Ask HN: Why did every YC startup move to hiring Founding Engineers?

[ciguy]

It seems like every HN Hiring post over the last 6 to 12 months is for "Founding Engineers". When you read the job ads, what they are actually looking for is a unicorn engineer who can build the entire product including Backend, FrontEnd and DevOps while also being an AI domain expert and any number of other demands.

This post is a perfect example of this: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/roe-ai/jobs/CZrzxk6-founding-engineer

They usually offer 0.25% to 2.0% equity and 150k to 200k per year.

I guess I am curious if there is a reason they all started doing this at the same time? Was there some kind of YC memo telling them to do this?

Why would someone with those skills and qualifications go work for a startup building their entire product for 2% or less vs just building it for themselves and retaining 100% equity?

This whole trend seems super misguided and somewhat exploitative from the outside but it must be working if they are all doing it?

[dang]

YC doesn't do memos, and I doubt that partners have been telling founders to do this. Some of the lingo around startups can be fashion-driven.

Personally I find the term "founding $employee" a bit oxymoronic and I tend to take it out of job ad titles on HN when I see it.

FWIW (<-- I am not a startup advisor!) my answer to your question is that any engineer who is inclined to "just build it for themselves and retain 100% equity" should do so. The only reason not to is if you don't want to, or have reason to believe that joining someone else's startup will be better for you in the long run.

Sometimes engineers want to work at an existing startup for a while, in order to learn things before starting their own. That seems legit to me. But you can also found your own startup without doing anything like that. Plenty of founders do, and YC is happy to fund them.

[andrewfromx]

"Why would someone with those skills and qualifications go work for a startup building their entire product for 2% or less vs just building it for themselves and retaining 100% equity?" Oh boy, tried that many many times. Turns out 100% of 0 is < 0.25% of a billion.

BTW if anyone is going to apply to one of these remember that 2% max equity is NOT REALLY THE MAX. Ask for 10% and slowly work down and settle for 6%.

[ciguy → andrewfromx]

Certainly possible, but one of the core premises of YC is that it's easy for technical people to learn sales and marketing but the inverse is not true. So this whole trend seems weird and a bit hypocritical. I'm more curious whether it's working and if they are actually finding people that meet these insane qualifications for relatively meager salaries and equity.

[Terr_ → andrewfromx]

> remember that 2% max equity is NOT REALLY THE MAX. Ask for 10% and slowly work down and settle for 6%.

At first I thought this was going to end with a caution about not being protected from stock dilution.

[jollyllama]

> When you read the job ads, what they are actually looking for is a unicorn engineer who can build the entire product including Backend, FrontEnd and DevOps while also being an AI domain expert and any number of other demands.

Tangent, but is there a descriptor for that in a traditional corporate setting?

[marssaxman]

> just building it for themselves and retaining 100% equity

I tried that once, and once was enough. It's not very rewarding to own 100% equity in a failed startup, especially when it failed because you were too focused on building the product to also build the business around it.

[ciguy → marssaxman]

Fair enough but wouldn't it make sense to find a co-founder vs getting paid a relatively small amount to build someone else's thing?

[marssaxman → ciguy]

If I had an idea for a business I wanted to create badly enough to go through all the stress, effort, and risk of starting a company, then yes: it would make more sense to find a co-founder.

In practice, I find business matters generally tedious, and I prefer to think about money as little as possible, so I would rather be an early employee than a founder. The reduced equity does not matter, because startup equity is generally worthless anyway.

[codingdave]

> Why would someone with those skills and qualifications...

Well, because there is more to building a business than code? I certainly know engineers who can be a one-man wrecking crew to build out an initial product. But I don't know any of them who also want to do sales and marketing, accounting and fundraising, HR and the legal side of things.

As far as why they are called "Founding Engineers"... meh, it is just a title, and trends in titles come and go.

[ciguy → codingdave]

Sure but this seems a bit hypocritical when YC prefers and recommends having 2 technical founders over 1 technical and one business oriented founder. One of their major premises is that it's easy to teach sales and marketing to an engineer but not easy to teach engineering to a non-technical person. In these cases it seems reversed where the founders are not technical and are hiring someone to build the whole product.