I always found job postings by YC companies surreal. The ideology espoused by YC is to be a founder of a startup. If you are a talented engineer, why would you work for 1-2%(if your lucky) equity and less salary than google/facebook/etc.
If you are a talented engineer, why would you work for 1-2%(if your lucky) equity and less salary than google/facebook/etc.
If you are a sufficiently young engineer (I am neither young nor an engineer, but I know people who are both), you might want to work at a startup before launching your own because
a) the startup might hit it big enough to make you rich enough to have a lot of runway for your own project,
and
b) you might learn something about the process of founding and running a startup if you get enough personal interaction with the founders.
So it's not always a dumb choice to work for a startup as one of the early employees. It's rare for an early hire's equity share to turn into serious money, and it's commonplace for startups to fizzle out and leave their early employees looking for a new job, but some young people like that atmosphere and think it provides learning opportunities that more "secure" jobs don't provide. There is also, of course, a case to be made for working at Google, Facebook, etc., but I am attempting to answer your question.
> a) the startup might hit it big enough to make you rich enough to have a lot of runway for your own project,
Do you also buy weekly lotto tickets and make wishes on falling stars?
> b) you might learn something about the process of founding and running a startup if you get enough personal interaction with the founders.
There are a lot of ifs and maybes in these statements. If you're lucky, you might get blessed with information, and that information may be meaningful for you. There's a fairly high chance that at the end of the day neither of these things will be true for most individuals.
I've been yelping about this for ages but most here seem to have the same opinion as you. I will say it again; you are gambling here with probably the best years of your life. Don't be crazy thinking 1-2% in a startup will make you rich. It won't. You'll just work yourself into ill health ; something which you will never be able to restore in the rest of your life and you'll not gain much besides the knowledge that you should never do or have done this in the first place.
Please check some statistics of startups; by far most go bankrupt, the rest disappear; might be sold to another company, might just close the doors with some blahblah story of 'it was just an experiment and it failed' => was it just an experiment for you, burning 80+ hours/week for 1-2% + a few $? Even being bought sounds like payday; it's not, especially for funded companies. It's just vultures picking dead bodies.
Then the minuscule (REALLY TINY; like furiouscowbell says below; it's playing the lottery, but at least in the lottery you get to work 0 hours/week) percentage which remains will indeed make you rich for your 1-2%; shame you didn't go work there! You picked another one; even without knowing you, I know this for a fact :) It's a safe bet for me to say this.
Please don't throw years of your life away doing this; start your own or work, for a good salary at a big/solid/hip one (Facebook, Google) and go from there. Make your mark there and then use the money you earned and super team you worked with to start your own.
Edit: if it's your own startup it's (can be) a lot of fun but you know the odds going in and your startup is different! You have to believe that and that's good. But if you are just tricked into working for nothing on someone else's dream it needs to be your dream as well, and who does that for less than a significant stake in the company anyway?
The last company I worked for was Scribd, and we hired a lot of young engineers and paid them less than 1-2% equity and a decent wage. I guess one could argue there was some value they were losing.
HOWEVER, I can name 5-6 people who started their own YC company as a result of this. If those people had spent 4 years sitting at Google vs 4 years with us, they wouldn't have gained those same skills.
FWIW: I totally agree with the author about working too much. I genuinely don't understand what startup's obsession with working people to the bone is at all.
