is offer a 4-day work week with the promise of sabbaticals and/or remote work. That might not be attractive to everyone, but it's something that would speak to me and that I would want in addition to equity and salary.
I think this would be a very strong advantage in the hiring market (assuming you can raise money from investors who're okay with it).
I'm not your target market (I'm just an in-demand software engineer who happens to be learning ML, not a top computer vision researcher), but this is something I'd be willing to accept substantially lower comp for.
Unfortunately most startups seem to require even higher work output than big tech.
Well, that's his big bet isn't it. There are a lot of studies that claim 4 day work week will keep productivity more or less the same.
The catch here is this will potentially enable you to hire those 10x people. Even at reduced productivity, 80% of 10x is more than double productivity for 100% of 3-4x people, and perhaps this work environment will foster other people to increase their productivity as well.
With the right people and product, I see this as the ultimate weapon against big tech, most of which will have shareholders that will act a lot more conservatively when it comes to risks compared to startups.
This is not something big tech will be able to accommodate in the current macro-economic environment, no board will approve basically a 20% salary bump to all employees and while risking a potential drop in productivity.
Just an anecdotal data point, but some places have a vibrant tech scene despite paying jack shit. Salt Lake City, where I live, is one of them.
FAANG don't have offices here and don't offer remote positions, so no one is competing with them. As a result senior developers are getting like $130k or something, and seem to be happy with that.
Some people (myself included) don't want to move anywhere else even for $500k. So it seems like a nice little arbitrage.
Happy to chat, first initial + last name at google.
I think the answer is, know exactly how you want to exit before you start and plan for that. Realize also that is 180 degrees polar opposite of how the major VC's want you to approach it - so if you wanted institutional money from Sequoia etc... they won't invest if they know that is the case. There are a lot of good reasons why they take that approach, power law and all.
The reality is, your best case scenario is most likely an acquisition. Which might be exactly what you want, and if so absolutely go for it, but you need to really understand how and why and when the companies you are targeting do their acquisitions. This is incredibly hard to do if you haven't gone through multiple acquisition Due Diligence processes before, but I know of people who have repeatedly done this, so it can be done.
As to the other points, there are too many variables to say whether those are good ideas or not, totally depends on what you're trying to do.
My first startup used computer vision to extract tables from PDFs. We had great engineers but my co-founder and I didn't know enough about ML back then to design a proper feedback loop.
My advice is to find a technical co-founder who has built and scaled a CV system at a larger tech company, but who is looking for a new challenge. There are a lot of annoying problems that can be solved with CV as long as you create a way for users to help you get labeled data.
So there are actually three tech revolutions going on in parallel:
1) Kuberentes
2) Microservices.
3) AI
All of them are based on open source, and all of them are permissionless (I.e. the startup does not need permission from a big company, e.g. an app store owner).
They also erode the build-in advantages of big tech:
1) Kubernetes erode cloud lock-in on compute/storage.
2) AI is best serve on the edge.
AI is linear algebra that costs x1000 because of the brand name.
There is no revolution in software. We are just building crud as high and as fast as we can because the quality of developers tends to zero as the number of developers increases.
> Kubernetes is a solution worse than the problem.
Not if you're a 1,000+ engineer org with an SOA.
> Microservices are unix pipes but slower.
Humans are way more expensive than the machines running our code. You can always spend more on spinning up additional instances. In reality the overhead isn't that bad. The principles of immutable stateless deploys free up so much mental energy when it comes to thinking about how to get your code out and not break things that it more than pays for itself.
> AI is linear algebra that costs x1000 because of the brand name.
Tell that to my real time voice conversion system I just wrote. There's a lot of new magic happening right now.
> There is no revolution in software.
I'm on a fucking phone responding from hundreds of miles away. We're launching satellites that beam internet.
> We are just building crud
You can't speak for everyone here.
Are you in adtech or a social spyware company? Maybe don't work like that then.
Find meaningful work that speaks to you.
> quality of developers tends to zero as the number of developers increases.
That's the problem. With a sane simple architecture instead of 40 years of crap on top of crap you wouldn't need thousands of engineers to spin up instances.
>In reality the overhead isn't that bad.
Over 1e2 times if the solution is in software, over 1e5 times if it's an fpga. Around 1e8 if you do it in silicon. You make the savings from not hiring the 1000s of engineers to deploy your bloated horror.
>The principles of immutable stateless deploys
Has nothing to do with k8s. Nixos and Guix are two systems that are as close to functional as possible and they sure as hell aren't 'stateless', even though they come closer than any of the sexy trending tech.
>Tell that to my real time voice conversion system I just wrote.
Thank you project librevox for proving a near infinite training corpus, thank you nvidia for gpus to do linear algebra 1e5 more efficiently than you can on a cpu.
>I'm on a fucking phone responding from hundreds of miles away. We're launching satellites that beam internet.
Like everything else you listed there this is a hardware improvement. A Casio watch from the 90s had the same order of magnitude computational capability as the first generation IMPs. Good luck getting it connected to the internet using any software you could write for it.
> wouldn't need thousands of engineers to spin up instances
If thousands of engineers had to worry about deploys, that'd be a problem. The deploy team is small. K8S makes this dead simple.
> Over 1e2 times if the solution is in software
That's ridiculous. Where did you get those figures?
> 1e5 times if it's an fpga. Around 1e8 if you do it in silicon
If you're writing code for FGPAs or burning it to silicon, you're far removed from application server development. That would move at a glacial pace.
> bloated horror
Our containers are thin.
> Has nothing to do with k8s.
You're just hating on k8s at this point.
> Like everything else you listed there this is a hardware improvement.
Kubernetes. :P
Honestly there's been a metric ton of software improvements. Literally everywhere.
Git, modern kernels, Rust, Paxos (popularized in the 90s), LLVM, modern game engines, tmux, Wikis, bittorrent, blockchain, protobufs, gRPC, Bazel, Redis, modern PL idioms, futures, TOTP, U2F, Markdown, RSS/Atom, so many algorithms, seam carving...
>> Kubernetes is a solution worse than the problem.
> Not if you're a 1,000+ engineer org with an SOA.
The fact that most FAANGs (Amazon especially) developed their own systems that are not Kubernetes, and often much simpler, should make you think.
Many don't even use containers - by design.
Amazon didn't have the kernel expertise to develop kernel features required for containers like Google did, and had massive sunk costs in their bespoke hacky solution (Apollo environments).
> Kubernetes is a solution worse than the problem.
I disagree. Maybe it's because we haven't gone "full Kubernetes" where every cronjob is now a Kubernetes cronjob, or what have you, but for all the complexity we've had to overcome, we've seen substantial benefits.
For example, autoscaling instances of my data pipeline apps based on Kafka lag.
Was it complex? Yes. We had to expose Kafka topic lag as a metric to Prometheus, then configure the k8s metrics server that HPAs (Horizontal Pod Autoscalers) use to scale to pull that in from Prometheus using k8s-prometheus-adapter as a custom metric, then set reasonable scaling limits in the data pipeline apps HPAs.
Was it worth it? Fuck yes. We no longer have to worry about data arriving out of time at our data warehouse, because the scaling we've configured (in YAML, god rest its dirty soul) ensures that our data will always arrive at the data warehouse within 5 minutes, which is ideal for a near real time reporting product that greatly enables our end users.
Is Kubernetes worth it? For us, definitely. For anyone else? Really depends on your use case, don't cargo cult this shit.
The inevitable comment lol. I'm sure it could. To clarify, when the app scales, it's pods (container instances) that are scaled, not necessarily machines,that is managed separately by k8s. Depending on how much of the cluster is currently being used.
Yep, we could handle it easily on one machine, if we gave it unfettered access to all the resource, but our throughput varies during the time of day, so dedicating a machine to it to handle the peak throughput wouldn't make financial sense at 3am at night. So it's far simpler to scale pods with known resource usage as needed.
It also helps prevent issues when throughput suddenly doubles because of a business decision that you're left out of the loop on.
On AWS you would be paying for many other things besides elastic CPU power. CPU and bandwidth is infamously expensive there. (But I don't think AWS was mentioned anywhere in this thread...)
You don’t need kubernetes to do it, any cloud provider has api that will make it possible. Kube main point is declarative model, which comes with a big price (like sql had). Yaml - is error prone way to achieve anything.
Will see if history repeats itself and we will see be imperative systems.
Well, arguably that's true in the webcrap space. The HTML->CSS->JS->Webasm line of development really is crap on top of crap. Trying to fix the design problems of one layer by putting another layer on top of it only sort of works. It gets worse over time. "The mold seeps through the wallpaper" (a comment I usually make about C++ collection classes trying, but only partially succeeding, to hide the problems of C arrays).
I was doing "microservices" on QNX using MsgSend/MsgReceive for hard real time over 15 years ago. It doesn't have to suck; the mainstream is just using the wrong tools for doing it fast. The QNX people managed to shoot themselves in the foot by going closed-source -> open source -> closed source -> open source -> closed source, after which their developer community was fed up.
Machine learning is not linear algebra. It's nonlinear. That's what makes it useful.
> Well, arguably that's true in the webcrap space. (...) crap on top of crap
Not that you're wrong per say, but personally, I think you should take a look at the HN guidelines. Like don't be snarky, and don't post shallow dismissals.
Just categorizing the arguably most popular way of building software as "crap" doesn't seem like thoughtful or curious conversation.
> The HTML->CSS->JS->Webasm line of development really is crap on top of crap.
I completely get the hate for modern web, but in this case I think it's unrelated. The whole Kubernetes/microservice world exists basically to serve JSON and similar protocols. Maybe rarely some static HTML.
For HTML->CSS->JS->Webasm stuff it is more fashionable to compile at build time and service as static assets. That's the polar opposite of Kubernetes/microservices.
“ AI is linear algebra that costs x1000 because of the brand name.”
This doesn’t even make sense because it can be said about anything involving numerical work on a computer and it’s still roughly true. Also because all of the libraries are free anyway.
> Some kinds of startups are effectively impossible to build given current structural constraints on financing them
There are a lot of things that are impossible to raise money for, that are possible to bootstrap. If you're willing to work on something for 5 or 6 years without getting paid, there are lots of opportunities that open up that have high barrier to entry because they essentially can't be copied by venture backed companies.
Very few people can afford to bootstrap 5-6 years, that is a privileged position, most viable startups will never be executed if that is the filter. Some startups require many man-years of engineering effort before they can produce an MVP, so after 5-6 years they may have no material traction. Furthermore, startups have a shelf-life beyond which they become borderline un-investable solely by virtue of age. There are always exceptions but I would not want to count on being an exception among exceptions.
Some startups may be amenable to slow bootstrap, but the ones that have this very high wage cost tend not to be those types startups. I love these kinds of hardcore tech startups and believe they are extraordinarily valuable, it is the kind of company I would start, but I am also very realistic about the economics of building a team that can execute within those constraints.
That means you are spending even less time on your startup. I've been there and done that. And despite eventually raising $20+M in VC (I was extremely lucky), it was a horrible idea that I've never repeated since (raising subsequent VC). The failure modes associated with this are well understood and nearly impossible to avoid.
Short version: you can either generate project revenue or product revenue. You build a fundamentally different company to do either, so if you spend a significant portion of your time in project mode, the time you spend in product mode is usually moot. Consulting companies are project companies, through and through. The widely regarded truism that project companies cannot be transformed into product companies exists for a reason.
I'd love for this to not be the case but I've lived it so many times that I thoroughly understand the reality of it.
I would just look at successful bootstrapped startups that didn't have traction for 4+ years after the last pivot. E.g. Global Relay, Mailchimp, Bubble.is, ProfitWell, etc. And I wouldn't count something like Kickstartr, which took seven years to launch but only because the founder was non-technical.
> Some types of software startups can't be built without a team of engineers where the market-clearing wages are typically more like $500k-1M.
What types of software startups have these constraints?
And, as suggested in sibling comments, could building a highly technical founding team (e.g. bootstrapping) be a viable alternative to hiring with high wages? There ought to be a sizable subset of highly skilled engineers who have achieved financial independence and would enjoy tackling a challenging problem in a startup.
> There ought to be a sizable subset of highly skilled engineers who have achieved financial independence and would enjoy tackling a challenging problem in a startup.
The flip side of this equation is that those same engineers can tackle pretty much any challenging problem they choose, while continuing to take home those massive paycheques from a big tech firm.
Big tech operates in almost every part of industry simultaneously - want to work on Blockchain? AI? VR? Shipping and logistics? Silicon design? Drones? A valued engineer at a FAANG can switch between all of those at will without ever even interviewing.
> those same engineers can tackle pretty much any challenging problem they choose, while continuing to take home those massive paycheques from a big tech firm.
but usually not in the way they see it. There's enormous value in having freedom to do things the way you want, without being restricted by corporate culture and/or engineering conventions of a Big Co.
But not all engineers want to work at FAANG, there are some that are entrepreneurial at heart and would love to work on their own idea as a founder/co-founder.
Internal transfers are close to mandatory in many cases. Veterans are strongly encouraged to move every 2-3 years to cross-polinate engineering knowledge and culture.
For someone at a senior level (Amazon SDE III/Facebook IC5), an internal transfer is at most a perfunctory whiteboard session, and often just a conversation - you already have passed an interview loop to get into the company, after all, and have an easily-verifiable track record thereafter.
> Some kinds of startups are effectively impossible to build given current structural constraints on financing them
I generally agree with this, except I would change "impossible" to "exceptionally hard." You're right that a lot of startups innovating on deep tech need to hire people who would earn $500k+ elsewhere, and that a typical startup can't afford that.
However, very exceptional founders can often raise unusually large rounds early on. I.e. some founders can raise a $10m or $20m "seed" round at inception, which allows them to afford to pay $500k salaries. It's the top 1% or 0.1% founders within their fields, but it is possible.
Imagine Steve Jobs having to pay Steve Wozniak. The trick of the startup is that the key engineers are the founders.
Startups are not a place for an MBA to get engineers for free but a place for engineers to make bank if their egghead managers in their corporations don't get going with an interesting business idea of which they know that it is a missed opportunity.
Thank you for so succinctly responding. I'm going to expand a bit and ask the GP (rhetorically) - if you want 500k-1M engineers (R&D I'm presuming) to work for you, what are you bringing to a table?
If you are failing to attract these high-end engineers to a low paying job, perhaps it is because they dont see what unique skills the "business person" is bringing to the table to balance the risk.
As an extreme example, I'd guarantee if the "business person" was Elon Musk, people would flock this startup. What high-end Engineers do not want is to give away a lions share of equity in exchange for a pay cut with no real upside, that would make no sense.
The typical procedural founder with "business skills" may have solid business skills, but those can be hired anyway, the business founder needs to demonstrate equal 500k-1M level of skills/background/trackrecord/etc.
I know a lot of very good people who would take a very substantial (well over 20%) pay cut if being allowed to work (mostly) remotely (+ equity if it's a startup). Especially the senior engineers (like myself) I know really consider taking or did take very early retirement over having to commute any longer.
Most engineers don't want to be co-founders, and this does not scale well in any case. That role comes with responsibilities that can't be executed by committee and drama/stress that many engineers would just as soon avoid. There is nothing stopping anyone from giving engineers a decent chunk of equity but it doesn't address the core issue of scaling reasonable comp.
A "founder" is not just another name for a very early employee. It is a wildly different experience. I've been both, multiple times.
That’s a title. I’ve never seen an accepted definition of cofounder but mine is anyone pre-money. Someone pre-money is taking a 100% pay cut and often invests their own money.
Cofounders do get equity but don't get paid until funding. Employees get equity and pay. If it's a startup, the employee will get value = equity + (K * market wage) + benefits where K is less than 1. That value should be competitive with the market and key contributors should get more equity but NOT in the range of cofounder because otherwise something doesn't add up.
There is an implicit startup social contract and the OP points out that maybe startups can't outbid the FAANGs for talent now. That may be but I think startups (and the VCs+lawyers who are guiding them) are absolutely pathetic at managing this social contract.
You want equity? Fine. Here's some equity in the form of an RSU (fuck you, Bill Gates) which won't qualify for either 83b or QSBS tax protection. Sure, it may crush the employee with AMT taxes. Yeah, the startup gets a minor tax benefit from this but then expects its employees to bleed for them. This is beyond stupid. This is beyond stupid by the founders, the employee (who knows nothing) and the VC+lawyers (aka the institutional memory of the Valley) who do know something.
It should be part of the startup social contract and best practices to inform and help manage the employees tax situation. Don't use RSUs. Put a gun their head and make them sign and file the 83b. Etc.
I think a solution is less hiring at early stages (until you can afford it) and having co-founders hyper-focused on what’s important to the business (the ip) and they build and do the work to get it or the gate.
This. I would even go so far as to say that if you can’t get the founder salaries up to market rate based on MRR you should either bootstrap some more if you’re really into the IP or product...or close the place down before you hire someone under what they should be paid.
Open sourcing does not share the cost of $500k engineers. People using open source typically aren't paying the wages of the people that wrote the code. There is minimal financial upside to contributing to open source for most people.
The challenges that open source faces are closely related to this subject. Many vibrant parts of the software world -- open source, startups, et al -- are essentially dependent on engineers willing to write code for the compensation (direct or indirect) offered. When it no longer makes sense for good engineers to write that code, everyone will suffer from their lack of contributions.
Consequently, startups that have this property are effectively un-investable because there is not enough capital available in the early stages to achieve technical viability
Well, this is the class system in action. Investors would rather sit on capital and moan about how they’re unable to spend it, than spend it in a way that would benefit engineers. They will endlessly try to keep that money circulating amongst their own class.
Note: I am not a Corbynista by any means, but there’s no other way to explain all this money with nowhere to go yet wages stagnating.
My experience: engineering at Startup #1 for 2 years, then Google for 3 years, then Startup #2 for 4 years, and now I've been working with seed stage companies as a VC for the last 7 years. The amount I earned as an engineer was highest at Startup #1 (got lucky!), significantly lower at Google, and a little lower than that at Startup #2. Startup #2 is still chugging along, which could eventually make it on par with or a little superior to working at Google.
But money isn't everything. Startup #2 was the place where I learned the most. I was senior enough to be single-handedly responsible for large projects like a distributed search engine and a logging and analytics service. Sure, my search engine was a POS compared to Google's, but at Google I would've worked on a part of a feature of a component of the search engine whereas at a startup I got to build the whole thing from scratch. I'm almost 40 now, and that search engine is still by far the most fun and educational engineering project I've ever worked on.
Aside from learning potential and financial comp, there are other factors like team camaraderie, independence, etc. I keep in touch with way more people from the two small startups than I do with Google colleagues. Google had a good culture, but the startups were much tighter knit.
Finally, I think articles advocating for startups vs. big companies are a little like trying to convert someone to atheism or Christianity with a blog post. It doesn't really work that way. Some people are wired for startups: they love them and spend their careers at small companies and don't understand why big companies are attractive. Other people are more drawn to big companies where the company itself has a huge impact, the teams are well-staffed and have lots of resources, and the employees get higher salaries and lots of other benefits. When these people try working at a startup, they often hate it and quickly go back to another large company.
Neither big nor small companies are objectively the best, but if you factor in personal happiness then often one type of company is the best for you.
Learning has a way of increasing job satisfaction and giving you opportunities for larger scope in the future. You can get that in big tech too: my first four years out of college, I was fortunate enough to have some incredible teammates who seemed like gods, and they taught and showed me things it would’ve taken me years to learn on my own, if I ever did.
But then I switched teams and stuck around for 5 more years before leaving out of boredom. I joined a startup, and learned far more in that first year than the last five years in Big Tech. In the span of two years I went from not really knowing how SSL worked to being the architect and primary coder for a couple kubernetes deployments with a few dozen services.
The thing about big tech is that you become super specialized. Sometimes that’s fine, like if you’re a kernel hacker earning $$$, but if you join the wrong team then your world just shrinks.
I don’t ever want to go back to working on a tiny piece of something, even if that something has millions of users. Even if nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, and everybody’s gonna die, I still like the feeling that the work I do somehow matters to the people using the product.
So a dev team of less than 10 is probably the sweet spot for me.
I've noticed the same thing in biotech startups. Some people are meant to be part of smaller, bootstrapping companies and others are meant to be part of more established, good business corporations. The most interesting people are the ones who get in early and stick with it, growing along with the company.
The most interesting people are the ones who get in early and stick with it, growing along with the company
It’s pretty rare for this to actually happen in my experience. Generally an early engineer will grow and be ready to take up the role of VP Engineering or even CTO and instead the VC’s will parachute in one of their cronies once the hard work has already been done.
Completely agree. The issue I see is that at that higher levels, opex is more important for success than familiarity with the specific science. So the people who "grew-up" with the company, who would have detailed understanding of the science, would not necessarily have opex skills commensurate with the requirements the larger organization now requires.
One very salient explanation of this that has stuck with me goes something like this:
A fast growing early stage startup is great for learning because you'll often end up with tasks that you're not qualified to do, which forces you to go out of your comfort zone and learn from the inevitable mistakes you'll make along the way, whereas in a large company they usually have plenty of more senior people to take care of the more challenging tasks outside of your current pay grade.
That's a very good point. Money isn't everything. Pretending that money is the ultimate goal of life can be off-putting in the startup world and in the American lifestyle in general.
Obsession with money is an easy way to envy, burnout, depression, and loneliness.
> I was senior enough to be single-handedly responsible for large projects like a distributed search engine and a logging and analytics service.
I'm going to be honest, I don't think this is the norm. I worked at a start up for years and never experienced that level of ownership or challenge. We basically built a glorified CRUD with VC money. Good for you! But I don't think this is the case for many? Or maybe it was just me.
- worked at a startup out of college for 85k max plus significant equity (never amounted to anything). Stayed too long.
- worked at a later-stage startup starting at 120k, peaking at 130k. Got some stock options there (haven't amounted to anything yet)
- took a job at FAANG starting at 400k, plus some stock options. Currently at this job for > 600k base. Plus stock options.
While at FAANG, I created a tool that we open-sourced. I've had several VCs contact me to see if I want to try turning that into a company, but by my math it would be a lot of work for no gain over what my salary already is. I already get paid to work on this OSS thing, but I also get to work on other things - and on the OSS thing it's pretty clear cut what I need to prioritize, since my priority user base works with me at FAANG.
For me, startups have a 0/2 track record of delivering value. Being able to net more than I make as an IC seems pretty unlikely, and trying would be a whole lot of pain and sacrifice. The "faster growth as a founder" idea seems to be conditioned on the assumption that you'll succeed enough to pay yourself more than you make now, and/or be able to exit at an amount that will make up for the opportunity cost of getting paid well in the meantime while having a sane work/life balance. YMMV.
> "faster growth as a founder" idea seems to be conditioned on the assumption that you'll succeed enough to pay yourself more than you make now, and/or be able to exit at an amount that will make up for the opportunity cost of getting paid well in the meantime while having a sane work/life balance....
I posit its even more than that. It's a meme / propaganda by the survivors with their bias and those who hope to follow in their footsteps.
Also what's also interesting is you posted your comment to a throwaway while the others parroting that talking point were happy to reveal themselves at least pseudonomusly.
I'm pretty sure why. You don't want to burn your shot if you want to have another go at the startup thing and have people be able to read you saying you wouldn't be fully committed.
I fully respect that.
The only reason I point it out is to show how Silicon Valley the larger VC ecosystem is an echo chamber around this ethos.
My guess as to why is how would they recruit the next generation without that?
Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup.
I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company. I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent convincing people that the service is needed in the first place. Direct exposure to customers also is really interesting and changes you as an engineer.
It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.
I've had kind of the opposite experience. At the startup we were really sluggish it was hard to learn anything because we were jumping into any possible business opportunity before even thinking about ROI because money was always tight. 80% of the time was wasted supporting clients and fixing bugs that were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early.
I think the biggest difference is money. A well funded startup might be a boon but a struggling one will be a bane.
There are lots of startups that aren't doing it right. The best thing someone working at one of those startups can do is probably quit and go someplace else.
I think systemically one thing we need to do is help people make better decisions about where they spend their time. Especially for people who are good builders, they happen to also be the best people who can decide for themselves whether something is actually going to work.
The difference is whether you see learning to do meaningful things on a shoestring budget to be itself a useful skill.
Boeing won't care if you save the project $5k by spending a week of your time coming up with a clever workaround. The week was more important than the $5k. Same for a high level role generally. But not getting work done for a week because your boss won't approve a $500 purchase... that would be frustrating and get old fast.
> Boeing won't care if you save the project $5k by spending a week of your time coming up with a clever workaround.
I'm confused what you're getting at here. $5k/week is $260k/y (or a bit less counting vacations and holidays) and the fully-loaded cost of an engineer at a startup is typically more than that. Then consider how high opportunity costs typically are at startups, and I expect most startups would view your spending a week to avoid a one-time $5k expense to be a bad tradeoff.
Yes, but a week of delays costs the company like Boeing a lot more than just your salary, and they have deadlines to meet and other teams that need your project done.
I agree, most startups would view spending a week to avoid a one time $5k expense to be worth it for several years at least. That's why I'm saying the experiences are different.
If you're reading a judgment into my comment, there is none, I think doing super constrained engineering is super fun and an awesome skill to have. But I have also worked places that have the attitude of time being vastly more valuable than cash, and respect that both approaches are reasonable. Just different. But worst is when you're cash constrained to the point where even your clever workaround isn't possible to implement, even though it costs 10x less and is mission critical.
Ah, sorry, I misread you. Fair enough, raise to the level you feel is reasonable for your field. I just picked a number that I think is about right for people like me that don't code much.
I am also thinking more "angel+bootstrap+grant" funded startups rather than people already past a Series A; if there's 10 employees with a decent runway the calculation changes a lot versus 3 people getting something off the ground. I think the latter is more typical of a startup for the first several years.
I find that saving developer time or large amounts of money can be rewarded well in my position at a FAANG, you just need to save an amount commensurate to the opportunity cost.
"...save an amount commensurate to the opportunity cost."
Which can be a hell of a lot more than you expect. Like, don't bother spending two weeks to cut the CPU use of a service in half, if the service only uses 1k CPUs to begin with.
On the other hand, it seems like a savvy engineer could work that into a story to tell a Boeing interviewer about how they took the initiative to think outside the box and develop a solution that saved the day when the team was under a time constraint.
If they solved a time constraint by being clever and working hard then clearly Boeing would care about that, I agree.
Saving $$ per unit and saving $$ total are so different. If all you're doing is saving $500 total, I wouldn't even care in most cases... but if you managed to use clever techniques to save $0.30 off the manufacturing cost for a toy that gets sold in the millions...
I most strongly agree with the ethical part of the article, in any event. I'm sick of companies trying to take advantage of their employees, it's just sad and gross to see it done by startups that could be better than big companies in at least this one way. But instead they take it even further somehow because their finances are far more opaque. I don't think it should be up to noblesse oblige to determine whether distribution of profits and salaries are fair, it should be assumed to be the rule even if there may be exceptions.
It's a sad day when you look at employment agreements from Intel and a shiny startup and find that Intel is more up front and transparent about how things will work and what you'll get paid.
I think the course of events in the USA in the decades since the 50s has essentially answered the question of what happens if you leave it up to the most fortunate to decide how to treat the least fortunate.
Sometimes the people who are best at "working stories up for interviewers" don't always feel the need for there to be any truth behind those stories...
Working for startups I usually hit the ceiling pretty fast. Not enough time for formal learning, because of fires or hundreds of menial tasks, and on-the-job learning is just not enough after a year or so.
> were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early.
Can you explain more about this? The mantra is generally ship early and iterate fast.
How come the tech team was spending 80% in a bugs rat race?
The earlier statement of "80% of the time was wasted supporting clients" seems perfect? i.e. what else should you be doing other than supporting clients who are willing to pay with features and bug fixes?
Initially the startup was a service company which later pivoted into customer medical product. Previous contracts were upheld, while new were piling on even after pivot. Note that this is in France, a lot of funding comes from 'collaboration' contracts between laboratories and companies, often including up to 5 different entities. All this means that you are stuck in a whirlpool of quarterly meetings. With a tiny team if your product needs even very little support for each client it piles up. On top of that this was a medical, connected, product, people have different expectations for devices with a stamp on them.
So now you have a team with about 2.5 collaboration projects per engineer, who are at the same time the tech support and SREs. With several new products in a pipeline. All of it wrapped in a bow of medical certification.
One think that startups should have in my opinion is focus. If you have enough funding to go for a moonshot drop everything else and go for it. Don't spend too much time hedging because you will never get to the goal. If it doesn't work out, too bad, but at least do everything you can to get there. Especially when cash strapped.
> 80% of the time was wasted supporting clients and fixing bugs that were due to the fact that the product was shipped too early.
There are a lot of valuable lessons to be learnt here about product planning and dev process, but if you didn't make any attempts to fix the issues you mentioned, you probably didn't learn very much.
this has been my startup experience, too. Chasing any customer even if we had to make a lot of changes and try to support antiquated versions of things for our software to work for them. It rarely paid off. Actually, it never paid off.
I worked at big companies for the first 15yrs of my career. And startups for the past 5yrs.
Firstly, startups have been an absolute delight. I very carefully chose the company and hence my boss and my co-workers and love working with every engineer on the team. It is a pleasure coming into work each day and I often cant leave because I'm excited about my work.
I have a lot of authority over what I build a much of it is "close to the metal" rather than some side system. I get to see the whole slice of cake from conception all the way to sales and client implementations and participate in all of it. At small companies, as an Engineer, I learned how to build a successful product and learned all the steps from inception to sales and production.
At every big company I was at, there was more specialization and lots of process. Process was necessary at that size. There was also a great deal of inter-departmental politics and incentives were usually not aligned at big companies, sometimes incentives across departments were even orthogonal. I spent 30% of my time on process and communication at big companies and it went to 80%+ once I was a senior executive. I made a lot of money there, but I think it was to compensate for having to deal with the inner workings of a big company (and being able to be effective at it.)
At big companies, I learned how to turn the gears of organizations and learn how to make globe-spanning change effectively.
To be fair, I took a big pay-cut to come to a startup as an Engineer. I'm happy with the choice. I dont think there is any silver bullet out there, but it is important to understand what you get with each choice. It is also important to make that choice with full intent and not be fooled or brow-beaten by anyone.
Yes, I think it's possible that you learn faster at startup. But it is ridiculous to say that you "learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company."
This just makes me think that either you are exaggerating a lot, or you were highly unproductive at the big company than most people.
In either cases, I end up not being able to take your comment seriously.
I believe him as someone who has worked both ends in many places over the years.
At a big company you are given a slice and you really have to push to get anything more. I've had the experience where no work is assigned because approving anything takes time and once the work comes it is extremely easy to finish immediately because you have sat through weeks of meetings reexplaining everything to different groups get approval to change a form.
At one startup by the end of the day I was already learning four different languages/tools.
Now I imagine places like fangs would be amazing places to learn. If you ever work in healthcare most of your day will be explaining why this is a small change / very safe and you learn very little.
1 month vs 3 years might be inflated a bit for learning, but then again it might fit.
At a startup you might get core technologies going in a month, while at a big tech company the timescale might be closer to years.
I worked at a startup and the focus was on the work. I got to make decisions on what to work with, what technologies to adopt, and then I had to get them running. I worked on core technologies.
At a large company you rarely get to do this. You usually have large systems in production, have very large teams, and get to work on an established code base adding a feature or fixing something.
An interesting exercise at a large company might be to look at the version control checkins from the beginnging. The features at the beginning of the log probably went in a lot faster from fewer contributors.
Depends on the company. "Big company" isn't one company, or one position. I absolutely believe it. At the big company I worked for, it took weeks just to get all your accounts enabled. Releases were planned months in advance. At every startup I worked at, I personally deployed our software more in the first week than the big company's ops team deployed our software in all the years I was there. You learn a lot from that. Not so much from waiting for the ops team to find time in their schedule for you.
Briefly to begin, I'm going to read the above extremely uncharitably, not in an effort to besmirch aeternum but instead to try and tear down some terrible guidelines about life choices that I've seen going around.
Here follows my translation of the advice above:
> Yes you will probably make more at an established company, but your rate of growth can be much higher at a startup.
You'd personally benefit more from working at an established company, but if you work for a startup you'll be trained on the cheap and then an established company can reap more profits from you.
> I worked at a large tech company for 3 years before joining a startup, and learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company.
The comfort of a large tech company is nothing compared to the stress filled life of working at a startup, having to constantly innovate on your toes and learn your own ways will push you to develop faster - but if you hit a wall you're truly hooped.
> I was able to design and implement a service in a matter of days, whereas at the large tech company those 3 days would easily spent convincing people that the service is needed in the first place.
I saw a need and dedicated some days of labour to filling that need, because it was a valid need I was praised, if it hadn't sold I'd be chewed out for wasting time - and there is no guidance on which needs might be helpful or not... Within a startup you'll be expected to do user surveys and then market your new product even though no time is formally afforded for either.
> Direct exposure to customers also is really interesting and changes you as an engineer.
I assume when you decided to become a software dev you really meant UX designer? If your perfect world is being given a task to do and doing it accurately to a high level of perfection then have fun trying to quickly adapt your highly designed system to literally contradictory client requests coming from the same customer.
> It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.
Losing your shirt trying to make your day job not collapse and then being excluded from any of the benefits when your company goes public is character building.
It sounds like you shouldn’t go to a startup. I’ve done a mix of both (from #1 hire out of 2 total engineers all the way to a Fortune 25). Across the board, I’ve found the smaller the better (more enjoyable, more learning, more energy, more urgency, better colleagues).
Yeah, there’s no formal time laid out to do step X in the course of development. There’s the chance that you won’t make payroll someday.
It’s definitely not for everyone, but when you get a good team together on a good project, it’s fantastically energizing.
I'd rather educate the population on the pitfalls of startups so that people going into them are less naive and so that the experience of working there can be more enjoyable and fairly compensated.
I have really enjoyed working at small companies as well - not two person startups working on hopes and dreams, but companies under a year old that are struggling to stablize their offering of a product that they know there is a market for. Startups can be lots of fun, they can also be a grind trying to keep up with shifting customer requests - especially if you find yourself with a single dominant customer that knows they can push you around. Start ups can buy you an island or you could make 60k a year for three years and then be let go immediately prior to an IPO. There is an immense amount of risk there and I'd like to see some shifts in startup culture to provide a bit more assurances since the experience can vary wildly.
Maybe employees at small companies need to be guaranteed (i.e. by the government) a portion of that company for their work, maybe work days need to have a hard limit on them - maybe there just needs to be more VC funding sloshing around and given away in small doses - 200k to twenty companies will produce a lot more success than 4m to a single company.
What problems do we see that are evidence that government intervention is needed or would be helpful?
I see a lot of people very much willingly freely entering into contracts that are beneficial overall for society. That many startups fail and few result in king’s ransom payouts for employees who put up no money to form the company seems ok and preferable to an environment where government has a heavy role in picking startups, regulating work, or otherwise mucking things up.
If a couple of my buddies and I want to work together and want to work as hard as humanly possible at it, why ought that be disallowed?
In my experience it’s the team more than the size/lifecycle of the firm. I’ve worked on teams hitting on all cylinders in large and small companies. Similarly I’ve had bad teams in those environments and all sizes in between.
"No guardrail environment" is a great way to put it.
I've worked in a large corp IT department and for start ups.
I'd say the most value in working for a start up comes from being in the core group of founders and first employees. After that point, my perception is that it's more of a toss up - if you're going to be a rank and file junior developer on the periphery of the decisions that shape the company, an established company could in many cases be a better choice.
I think it depends on the big company. With aws or on-prem cloud native tech, there is a lot of freedom and responsibility given to individual engineers to build services and applications in an autonomous fashion. This goes for everyone, including folks with a year of two out of college.
I have seen no limit to what an individual engineer can accomplish at my big company as long as they have the desire and ambition.
I'd even take the position that if you are able/willing to work hard and grow fast, a start-up (or more precisely a high paying, high growth unicorn) will likely pay more than an established company - because you can grow faster and become more valuable (and thus compensated) in a higher-growth environment where the only limit is yourself.
> It's definitely a no guardrail environment, in the early days we had a bug that directly cost us a large customer pilot. No better teacher than experience, we did not make that mistake twice.
There's a thin line between growth through mistakes and learning bad habits (because of lack of training and no colleagues with experience).
I've been out of startups for a few years now, but it always struck me that there is plenty of room in the cap table for employees, if founders and VCs realize they have to cut back.
If founders and VCs gave a third to half of their companies to employees, instead of crushingly small option pools, this math would almost certainly shift. And the returns wouldn't be much worse for founders or VCs.
The reason they don’t is because they already gave 50% to the investors. And it isn’t uncommon for companies with $30M or $1B exits for the founders to get nothing. I heard about a company recently where the company sold for $40M and the founders only owned 4% after years of raises. I doubt the founders got anything. Most of the time these companies are having trouble scaling sales.
That’s why I included investors. One could imagine a regime change where, given the market for talent, both founders and investors realize the need to carve out more for hiring equity, and value companies accordingly, especially in the BS early rounds where it’s not based upon any real financial metrics.
I worked at software startups in the Boston area from 1988 through 2013, so perhaps my comments are not relevant to this day and age. But what I read in that note sounded awfully familiar.
In the mid 90s, Microsoft was buying up talent left and right, in whatever area they wanted to go into. My field is databases, and I developed expertise in the integration of query languages with programming languages. I got an obscenely lucrative offer from Microsoft, and decided to turn it down. It was a dumb decision, financially, but actually worked out fine on that front. However, I'm sure that Microsoft enticed many promising software developers to work for them instead of startups. (A few names do come to mind.)
This problem was completely solvable then, and the same technique would work now. The problem is that VCs don't want to solve it. They want software developers cheap. They give miniscule amounts of equity, and bias the terms so that those tiny stock option grants almost never pay off very well, (e.g. liquidation preferences). Except, perhaps, for the chief architect, and one or two very senior developers, we are viewed as disposable, interchangeable cogs.
There are great reasons to work for a startup, other than equity. I am very happy with my 25 years doing just that. But equity is definitely a factor. Contrary to what they would have you believe, VCs are extremely risk-averse, certainly compared to the developers who are sacrificing the best years of their lives for their companies and the chance of a financial win.
It has always been mindboggling to me that startups are still so all in on the Bay Area. Most problems mentioned in the article go away if/when you are willing to staff developers in an area that is not as ridiculous in terms of cost of living as the Bay area. According to StackExchange data, the 50th percentile pay for a Full Stack Developer with a Bachelors degree and 3 years experience (a profile that would seem reasonable for a startup hire) in the Bay area is $140k, whereas in the St Louis and Minneapolis it is $89k. Not sure why for many startups Bay area seems to be the only option. If they staffed their developers in a place like St Louis they'd be able to avoid the SF salaries and still pay in the 75th percentile for the market and the developers would have more purchasing power making $115k in the midwest or Raleigh than they do in the bay area making $145k.
Being a developer in St. Louis, the median developer that makes 85k here is not really the kind you’d find at a good Bay Area company. When you look for the good ones, they often have competing remote offers with salaries not that different from the bay: The biggest difference is that nobody gives real, useful, valuable RSUs the way FAANG does. Barring one of those jobs, the trade off is pretty appealing for developers.
The problem for a startup here is money and customers. There is some local money, but in practice, you will be raising from firms in SF or Boston. To do that well, you will be sending a founder on trips a high percentage of their time: Our CEO was out 50 percent of the time this year. It’s OK with three founders or a small team already, but the seed stage is very rough, especially for a solo founder.
There is also the matter of customers. If you are doing B2B for startups, or straight sales to developers, the market isn’t here. Consumer? Any physical bits are not going to grow the fastest here. Do you want to start selling to large masses of people with little time and loss of disposable income? Not the best test market. So you better be doing something that is better done from here. An agriculture startup, with farms across the river, for instance. Still, it will be rare for this to be your ideal location there.
Still, I wish for more startups here, but the negatives are very visible, and we have very few success stories that tell people it’s worth trying.
The Bay Area offers software engineers a career growth trajectory that other places simply don't.
That $140k number might be a reasonable 50th percentile for what a junior engineer would make at a startup in the Bay Area, but compensation can increase quite a bit after several years in the industry, especially for engineers who move to large companies which give stock compensation. They will far outpace the earnings growth of engineers elsewhere.
It's much easier to achieve that kind of career trajectory in places with high concentrations of tech companies, e.g. the Bay Area and Seattle.
That makes things look even better for St Louis and Minneapolis type places. Startups in BA can't even hire juniors for $140k while if they pay $100k in St Louis they will have people jumping at a chance.
Now I'm sure the BA people average better but somebody in the top 5% from St Louis is going to be pretty good.
Note: I'm from Auckland, New Zealand and $US 100k would be a very good salary.
Well, this assumes that the x %ile in smaller markets is interchangeable with the x %ile in the more expensive ones like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston. But I know lots of people from cities like St. Louis who live in these much bigger tech cities because if you’re in the higher range in comp. for your years of experience, it’s just a much better deal being in the more expensive city. So I would guess that in these smaller cities, you will miss a lot of the top 10-20% developers
The cities I mentioned (St Louis, Minneapolis, Raleigh) and comparable cities like Austin/Columbus etc are not podunk small towns. They are all major metros that are host to big universities and local colleges and as such producing a large amount of talent. I don't disagree that many devs from these cities move on to bigger cities, but I'd wager that a large majority of college grads from universities in these cities stay there and work for local companies (and them staying there is not a reflection on their talent level but more about the ties to the local community).
Even if I concede to your assertion that a vast majority of the top 10-20% of developers from these cities leave for the big tech centers- most startups are not doing the kind of work that requires their tech team to be made up of "rockstar" top 10-20% developers.
From the perspective of a potential employee, taking a job in a lower paid part of the country seems like a bad idea. You would generally be giving up some quality of life and neither debt nor savings care about cost of living.
Although maybe it would work if some of the second tier cities agreed to pay off the debt and contribute to the savings of people that agree to work there.
There is a lot of capital out there, what needs to happen is the number of startups shrink and the well funded ones pay more money - even more than google or FB pay. Simple as that! If you are sad that you can’t get a professional team on a $1mil seed, I have absolutely no empathy for you because I’m an employee and this is the free market.
Now, if you really want to make it more enticing, some things that would move the needle for me other than comparable salaries (although more cash is #1):
- Larger equity that automatically ups if it will be diluted, and the moment any shares vest I can sell them in the private market.
- Transparent cap table.
- If the founders take cash off the table, I can as well, and no preference for founders.
- 10 years after leaving to exercise my shares. I don’t want to have a 3 month trigger that handcuffs me to prevent a giant cap gains bill on “paper money” when the fair market value is way higher.
- Reasonable working hours.
- Flexible work from home policy.
But overall, go raise more and start offering more cash, because I assume 95% of startups are total failures.
I've said this before and I'll say it again.
Never accept a lower salary in exchange for equity.
Salary is your market rate for providing labor.
Equity is what you get for taking on the risk of being out of a job sooner than later.
So with that in mind, if the equity and bonuses in BigTechCo are a sure deal, then it may be worth negotiating for more when you join a startup.
I believe this post does a very good job of bringing the elephant in the room into the discussion. The current structure of equity compensation for early-stage startup companies is simply not enticing enough to get people to choose that over the salary and predictable path of BigTechCos. I love working in startups and even I, when presented with the choice, pad the salary knowing that throughout the funding rounds, if the startup is lucky, any fractional percent that I have will be so diluted that I'm likely to walk away with nothing to show for the work I put in beside the cash I opted for, hopefully, some new connections and some learnings. While some of the more successful startups can compete with those companies on base salary it is just not enough necessarily to convince the top talent that you are the right move for their career. That said there are ways to improve this such as the increased transparency OP wrote about in their post. We should also give more equity to early employees and have favorable terms around vesting for these employees and better timing around the loss of options after leaving a company. Of course this negatively impacts founder equity and potentially investors as well. But to me, worrying about that negative impact to founders and investors comes off as short sighted on part of the investors and founders. Ensuring your early employees will be taken care of means they'll work harder for your company and this will increase the chance you'll survive long enough to see an event that makes anyone a return on their investment. The numbers are so overwhelmingly stacked against startups that worrying about the couple million less you'll have because you gave out 1-1.5% equity to your early employees is really silly, very much chicken before the egg. Instead we currently have the weird known but unspoken fact that your early employees will likely get nothing in a liquidity event while still asking them to put their all into your company which is unethical at best and downright manipulative and harmful at worst. So yeah startups are in a weird place. This doesn't even touch on companies that just stay private forever which is another issue all together.
To be fair it’s mostly been the VCs learning how to extract more value and forcing that on the companies.
The VCs have naturally gotten better at what they do, which is bring returns to their LPs. The consequence is that they get more value from exits than they used to which comes at the expense of the employees and founders.
1) People say you learn a lot more in a startup than in a BigTechCo. I don't think this is true: I've gotten far more skills during BigTechCo stints than at startups. YMMV.
2) A new grad at a startup gets, what, $100k in salary and some equity? If we're talking a three year stint at a startup, you're effectively asking a worker to invest ~$500k in exchange for that hypothetical equity. In the broadest strokes (obviously everything depends on the deal), what kind of equity does an angel get for half a million dollars, and how does it compare to the amount of equity the new grad gets? And it bears pointing out that that new grad equity is subject to all kinds of games and deception. Of course, the usual response is "you just have to be smart enough not to be scammed!" Perhaps, but I know tons of people (including myself) who are apparently just too dumb not to be scammed but are still smart enough to be gainfully employed at a safe job.
I've worked with startup employees who knew 15 technologies - all of them poorly. They had zero best practices because it was go fast 24/7. It was guys right out of school thrown right into the mix so they didn't get the guidance of more senior devs.
I just made a move to a small (~1000 people company) from Google and I feel you. The code quality is terrible, they do not write maintainable/modular code and worse, they do not do design. They suffer from this(there is always another corner case that they did not take into account because they did not communicate well with the customer) but they still do not take any steps towards the right direction.
What made you think that Google does design? In my experience, what they do at Google, is talk about the overall idea of what they are going to do, but they never did design, they never analyzed tradeoffs, and they never estimated project costs or long-term implications of the crap they threw at walls, at Google. They just pretended to do design, at Google.
It's in finance/trading. I only worked for 2 of the FANG where I focused on tiny optimizations of an infrastructure software (where a couple percent improvement would directly result in a promo). I wanted to build something from scratch but did not want to move to a startup (because of the issued mentioned in the post). Now I am designing a new system for this company and I will lead the implementation of the project as well. This is like working for a startup (with all the good and bad sides) except I still make FANG level (even higher) income.
It’s even worse, because when you leave after 3 years, you have to pay to exercise those options and then pay the taxes on them. And then hope they end up worth something someday.
How do you come to $500k? Wouldn't that require that the new grad would be able to get a $266k job at a larger company? That doesn't seem particularly realistic.
Rough numbers, but I'm thinking roughly $200k, $230k, $260k. It's an order of magnitude estimate, take that for what it's worth. If the new grad is instead investing $300k, the calculus remains about the same.
I think it's fair to say that someone who can get that sort of job right out of college probably should. However, I'm not sure that the vast majority of engineers can do that.
When I started at Google my first three full years were $213k, $233k, $287k (https://www.jefftk.com/money). Some of this was stock growth (which is not guaranteed and I was lucky there) but I think this sort of pay is reasonably typical for people who are considering a FAANG offer.
I don't think that had a large effect on my compensation, if any: I joined at L3, which is what most new grads are hired at, and my salary before Google was low enough that I don't think it pushed up my offer at all. I also didn't get offers from multiple places, which is the sort of thing that (a) results in higher offers and (b) is the sort of thing new grads usually do.
But ideally someone hired right out of school would be up for sharing their comp?
Mind sharing what your rent was during those 3 years? The best figure would actually be comp minus taxes and rent.
edit: Oh, I see you were in Boston -- that's a great deal then. I still wouldn't want to work for Google for idealogical reasons, but I can see why the money would attract others. You also had ~9 YEARS of full time experience at that point, which makes it a lot less impressive.
Also, I didn't have ~9 years of full time work when I started at Google, I had 3.5. My first full time programming job started fall 2008, and this was Spring 2012.
If you were making 60k+ through your college "internships," I would put them at the same level as full-time work. My first college internship was $9/hour with no benefits, and it lasted
6 weeks...
Also, donations are discretionary, so you wouldn't count them at all -- you would just count your salary minus your tax rate (not counting deductions, so that the average Joe can get some context).
You can be compensated in other ways, but often I've found much of the work at startups can be no more interesting than their Big N counterparts. It might not even be faster paced. Your career growth might also be similar. In theory, for startups, you sacrifice pay for other facets. The reality is quite different.
The work might be similar but you're paid 50-75% of your peers. That was my experience in startup land, at least. Few good challenges or career growth and half of what I felt like I was worth. Completely personal anecdote, but I felt I was sold some half truth, where I was promised career growth, interesting problems and flexibility, but got nothing that I couldn't have found at many Big N companies.
> I think startups’ best bet is to make the most of the variables they can control outside of money and perks (if you lack the appropriate resources). This means being transparent and honest with candidates about all risks involved when joining a startup and factoring all this into the amount of equity they offer which should be something considerable.
Even if the original founders have the best intentions, large equity up front is unlikely to give you a big payday.
Since, in the traditional VC model the drive is to move toward bigger rounds (A, B, C, etc) and investors get paid back first.
So even if you do start with 10%, you'll probably only end up with a low % percent after 3-4 rounds.
The important thing to note is that this whole thing bamboozles our brains because of unicorn survivor bias. We feel like unicorns and $100m dollar companies are the norm but nothing could be further from the truth.
The chance of being part of unicorn is about 0.006% last I checked. The chance of being part of a $100m+ company is in low single digits (of all startups).
If it ends up just making a few million revenue investors will drop it (because not 10x enough) and you're 2-3% will be worth very little.
If ends up stagnating at $5m for a few years investors will drop it (because not 10x enough).
The overwhelmingly most likely outcome of you getting a large chunk like 10% up front is, when all is said and done, after 5-7 years you'll walk away with a few hundred thousand (before tax) if you are lucky.
In my case I was on founding team. Started out with 10% equity. Co. is now 7 years old. After a merger (diluted by 40%), $10m investment (diluted more), $4m strategic investment (diluted more), then investors taking money off the table first for an exit event - I stand to make $100k if we sell at $20m and $600k if we sell at $40m (currently valued at $20mish and has been for 2 years). That's pre tax.
Ditto to that, and add that this can happen at a larger scale even if you happen to find yourself working for one of those lucky unicorns, where late-stage VC will swoop in, inflate the valuation, and dilute the hell out of everybody holding ordinary shares.
Ouch. Being an senior engineer at a FAANG would give you 800k in RSUs over 4 years (initial grant + refreshers), a staff engineer position 1.5M... considering almost 8 years of work, that's probably at least 1.5-3M in RSUs (without considering stock appreciation, which can easily be quite significant).
"To make the situation worse, the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down."
Ok I have seen this written every now and then.
What does this person look like and how do I become one given a willing to sacrifice everything else?
I can not find a good answer to this question. Everybody seems to have their own opinion.
Eh, I really don’t think this is representative. I’m a self-taught iOS dev who has only ever been self-employed and I just got a $420k / job from a public company. And I’m smart, but not some unfathomable genius.
I think every engineer should at least do some mock interviews on data structures, algos, and system design (there are TONS) of free study resources and then do a round of interviews. You only need one yes.
right, wasn't looking for the company actually, by "where" I meant the location, which I think is NYC based on your handle! Congrats, that's a great gig!
>First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions.
Sounds like this is not possible without years of exposure to events that force you to this situation. How else would you learn to act like that?
Regarding being "smart": How do you define this? For example, I got a CS degree from a second tier Engineering school. But I was a B-/C+ student. Do I meet the criteria for being "smart" or just lazy?
>Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline.
Is this a hard requirement? What do these schools do that others don't? Is the exposure to other top tier people a necessary requirement from a skills perspective?
>Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers.
How do you choose a field that leads to the original goal: "the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down."
Tech is such a diverse field. There are so many paths to take, none of which guarantee I will reach this outcome. I could become a rock star developer having developed tons of apps, but is that the right path? Or will it lead me to a cubicle job?
>Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such).
This seems like just a lot of practice. Maybe even requiring growing up in a very socially active lifestyle. The opposite for people who sacrifice everything to become great at something eg. programming.
Its looking as if you need to be in a narrowly defined path that needs to either be decided when you are born or you adopt very quickly at a young age in order to accomplish all your steps.
Ignoring all the indicators that's been mentioned (acing all interviews, right pedigree, etc.)
- Solid results too show
- Fantastic references
I know a lot of younger guys have these pipe dreams of sacrificing their youth, going to the best university, studying years for interviews, and looking / being the "perfect" candidate come interview time, without actually having built anything of substance.
Sure - you will probably land some sweet positions, but there's no way in hell you'll get hired as a CTO without anything real to show - unless it's a 3-piece student startup.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are young people that land very nice positions, but they're almost always both smart and experienced.
I think the roadmap look pretty boring, but it's what it is. Read, build, analyze, and understand. Have vision, and get good. If someones gonna hire you to design / build / develop their product, then you need to be able to lead and deliver. Hard work, experience, and good networking skills.
>I think the roadmap look pretty boring, but it's what it is. Read, build, analyze, and understand. Have vision, and get good. If someones gonna hire you to design / build / develop their product, then you need to be able to lead and deliver. Hard work, experience, and good networking skills.
This is probably the clearest answer that I have gotten so far so thanks.
However I was hoping for something more exact. I guess there is no perfect path that someone can take.
I think I also asked my question incorrectly seeing the other answers I got.
What I was really looking for was how can I as a 29 year old graduate of a CS program who is currently working as a developer(Doing nothing exciting at a enterprise company) get to that goal(the one mentioned in the original comment). Like what steps should be taken going forward.
I wrote that other article and agree with what the original author here has written. Startups need to do a lot more to a/ solve the real problems of their customers and users, and b/ treat their employees and ecosystem better.
As I was reading "Downsides to working at a tech giant" it occurred to me that the alternative to working for a tech giant is not necessarily a start-up: I would probably work for myself — freelance.
So, in fact the two articles can both be right. ;-)
You can also work in tech, for a company, but for something that is neither a giant nor a startup. There's plenty of such jobs out there. In fact, the majority of tech jobs probably fit that category
They can be right even if your two options are either a startup or a tech giant. They have their downsides as does every job, even freelance.
I like being freelance but getting the motivation in those first couple of weeks was pretty hard. I also found it tougher to sell my services because I never really had to do it before. Probably some other stuff I can't think of off the top of my head? I don't think any type of work is perfect although I'd go for freelance any day of the week.
> Written by a VC trying to get engineers to join the startups he's invested in.
Actually for most of the piece he was pretty straightforward about making sure you get equity if you want to get paid upon company success.
What has changed is that genuine equity in startups isn't being offered as readily as it was ~15 years ago (and it is notable that the missed opportunity he describes is that far in the past).
I was a software engineer who learned to start a company right off the pages of the site you're looking at right now, Hacker News. It was here where I learned to start a startup.
I later worked for Y Combinator as a partner helping founders make products and services. The best ones made something that touches millions of people now.
While there is a lot of zero sum thinking in startupland and finance/capitalism in general, you have to remember that this is probably the most GROWTH mindset industry in the world. Where else can you, with just your hands and a laptop on the Internet, create something a billion people use?
I'm not saying that is the norm. But when it works, it's still remarkable.
And it can start with you, and everyone reading this.
> I was a software engineer who learned to start a company right off the pages of the site you're looking at right now, Hacker News. It was here where I learned to start a startup.
Keep in mind that if you look back on the things that made you excited to go into startups into 2006 or whenever, probably none of them are true anymore. E.g. the main reason people were excited back then is that there was a huge arbitrage opportunity to take every business that already existed as either brick-and-mortar or web 1.0, and reimagine it using AJAX and web 2.0 design language. In retrospect there were a bunch of other favorable macro trends coalescing at the same time also, but regardless none of these arbitrage opportunities exist any longer.
> Where else can you, with just your hands and a laptop on the Internet, create something a billion people use?
Serious question: how many software companies have something that a billion people have used?
It's a pretty special industry, for sure. But the odds of it happening are basically zero. I see how selling the dream makes for a good story for young and hungry startup founders to passionately change the world and (cynically) end up as a failed bet in someone else's portfolio.
But it's a bit disingenuous to make it sound like it's commonplace.
No disrespect but I think what the people use the product for should be mentioned ... in addition to the number of people using the product. The world has a lot of problems right now. I know there’s some VC in those areas but, well, look at what we talk about.
Touch 20 lives as a teacher and enrich those individuals, or 20 million lives by helping them order groceries over the internet.
Workers cooperatives are too risky, the liability in case of default is not limited in all legislations that i'm aware. There are successful cooperatives in most countries but those are the exception not the norm.
It's always simpler, safer and more wise to incorporate.
There are a bunch of things that “good” startups can do (and ARE doing in my experience) to make early stage equity worth it. For example, instead of a 90 day limit after leaving the company to choose to exercise options, many good startups are now offering ten years.
>> Equity agreements should not be intentionally confusing or designed to screw over employees.
You should feel lucky if confusing is the problem. I think the bigger problem usually is -- you often cant see the cap table. If you cant see the cap table and the preferred overhang, there is no way to realistically understand where you stand in the scheme of things. Confusing can be overcome with some search, but "opaque" cannot be.
Your odds of making money are much better with a young-ish but publicly traded company than with a startup. Even if a startup is successful, you won't see much money unless you were one of the founders or early investors. There's a million ways the stock options that early employees get can be made worthless (or worth-little).
I have BEEN one of the founders, and still didn't make any money off the ultimate sale. There are far too many games with share classes, VC-funded bridge loans, and preferred investor incentives. The only way to win is to not play the game.
There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity.
I can say as someone older than they were at the time that there was an element of wishful thinking about many of the founders I worked with, and even more so for some that I met in passing.
Charismatic people who are deluding themselves just bring others along for the ride. They may not even know they’re being dishonest. People who have a way with words can be sucked in by their own words just as much as others can.
For a lot of them that's just not the primary goal. Honestly, I expect the next big success stories to break from this pattern of the silicon valley sickness of trying to grow a company at all costs by conning VC firms until they've got enough users and then sell the company or get another round of funding to try and figure out the whole "revenue" thing later.
I think some old school thinking of more organic growth of a good idea with immediate revenue will see a resurgence.
It seems like start-ups could catch up, at least somewhat, by offering more stock. Right now founders are still ending up with an order of magnitude or more stock than the first few employees.
There are certainly situations where that makes sense but if the founders are adding extreme value compared to the first few employees perhaps they should only end up with twice as much stock. That would free up a lot of equity for early employees.
I think another reason that people are wary of joining start ups, is they've realised that:
a) The market is now incredibly saturated, and being an early equity owner in a start up that will be worth billions is very rare now. Gone are the days of a unicorn every month or two.
b) People have noticed the trend of FAANG companies buying up start ups, and that this is the goal of many (most?) start ups today. Reach critical mass, get a good valuation and customer reviews, get bought out by tech giant. If you want to work on the most viable new products, just join a tech giant and work on one of the projects they've acquired. (Or wait till the company is bought and join them if they are still independantly run at which point they're not really a start up anymore)
I didn't mean that a company became a unicorn every month or two, but it seemed that companies were founded quite frequently that later went on to become unicorns.
The problem is getting paid in common stock.
A pay cut is money that, instead of making, the employee is investing in the early-stage startup. That's no different than the money the investor is putting in.
Employees should get preferred stock in the amount of their pay cut.
I think the questions/issues around this topic don’t really make sense:
A. Why are we comparing an employee situation at a FAANG company with what should be a co-founder situation? If someone is an engineer that can make something happen at a startup, they should probably be a co-founder rather than an employee.
B. Why are tech center startups trying to hire coders of a certain skill level that will be incredibly expensive due to local competition? If a startup is looking for skilled coders to implement the vision of the co-founding engineers that can make things happen, then there are plenty of remote coders in non-tech-center areas that will do a bang up job for a reasonable price. Note that many of these remote coders don’t want to or cannot come to a tech center. I assume that this is an issue because many/most startups are not good at hiring, on-boarding, managing people, managing remote workers, etc.
C. Related to issue B, why play the micro-equity game with coders at all when they should either be co-founders or they (as remote workers) can be paid a satisfactory wage without equity bait?
D. Why is this conversation comparing a job with (relatively speaking) a lot of hierarchy and politics at a FAANG with a job that should have a flat structure and a great deal of autonomy? These jobs cater to two different groups of people — the ones who like the former probably won’t like the latter, and the opposite is true as well. There are subtle sides to this (e.g., do your time at a FAANG to develop a network), but many people who succeed at startups are not folks you want working at a large company — they will go nuts, and they will drive the people around them crazy.
This whole conversation is bizarre to me. I think there are three relatively simple choices:
1. Take a company job if you’re a company person — that is, someone who likes structure and hierarchy. It might not be trendy to admit it, but many/most elite school grads fall into this category.
2. If you prefer things like autonomy, being close to the customer, and being a generalist, then go to a startup. Plan on leaving once it hits a certain size.
3. If you have a plan for an alternate path that includes both, then go for it — specialist work at FAANG, FAANG then startup founder, startup employee then startup founder, etc. Just know what you’re getting into, because it can be awfully tough to walk away from $300k annual comp as a 25 yo.
Most people I’ve known clearly fall into one of these categories barring some sort of life-changing event.
My career path has been startup, public tech, startup, public tech, startup.
I got lucky that the public techs both had the largest stock growth in their history while I worked there.
All the money I ever made was at the public companies. I also learned a lot of cool, very specialized skills and got to do a lot of “ohhh so cool” type stuff.
Almost all of the knowledge I learned that allowed me to be successful at the big companies I learned at the startups, and most of the friends I made at work that I still talk to were at startups.
Both environments offer something unique.
I usually tell young people to start at a big company with a well known mentorship program and then quickly move to a startup to learn a bunch of practical skills.
I have a very straightforward suggestion for startups: Focus on the engineers who've put in a decade or more at the big companies.
They are, given the exorbitant salaries, financially set enough to afford the startup risk, and there's a good chance they'd like to see some more agility again.
But 1) you'll need to stop lowballing equity for hires, and 2) you need to get used to the idea that it's not going to be an extension of university life - these people have all better things in their spare time than playing beer pong.
Bonus points: Offer an office instead of cubicle mania.
Bonus bonus points: Make sure you hire a diverse workforce from the get-go.
I've worked at 3 big tech companies and 3 startups. 2 got bought out, the other is going strong. I made more money off 1 year of bonus at Google than I did with any of the successful startups. It's not because I did anything wrong (I was Eng #1 at one, First iOS Lead at another and Lead for the 3rd) It's because I was building someone else's vision for the promise that that my stock will be worth something. When a company gets bought even if you have a high % when it gets funding, it will be diluted. If the company doesn't do refreshers often enough you will be working long hours for close to free. The charming CEOs will talk about how they plan to change the world, the sleazy ones will tell you they are a sure thing (and what will you do with your millions). That makes no difference, it's just a lottery ticket. You have to decide how much of your career to put on that ticket.
Startups are a wild ride, and a thrill to join, you'll learn a lot, and have a great chance of coming out learning more than you'd learn as a entry level at a big company. Don't for a second think you have the winning lottery ticket, because if your number doesn't come up you'll left with memories and the paper it wasn't written on.
PS I'd argue if you have a group / team, build your own vision. Go big, we have enough insta-wecha-snapple sauce out there. Build something that will have real impact. And if you don't have the Team / Vision / Risk tolerance go somewhere they'll pay you what you are worth. Maybe you'll be even meet some of those you want to build a team for whats next.
Maybe startups should try cities like Pittsburgh, Columbus, Atlanta, Knoxville, etc. Lots of talent that will work for less for the simple reason that the cost of living is not so stupidly high. Hell even SoCal, Portland, Austin, and Chicago are bargains compared to NYC or worse SF.
Problem is that all the capital is in NYC and SF, and they still prefer to invest locally. At this point VCs should just skip the middle man and cut checks directly to landlords and property speculators.
Isn’t this also a function of the limited runway VC’s give to startups. If they 10x’d the amount of funding for seed and series A, startups could afford to hire the best.
It would add a lot more risk, but given the outsized rewards, it would still be profitable for some VC’s.
Otherwise, there will be lots of ideas left un-persued because many experienced engineers will not want themselves or their employees to live (in relative terms) an ascetic lifestyle while perusing their dream.
It's VCs' and founders' fault for always diluting employees on the big exits. If they want to gain back trust we need iron-clad poison-pill provisions that prevent employees from getting screwed out of their equity.
I work at a startup and have for 2 years since graduating college. Its quite hard to gauge my true value. I know that for the area (according to Stackoverflow's salary numbers) it seems competitive, but big N companies are moving in to Culver City which may be changing that.
Since starting, I've seen engineers who can't hack it leave or get fired. I've been the one engineer who has been productive and seen our projects to completion. Our team has gotten stronger over the past 2 years however and I feel that we are in a good position. In this way, I feel that I am valuable, but I have nothing to compare myself to.
Working at a startup I've also learned an extremely broad area of knowledge, much of this completely on my own. I'm often worried that that may hurt me if I apply at a larger company and that hiring managers would question my fit.
It’s worth mentioning that this post is focused on USA and (unsurprisingly) highlights Bay Area.
I’m sure the points exposed apply there but there are many other places in the USA and the rest of the world where this doesn’t apply and you can find good talent without needing to offer an exorbitant paycheck.
Well said. Startups can't really compete with MGAFA those days. Not the people, not the resources. For domain like ML, it is hard to imagine what you can realistically achieve outside of working in those companies.
A few years ago I decided to start working for a startup because I wanted to try out the experience. It was a late-stage startup with no VC money and they had good prospects for a possible acquisition.
I did the math and I figured that it might work out for me. 2 years later it turned out that they have been talking about a possible acquisition for the last 3 years, but nothing happened. I also checked the company's public information and it turned out that they weren't that transparent about the shares. I was told that I get 0.5% worth of shares (they refused to tell me the total amount of shares) and what I saw is that it was true: I had 0.5% of the outstanding shares. But in case of an acquisition, they are free to dilute them 5-fold because the authorized shares are 5 times as much as the outstanding ones.
So I decided to join a big company which is paying almost 2 times more right off the bat and I also get additional shares each year. I made a calculation and even if the old company gets acquired I get less money (it is just a rough estimation) than I get at the new company. And that's still a big if. I think that I still started from a much better situation than most of the other folks working for startups. This company produces profit, they have a business model I believe in and there is no VC to please. Most of the startups are in a much worse situation.
Captable slots for early employees range anywhere from 5 to 40% (collectively, not individually), depending on who the partners are and what the company does it might make sense to join a start-up. But it's better to be a founder and if you are risk averse then it is better to work for a big company with long term viability.
This definitely isn't one size fits all and there are a lot of people that will happily try to sell you on their version of the story because 'it worked for them'.
It's fun to watch the Bay losing its startup spirit and becoming a land of mega corporates. It might resemble Atlanta in 20-30 years. There are so many other places where joining a startup is the best option you have (excluding remote gigs). I guess most startups will become remote-first and lure people who care either about the team or the problem being solved. Building a startup employer brand will be of paramount importance.
I like this piece and I agree that startups can be great. But the first half of the essay, the hook of the essay, was contingent upon the author declining a $70k check from Thiel and noting that he walked away from $200 million; and the end of the essay suggested that one shouldn't work at a startup for the money (and you really shouldn't, it's unlikely it'll make you much).
Agreed, if you're living in SF or NYC I don't see the point in working at a startup unless you're just really passionate/optimistic about the work/company or are getting some other perks you wouldn't get at a FAANG.
Personally I work for startups, but only because they let me work remotely, something I wouldn't be able to do at any FAANG. I would only go back to an office job to work at a FAANG, since compared to a startup the money, "exit ops", work life balance, and job security are probably going to be way better.
If startups want to be more competitive and have access to more talent, then they'd be wise to open to hiring remote workers. Otherwise they're going to struggle to compete with FAANG type companies. Remote is the one perk that FAANG companies don't offer, and unfortunately probably won't for the foreseeable future short of some serious cultural change.
If the cost of housing was substantially lower, perhaps these great engineers would work for startups that could really use their talent, as they might not care as much to being millionaires so they can afford what's considered a middle class home for their family in most other places besides SF/Bay Area.
It seems to me that most companies start to gain a tedious/conventional/corporate atmosphere once they get to more than, I don't know exactly, somewhere in 100-400 employees. At that point the company has acquired, in addition to those who care purely about building companies and building software and building hardware and physical processes, a middle layer of conventional auxiliary staff, and nice though everybody may be, the company just becomes a standard corporate office environment. Many people (especially those who have enjoyed academic environments) strongly don't like such atmospheres, and for those many people this is a pretty strong incentive to work at small companies.
> And, to be clear, I’m not saying that one should or should not place money or perks above everything
Why not?
The whole premise of venture capitalism is that money is an appropriate common denominator for what is valuable in the world, that the best way to change the world is through establishing a legal entity whose goal is to make money, that once you have lots of money the best thing you can do is to put that money to further use instead of directly engaging your own technical skills.
Why do we tell potential employees at startups "money isn't everything" but potential founders "you'll make more money this way" and potential funders "please, sir, some money"?
The startup ecosystem is a way for venture capitalists to get richer, and to incentivize the people who can directly help them get richer. Evidently it's not enough - so maybe they should incentivize the people who help them indirectly get richer. If money isn't everything, don't join a startup or a big company, go to grad school, where you can actually work on whatever you want. Or go work for a big company for several years and retire, or find a half-time consulting gig, or something.
I have worked at 3 startups for 3 years of my career. At one, I was a founder and seed-venture investor; that one lasted 8 years. It was the only company NOT run by criminals. Total out-of-pocket costs to me (in 2019 dollars) : $45,000 in 2 startups for shares and for options. Total return : $0. Total discount to market salary that I worked for : 33%. In 2 out of 3 startups, the CEOs (1) stole all the money and fled the country, or (2) conned the VCs out of $2.5m and shut down the business the next day after the final funding round (all monies went directly into CEO bank accounts.) Ask me what I think about startups .... Fuck startups.
I agree that the game is clearly rigged in favor of corporations at this stage.
If money is what you're after then joining a big company is by far the most rational choice. Eventually, big tech companies will realize this and start significantly lowering wages until new engineers are paid the same as blue collar workers.
The reality is that new startups do not disrupt corporations; they feed them.
The only way I can see to end corporate dominance is with blockchain tech because it can disrupt the incentive structures that feed corporarions. The new generation of developers can build a new financial system using cryptocurrency as the decentralized foundation in which to store value.
While I understand your sentiment, there is a 2015 Dan Luu article which goes into far more depth saying basically the same thing: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
I can see you just started writing on this blog so I don't want to discourage you, but I was struck by the formatting of your notes page and this post being so similar to Dan's along with the topic and content of this post. Keep writing but I would maybe suggest something with more of an original spin.
It wasn't mentioned specifically, but I assume this post was written as a general response to "Working for Microsoft cost me $200 million" [1], which has been at the top of HN for most of the day.
I don't think Dan Luu has some sort of eminent domain over this topic -- I've seen literally hundreds of similar posts, most long preceding and covering the same topic. It's a pretty common decision for people in this field to face, and lots of people have lots of takes.
Not to mention that his post format isn't remotely like DanLuu's. It reminds me more of old Philip Greenspun.
Not that "basic text" is some sort of copyright or something.
Thanks for the comment - this was more in response to the recent article as mentioned by seattle_spring but thanks for sharing Dan’s writing, will take a read. In terms of the similar design, I actually optimized for the least amount of HTML / CSS necessary to put readable text on a page, I guess resulting in a similar look.
I've always thought this problem to be overstated. It doesn't make financial sense to work for a startup, but the upside is that you get to work on something you care about (and even the startup salaries aren't that bad in the grand scheme).
> the upside is that you get to work on something you care about
As a counter example, I found this is far more true at big companies, where you can switch teams until you find one that fits your interest, then at a startup where you are expected to work on basic infra that the company doesn't handle.
For the data/ML related jobs that I was looking for and the industry is moving towards, big companies have tons of valuable data that startups could only dream of acquiring.
burnout,
working evenings and weekends,
a life outside of code,
having children or families,
master in a specific field vs jack of all trades (master of none),
money is more important than free snacks,
working your butt off to watch all the credit go to the founders (as well as the money),
long term stability,
benefits and retirement is much less risky than hoping for an equity payout
I feel the startup founders should enjoy reaping what they have sown.
I really agree with your opinion, especially the words in the last paragraph. I am working in a startup now for half a year, in which all the rules you mentioned is done well, so as a fresh graduate, I never regret working for a startup. There, I have learned a lot of different skills that definitely will be my great treasures in the future. So, for the fresh graduates, I think working for a startup makes great sense that helps them find their true value.
i'd say if a start-up is hiring outside of founders / stock offerings then they are no longer a startup and should offer somewhat realistic wages. before that time, people accept to get paid less with prospect of their stock options exploding and that compensating for the lack of initial wages.
that being said, if a person wants to work at a startup, i'd say they already accept that the wage will be much lower than at some big corporate or company who is making good income already. it seems a bit if not a lot silly to me that someone would join a startup in the early phases but then demand a corporate salary. startups are kind of a popular term, but think about it... people used to actually build stuff and then get funded / success, instead of wanting funding upfront without any actual effort put in (thats exaggerating i know). A lot of startups these days though really ask for ALOT of money from investors without having even an MVP or viable product yet. I can't see why someone would pay for just an idea ... it seems a lazy way to make a startup. Building something, prove it works, and investors will have no issue to invest?
> The two things I really like about working for smaller places or starting a company is you get very direct access to users and customers and their problems
I don’t understand this at all. Big companies have lots of individual projects, where engineers get direct access to customers. At my big co, we all watch every App Store review come in, conduct thousands of interviews with customers and have a direct say on what gets built.
Better solution is to make do with as little staff as possible. Lower headcount makes management overhead and friction inefficiencies lower and saves you money big time. And this is something big companies can't replicate. This is how a startup was supposed to be: do one thing and do it perfectly, with as few people as possible.
The blog post echoes sentiments in TechLead's video last month about the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btbvv9kfLqo "Software Engineer Salaries in 2020. How much do programmers make?"
Also - outside of the bay (I live in Chicago) you actually make more money working for a startup (at least I do) than for a larger company (as a senior engineer with a lot of early stage experience). I think it might be the nature of the market here.
My main question is how do you attract developers to join your open source project? Wordpress and RoR and all those other projects?
Instead of startups I want to attract people to a project to change the world just like the OP is saying. But where to find the first few developers who would do it not for the money?
I work for startups because generally there's not useless word docs and red tape. You can have a fully reproducible engineering cycle without all the nasty forms.
I can't find the link but a while ago hacker news how to link to an article about useless jobs at large companies. Reminds me a lot of this.
Frequently in the UK I'm seeing options that are clawed back if you leave the company at any point. EMI options that can only be exercised under certain conditions such as an exit.
Actually, my observation over the last 20 years of being a venture investor, bigco acquirer and startup CEO (including at a unicorn) is that the risk-adjusted $ compensation is the same at a startup and at bigco. Startups just have more beta in the comp. You learn a lot more at a startup and hence it's the experience you want if you hope to do your own startup. If you just care about short-term $ then absolutely stay at bigco. If you want experiences unavailable at bigcos and are willing to take the chance of making less, but also the chance of making 10X+ more, do startups.
Show your work, because I flat out do not believe you. Just the fact that you were investing in these startups, acquiring them, and working as a CEO at a unicorn indicates that you have a vastly skewed perception of the typical startup.
>The risk-adjusted $ compensation is the same at a startup and at bigco. Startups just have more beta in the comp.
I work with startups, and while this may have been true 10-20 years ago I can't imagine how you would think it's true now. As the sibling comment says, I'd love to see your work, i.e. a remotely plausible example case with numbers illustrating how startup EV would approach bigco EV.
Just hire abroad. Working in a completely remote environment is entirely feasible, and it's actually in many, many ways, more comfortable and productive.
Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies.
To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side.
Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made.
1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me to be engineer #7 and completely own the mobile app and strategy, which is the single point of interaction for their customers. They offered me 0.1% and spun some story about how much it would be worth when they were worth $800mm. Their last valuation was about $35mm. Even if their numbers were real, I’d still make more at a big tech company in equity alone. They also made it clear they wouldn’t budge.
2. Bad work/life balance: the big tech company where I accepted apparently has no issue with people taking off whatever time they need (avg is about 25 days per year), working normal 40 hour weeks, and working from home if needed. By contrast, the startups felt way more restrictive here.
3. Terrible interview process: almost all these startups had pretty disorganized process. Worse: they did the standard whiteboard algorithms interviews, whereas multiple bigger tech companies had more iOS-specific interview loops. Even worse, the startups tended to have a higher bar for hiring than the bigger tech companies. This one is subjective and could be random or misperception on my part too.
4. Most infuriating of all, all of these startups (except coinbase) had a 60-90 day option exercise window for employees who left before a liquidity window. Let me be clear: fuck you if you think this is fair. IPO might be 7-10 years out and if I stay and add value for anything short of that, you’re going to ask me to take a huge risk to exercise my options (and pay the taxes) on your probably worthless stock, otherwise you’ll just keep it? Fuck you.
The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s pretty clear that these founders and investors don’t give much of a fuck about their talent, and watching them get squeezed by big tech companies offering sky high comp fills me with glee.
Be a founder, investor, or big co employee. Fuck being an employee for a startup so they can bleed you dry.
> Fuck being an employee for a startup so they can bleed you dry.
Could not agree more, and this is my stance which I will happily share with anyone who cares to listen. I was first employee (and only engineer) at a startup which dangled 'equity' in front of me but didn't deliver. Contract was so full of gotchas that the path to me seeing some sort of actual payoff was astronomically unlikely.
90 day exercise windows upon leaving or even getting sick and being forced to leave. Liquiditation preferences for VC shareholdings. No way to sell your options on a secondary market. Permission of the board required to actually exercise them. Half a dozen clauses that allowed the board to revoke your options at any point in time. Basically, they want you to give your fucking life to them for 5-10 years with only a contract not worth the paper it's written on as an incentive.
Between the shitty equity terms and the fact I was building a damn tech company to make someone other than myself rich, I told them to go fuck themselves and took a job at Google for over 3x times the pay. I have no regrets. Being an early employee at a startup is a complete waste of time and I still beat myself up for being so naive. Sharing this so other people don't make the same mistake.
Liquidation preferences for investors putting actual cash into a business exist for a reason. Suppose I have a company idea, maybe an early prototype and manage to raise $2MM at $10MM post-money valuation. The investors have a 20% stake for their investment.
If I decide the next day, “Nah, it’s not going to work; let’s close the company and distribute the assets to the shareholders,” it would be manifestly unfair for the 80% shareholders to take $1.6MM of the $2MM in the bank and give the VCs back the $400K that represents their 20% stake in the bank account.
Liquidation preferences ensure that the first $2MM that comes out goes to them.
Imagine you have an engineer who could be working at BigTechCo; she works at your company a year, and then that raise you specify happens. Engineer continues to work there for three more years. Company amounts to little, acquired for $2MM, engineer gets nothing.
Of course, everyone is disappointed. But it's still unfair for that engineer who gave up half a million dollars or more to work at the startup to get nothing. You might say that the engineer should be aware that they agreed to a way of structuring equity that means it's likely they'll get screwed. Fair enough! But all of this discussion is meant to make readers aware that, yes, the industry standard practice is to screw over the people who have the most skin in the game.
Why is it unfair? The engineer was part of a team that collectively destroyed economic value. What is the fair portion of bonus on top of salary that they should be rewarded with for that performance?
By all means understand it; I’ll never argue against that, but I find liquidation preferences quite reasonable.
The VCs are also part of the team that collectively destroyed economic value. They can't simultaneously claim credit for every success and disavow every failure.
We have a lemon socialism banking system. Obama made certain that 100% of bankers wiped out in 2007 paid NO PRICE for their recklessness; he prosecuted NO ONE.
It's not a reward. The engineer's work is a commodity they are selling to the company. Partly for wages and partly in exchange for equity. That is a real investment they are losing just like the VC's if things go bust.
Really that sums up the american dream, completely. Get rich by screwing the people whose hard labor built your enterprise, often based on "borrowed" software (Example: Microsoft 'borrowed' a source listing of a basic interpreter written at DEC.) It happens every day in the USA, and it's why conservatives love it so much.
I don't have statistics, but I believe the more common scenario is that the company gets acquired, and the return on investment is not the 10x or 1000x or 1000000x the VCs hoped for, so they recoup their original investment. Leaving the engineers with options worth nothing.
I view liquidation preferences as VCs offloading risk to employees because they can.
IMO, it doesn’t happen in part because the liquidation preferences are present. If they weren’t there, a great many startup founders would find their highest expected value play to be to close up, distribute the funds, and go back to working for someone else. Maybe not the day after funding, but 3, 6, or 18 months in. “This isn’t working out, but I can cash out from the cash left in the bank.”
Just like the “declare strategic bankruptcy a few months before graduation” doesn’t happen much because student loans aren’t discharged in bankruptcy.
Both moves would “break the game” in a very similar way and so are blocked.
You have a point. However, it would be very easy to distinguish between this scenario, and a sale of the company. VCs don't make this distinction. They could.
> a great many startup founders would find their highest expected value play to be to close up, distribute the funds, and go back to working for someone else
This is absolutely correct and it SPEAKS VOLUMES about the reality of the startup world, even apart from this discussion on liquidation preferences. I'd recommend anyone looking at working for a startup to consider the above and then consider the fact that as an employee they'd be in an even worse position than those founders before turning down that far more lucrative offer from BigTechCo.
> Suppose I have a company idea, maybe an early prototype and manage to raise $2MM at $10MM post-money valuation. The investors have a 20% stake for their investment.
The rich technically have less personal risk -- that's because, well, they're rich. GP arguably took more personal risk, took less pay, and created the machinery that made the company profitable.
If you want to say that the original $2M is paid out before anyone else is, that's fine, especially in a sinking ship.
If you mean to say that on a %1000 increase of company valuation, GP should not get his share because, well, he didn't fund $2M dollars -- that's _utter_ bullshit. And arguing that VC's should get preferential treatment so they can directly screw over the people who directly provided the growth is the stupidest argument I've heard for this clause.
I think the point the OP is trying to make is that the structure that you described, while great in protecting investors, seems pretty unfair when the startups do succeed. So while recouping the intitial investment preferentially sounds great, it shouldn’t be extended as far as giving the 20% investors the lions share of a successful exit before the people that actually built value.
The liquidity preferences could certainly be structured in a fairer fashion. Just because it’s currently structured this way doesn’t mean that it needs to be always or that it’s a great model ( it’s not unless you’re a VC, which is basically the point).
Imagine if you had a very deal-term savvy crew of engineer hires. They then proceed claim that "the compensation cut we have taken by working here directly offsets cash you would otherwise have to spend/raise. This should count as a capital investment and should therefore entitle us to 1x preference just like for the other investors have."
It's silly to automatically assume that "investor" or "capitalist" is someone rich. Chances are, the VC get their money from banks and pension funds who, in the end, invest money of people who earn much less than an average startup employee.
No, it is not manifest. Investors should ideally not invest in companies that are not "Going Concerns"[1][2]. If the company fails, all investors (including employees who invest with their time and energy) should bear the losses. The increased risk is what usually justifies the outsized returns.
As an employee (who’s also investing actual money, i.e. the higher salary I’m not making elsewhere, as well as labour & time) I also want “liquidation preferences” - 500k per year of working, vested monthly, senior to investor’s preferences - and it’s only fair, as I’m both investing and risking much more!
None of this logic applies to equity granted to employees, which are already subject to vesting. The argument you're making is actually for founder vesting, which is a separate issue.
Well, if the only thing you care about is compensation and work/life balance then of course, you should never work at a startup. There can be benefits though, arguably better personal development, a broader view of the entire tech stack, and potentially more personal satisfaction.
Of course, if the difference is 2.5x then it's a no brainer.. I wouldn't take more than a 20-30% cut to work at a startup.
One thing I absolutely agree with you on is the option exercise window. I think it's pretty common in the startup world, but I can't really understand WHY. I mean your options at a startup are already worth less than stocks at a public company, and they still do this shit ? With all the extra risk you'd imagine they'd have to get rid of the liquidity window just so they can compete a bit better with the big guys.
> There can be benefits though, arguably better personal development, a broader view of the entire tech stack, and potentially more personal satisfaction.
There's also:
1. Shitty bosses (this and the following can be found in any kind of company)
2. Being promised one thing and then being screwed over later. How many companies have screwed over their employees of stock options or those holding existing stock?
3. Terrible tech stack / less personal satisfaction -- especially if the startup hires lousy people and value code production over smarts.
4. Management defined engineering -- when managers make important technical decisions instead of engineers. ("We've signed up for service X, please integrate with them regardless of your thoughts on the matter").
The total liquid compensation difference can be huge, when factoring in all the public equity and big company benefits...
Imo we’re not talking 20/30% here, but multiples...
2) Ownership over your company’s strategy (e.g. mobile) only if you’re paid highly for doing it (not a bad thing, but many other people exist who would willingly take a pay cut for the ability to have an actual impact on company strategy)
3) A highly organized and logical hiring process and qualification evaluation
4) Custom negotiated options contract outside of industry norms OR BigCo stock that has value today
5) 5 weeks of paid vacation
It definitely sounds like you made the correct decision by choosing BigCo over startup.
I think the point is more that startups are really overestimating what they're offering, or hoping their employees are too stupid to realize the disparity. So far as I can tell the only thing most startups offer anymore is ownership, lack of large company culture/bureaucracy, and more opportunities to switch roles.
Equity is basically always monopoly, you generally can't even evaluate its value because no one will show you the cap table. Highly profitable startups still regularly manage to deliver a pittance to early employees on exit. Even if the exit does deliver oftentimes the yearly compensations disparity is so large that if they'd just stayed at BigCo and invested the bulk of their earnings they would have earned as much or more. This is all while working significantly more hours per year.
The list of upsides is really small relative to the risk. If startups want talent the industry norms are going to have to change.
I've always thought that the shitty startup practices when it comes to equity is due to insufficient competition for talent. Looks like this is about to change, since startups now obviously struggle to get the best people.
Not showing the relevant details of the cap table is ridiculous, companies that do this are banking on a pool of candidates that are either morons or don't care what they're paid.
Imagine the following situation: You're in a foreign market, and a vendor tries to sell you a fancy-looking machine. You know he's legally bound not to lie, so you ask what the machine is worth. He says "it's worth 2 billion Magic Moneys!!" but refuses to give you any information that would help you suss out whether that's 20 cents or 20 million dollars.
From your comment, it sounds like maybe you're one of the founders I was talking about.
1) Fair compensation, yes.
2) It's unfair to ask someone to have the responsibility for the success of a huge part of your business without making sure they have significant upside if they succeed.
3) Yes, I want a logical hiring process. The horror.
4) Fair. Not "custom negotiated", just fair. The fact that the industry norm is to fuck over your employees should fill you with shame, not be an excuse you hide behind to do the same thing.
5) I doubt I'll take that much, but I like that the company understands that they'll get the best work from employees who are taking care of themselves and their families.
If you're representative of a typical NYC founder, then yes, I'm glad I didn't join a startup.
> 4) Custom negotiated options contract outside of industry norms OR BigCo stock that has value today
The norm is changing. Good startups today generally offer 5-10y exercise windows. [1] This is something Triplebyte started, and they have a guide for how to implement it. [2]
> Custom negotiated options contract outside of industry norms
I think you mean the GP wants options within industry norms, which are outside of a failing startup's shoestring budget. On a separate note, what are your thoughts on the glassdoor ratings of Localize?
So your startup's hiring pool is people who hate safety, vacation, favorable contract terms, and logical processes, but love taking on extra responsibility for no pay? Seems like a small pool, and explains why hiring is so hard these days.
Sorry that was your experience. Just so everyone else reading this does not get the wrong idea, not all startups are like this. Many are, many are not. 10-year exercise windows are becoming more common. Flexible remote work is also more common (in fact, startup I'm at now as co-founder, we let people work from wherever the hell they want... while my friends at large tech co's have to work out of an office, even if they are allowed to WFH like once or twice a week). And we work hard but let people take as much time off as they need, whether that's vacation or just a day or half day here or there to deal with some family thing.
If you're reading this, please know that not all startups will "bleed you dry". And on the other hand, many big tech co's will!
Then they should compensate commensurate. As it is, I suspect that many are a market for lemons. Primarily the "seniors" who would take these jobs are the ones that can't get hired at 2x - 3x the comp, or (I suspect much more commonly) think they can't. I'm going to do my part to try and make sure more engineers know that they have options beyond working for shitty startups that dangle worthless equity in front of them.
This. You can be average or mediocre at a big company as there are lots of places to hide. There is nowhere to hide at a startup, in addition, a single hire can make or break a startup. More then anything a startup is just a collection of talent. Unlike a big company which might have physical assets, IP and other valuables. A startup is really just a pool of talent. So if there isn't any, well it wasn't going to work.
Number #4 is the law. However it is possible to convert an ISO to a NSO which doesn't have the 90-day restriction but has different tax implications. Some companies have started doing this, but I don't know how common it is.
Is there any way I can contact you? My email is in my profile.
I'm working on something to make the interview process and the offer piece a lot more transparent. I've been part of terrible interview/offer loops too, and the problem aggravates me to no end.
There are definitely startups that offer better equity terms - the last one I was at offered ten years to exercise after leaving. I hope the trend continues.
Pinterest started that around 2014 if memory serves and it became quite popular for startups to follow suit but recently less so and I’ve even seen some roll-backs; ultimately many startup employees don’t understand equity and don’t optimize for it.
Lyft also gave 7 years equity exercise terms starting around 2013, and it was part of the reason for having the IPO when it did, was because some of the early equity holders were getting near to seeing their shares expire.
>watching them get squeezed by big tech companies offering sky high comp fills me with glee.
Enjoy your new life as a corporate drone!
Note to the salty drones in the comments below: I started a business that was passively profitable for years and now pretty much just work on what interests me
I was self-employed for more than a decade and I made $300k - 400k for years. I'm not at all worried about the corporate life. If I don't like it, I'll go do my own thing again, no problem. What I won't do is work for a third of the income and convince myself that I'm one of the cool kids because there's a ping-pong table in my office and my "CEO" made some 30 under 30 list.
But it's not your whole life because we're living longer and it's enough money to retire earlier. Suck up the drone life, retire early and spend 50 years with no boss, no customers, just tooling away on whatever you please.
I find big companies to be incredibly frustrating. It is so hard to get anything done. As a result I have gravitated towards startups. I know I have made less money but I love the daily feeling of having an impact.
I think startups are great for junior employees because you learn so much so quickly. Eventually if you want to be successful in startups you need to start your own startup. The payout on 25% ownership at $10M or $20M is not bad and lots more companies can buy that sized company than a billion dollar one.
I'm hopeful that there's a middle ground. The company I chose is on the smaller side (think Dropbox, Snap, Twitter, etc) but still public. My team is even smaller, I'll be one of a handful of iOS devs on the product I work on. But we'll see, it might suck!
I feel like it is hard for people to say what they truly love before they have at least $1M in their bank account. If you have FU money, your view on working at a FAANG vs building a startup can change. You will find it easier to know what you truly LOVE.
That assumes that the person doesn't change in the meantime. You might put your dreams on hold to solve the money problem, only to discover that you no longer have the energy or focus to accomplish what you could have in the past. End state: I wish I had done what I loved back then.
>> That assumes that the person doesn't change in the meantime.
In the meantime of what? I didn't suggest any action but merely suggested that sometimes money could clarify whether you do something because you love it or/and because you have to make money.
A remarkably large number of the most notable of those people came from wealthy families - that’s what allowed them the single-minded focus, instead of worrying about food and healthcare.
And a lot of them suffered in poverty to pursue what they loved. Is there survivorship bias there? Sure. You don't become great without taking some chances though.
If we want to equate them then we should aspire to write code that is meaningless while we are alive, while living our entire lives poorly or being completely ostracized in society?
I'm not sure the startup angle jives with the artist's.
Most of the code I've written in my life has been meaningless,
but yes I get paid well. The ostracisation happened to a lot of devs during high school through the invention of the wedgee.
I am a scientist and thousands of scientists and engineers use my work.
Most great artists, musicians, writers, theorists, scientists, teachers, and inventors would not need to struggle as much if they would have some money to cover their basic needs. They would just avoid bullshit gigs and do they stuff with a greater focus. And if having $1M in their bank account would stop them doing what they love, then it is quite possible that they didn't love it in the first place.
Artistic pieces or songs are generally a representation of an event, a struggle, or a state of mind - if you lead a cushy life then no, you're not going to have the same output than if you were living on the breadline. There's a reason that history is dotted with songs and pieces of art that were written during times of struggle.
Perhaps that gets at my intended point, which is that different people have different comfort and stability thresholds.
If someone doesn't feel comfortable leaving a job to bet on a startup project with 20 years of mortgage payments in the bank, it is unlikely they ever will.
1 million is 40.000 dollars per year indefinitely, by the 4% rule, with a small risk of ruin that you'll most likely see coming years in advance.
It should be possible to live in the Bay Area on that, given that the place still has cashiers, cleaning personnel and maintenance workers. It won't be a middle-class lifestyle, but you'd have to make _some_ sacrifices in order to indefinitely work at whatever you want in the most expensive place in the world.
Never having visited myself, this is what I don't get about the bay area. How is it still a functioning city? How far out do you have to live to be able to afford rent on a non-tech bro salary?
but why would anyone do this not making a stupid salary? i don't get the appeal why anyone would put up with that just to have the privilege of serving coffee to techies in a formerly cool city. (not to imply that techies aren't cool)
> It should be possible to live in the Bay Area on that, given that the place still has cashiers, cleaning personnel and maintenance workers.
There’s no reason pay for cashiers, cleaning personnel, and maintenance workers can’t rise, or to meet the demand of labor with a little bit of automation also. Making $40k per year as a cashier means $80k as a couple or roommates.
Why not? If you have a partner, you would be able to cover half a mortgage, and if not you can get a roommate. I know tons of people who aren't in tech that make ~50K. It makes sense because 50K is pretty close to the median per capita income in SF [1] and a starting teachers salary [2].
I mean, I don't live in SF so maybe I'm off base. But my impression is that even with a roommate you're looking at $1500-2000/mo. That's oppressive on $50k/yr.
Even assuming 0 tax we're talking more likw 2200-2600 and there are gonna be some taxes, especially in CA.
Assuming this is investment income of course, and not just spending down the principal, which obviously wouldn't work.
So probably under 2k, and it's not fun money, it's everything but housing starting with food and transportation.
Doable? I guess. Fun? Eye of the beholder, I'd say. And that's assuming kids don't enter the picture, say goodbye to every part of this plan if they do.
I wholeheartedly agree 50K is a miserable salary in the Bay, but the original premise was $1M in the bank:
>I feel like it is hard for people to say what they truly love before they have at least $1M in their bank account. If you have FU money, your view on working at a FAANG vs building a startup can change. You will find it easier to know what you truly LOVE
The question wasn't if you can retire, or live of the investment income, but one of perceived finical security.
If someone is too afraid to try working at a startup with $1M cash in the bank, it is unlikely they ever will.
Even if someone has kids and family, $1M provides a huge buffer to find a new job if the startup doesn't work out. Maybe 20 years is a stretch, but I am utterly baffled that other posters think this would only cover 2 years of spending...
True, 1M in savings gives you ~40K per year to live off. This wouldn't be sufficient in SF, but given that you're basically retiring at that point, you might as well buy a home somewhere else and then you'd be able to live comfortable off of that.
I'd say it's less about the number in the bank account and more about the perceived safety you feel. Similar to the lower two layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you don't think that the worst outcome of pursuing something you truly love is manageable, you're less likely to put yourself up to that risk.
In US this might correlate more strongly to the numbers of zeros in the bank account or the salary difference to similar workers at FAANG. But feeling of safety is subjective and depend a lot on the environment you're in so I don't think that's universally the case.
> I feel like it is hard for people to say what they truly love before they have at least $1M in their bank account.
[edited to protect your feelings]
Are you saying that simple introspection is hard? I completely disagree, because separating extrinsic motivation (I do this for money) from intrinsic motivation (I do this for fun) really isn't that hard.
What you're saying basically amounts to "people are blinded to what they love by their need for financial security". This may be true on some level, but anyone can see through it with a modicum of introspection. Or am I giving the average person too much credit?
I'm not the original commenter, but I think you are vastly oversimplifying the situation. Most jobs are not black and white in one category or the other. There are people who will never be completely happy with any job, and there are local maxima, where one might not reasonably expect a better fit to exist.
>Or am I giving the average person too much credit?
Another consideration is that this is an irrelevant question for your average person, or even 99.9% of the population.
Dunning and Kruger explained how people drastically overestimate their value. The author won't be earning what he thinks he deserves, isn't working on projects he thinks he deserves, and doesn't get the promotions he thinks he deserves wherever he goes. His reality may never change for him and that's his cross to carry.
Broadly speaking, engineers will work at a discount to market-clearing wages of maybe 20% if they really like the startup. This is not necessarily an issue if you are well-funded and require ordinary levels of skill from your engineering team, which is most startups. Some types of software startups can't be built without a team of engineers where the market-clearing wages are typically more like $500k-1M. Even at a 20% discount to market, the amount of capital involved just for headcount is far too large for early stage investors, and startups that try to fit within the capital they can raise by getting by with less qualified engineers always fail at technical execution. Consequently, startups that have this property are effectively un-investable because there is not enough capital available in the early stages to achieve technical viability even though they may be great investments in the abstract. This wasn't a serious issue a decade ago, but it is spreading to a larger set of startups as wages rapidly escalate.
Given a long-term glut of capital, this could be addressed in principle by designing a model that modifies the distribution of capital/equity over time to accommodate startups that have difficulty financing the initial wage gap. As the startups grow, one would expect the average wages to start reverting toward the mean, but these startups won't get out of the gate without that initial investment in capable and very expensive engineers.
I've had interesting and productive discussions around this, it is seen as a way to bring fresh blood into an early stage pipeline that is drying up. It is obvious to almost everyone that the classic model of how you finance and build a startup team is breaking down in the current market environment, with an adverse impact on expected returns.