I'm torn between thinking of Hacker News as benevolent or delusional and self-righteous.
I get the benevolent vibes when I see comments like golergka's. I get the delusional, self-righteous vibes when I see founders and VCs comparing themselves to JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller, saying "Hey! Look! I'm just as important as those guys!" "Silicon Valley is important!"
That said, Silicon Valley may very well be an important part of history. But the self-centeredness makes me wary.
When I was a manager in big corp, here what was important for us. These things you will not gain in some start ups (and in some you will definitely learn):
- How to write and communicate functional, design, and QA specs
- How to properly setup unit, module, program, product, and system testing
- Understand security issues
And the funny thing is that startups which will help you to grown in areas above are anyway going to be ones which do offer market base salary.
The best decision I made in my career was to ride the 2003 recession in a small catalog company that wrote its own code and wanted to grow. Since they were that small, I had responsibilities that had nothing to do with what people of my experience had to do in big companies. I was making stack and architectural decisions quickly. Since we didn't have an army of people, I had to do infrastructure, project proposals, requirements gathering, database administration, and decisions on stack changes. We just couldn't afford specialists. My pay was not exactly competitive, but when I left for a bigger company, I had major advantages over my coworkers, because I had such a breadth of experience compared to them, pigeonholed in roles that did a lot less, and never had to care about what was good for the business, just doing what the next guy in the totem pole said. Your idea of big bucks might be different from mine, but making over 300k in the Midwest sounds pretty good to me.
And it's not just my story: The rest of the people in that team are all doing extremely well. One is a senior architect in a cloud provider. Another is a pretty big conference speaker. The last one is the top technical gun in a consulting firm. All my friends that didn't take risks to go for better experience are doing far less interesting work, for far less money.
That said, a startup just makes it easier to get a job that teaches the right things. If all you end up doing is writing a web app in Rails, you might as well do that in a bigger place that pays better. It's not really about the office being cool, or thinking the company has a good chance at making it, but about finding ways to get a competitive advantage over other developers for the long haul.
It's one thing to hire just a developer. It's another thing to hire a developer who knows first-hand what's it like to run a startup, what's important for management and what concerns do they have.
But if you ask whether they give you more money because you are now in another relationship with them (consulting?), then absolutely, yes.
I've never heard that before but I realize now that it summarizes my motivations fairly succinctly
Has any recent British tech company/startup ever had such a raise? (Boo.com did but that was 99.)
If you are the founder you get the best deal overall on expected value.
If your offer is generated before the A Round closes, you can negotiate equity at a pre-A-round valuation, but you are never exposed to any pre-A-round risk, and you can negotiate a post-A round salary that is contingent on the round closing.
Won't this leave you with a huge tax bill, since the differential between the strike price and market price is so great? Options aren't worth anything if you can't afford to exercise them, so might a slightly smaller percentage after an A-round actually be preferable in practical terms?
It's a whole different ballgame if you join one that's actually making a profit and doesn't need someone else's cash. Get in as early as you can, if you like the idea and can see it's got longevity.
Startups rely on fast growth. If you have a very narrow market or your end goal is $200k/yr in profit, you are by definition not a startup.
If you're actually a startup, you should not have any profit in the beginning. You should be pumping that money back into the company and seeking external funding in order to pour gasoline on the fire.
There's nothing wrong with having a business instead of a startup (personally I prefer the bootstrapped business route) but to say that it's a startup is not accurate.
Only in the Hacker News / Silicon Valley echo chamber.
1. What are your expectations? 2. Are you a generalist or a specialist? 3. Do you want to work in a small room with two or three guys with a pay check? 4. Do you want to join a more established startup, but have less impact?
Make sure you understand the pros and cons of each option!
A particular subclass of this problem: the person who heads up your (pick a department randomly) Marketing from e.g. your seed round through your Series B is a) likely to be young and on-paper unprepared to run a Marketing department with 10 direct reports, b) likely to have a perceived lack of gravitas, c) likely to lack industry connections. Your VC fund and/or senior management may decide to bring in someone More Appropriate For The Role when you need a Director of Marketing.
This presents a dilemma: what happens to the person who built your entire marketing strategy when someone has just been brought in to own the entire marketing department going forward? Is new person going to report to them? No, that's an obvious non-starter. Are they going to report to new person? A surprising number of people would prefer to not have perceived issues with the existing team (most of whom were, after all, hired by the existing employee) deferring to that person rather than their new titular boss.
This is a time at which you either pray you are listed as a founder of the company or the founders are willing to go to the mattress for you, because otherwise the outcome is "Thanks for your service; best of luck in your next job."
Another approach is to consider what non-monetary goals you have - e.g. growth. For a junior engineer, going to a top-tier public company or unicorn is often a pretty good idea since you can learn a lot about best practices and can be mentored by more senior talent. Going to a startup mid-career is often useful since you get a broader perspective outside of engineering (on business, marketing, etc). etc.
Any job that doesn't have 2 years of reasonable stability need to be evaluated by your passion for the project. Do you want to take on personal risk because you believe in the project? Are you willing to lose money over it? Are you willing to lose time over it, and be broke at the end? Does this project improve the world, and do you want the work to be done even if you do not personally gain from it? Positive answers to those questions may lead you to join up.
But if you join a startup because you hope to get rich from it, you are gambling. There is nothing wrong with that choice, but you should see it for what it is - gambling your time for a small chance at future money.
This may be true in SV and a handful of other areas, but it is far from universal.
But if you are the type to be a lifer at a job, you don't need advice on when to join a startup in the first place.
Also, at some point, does a startup not become a company?
This is the best answer I've seen. Most startups are companies, and most startups are businesses. Graduating from a startup to a business doesn't make that much sense. But when your identified customers, product, and business model are repeatable and financially stable for the company, you aren't really a startup anymore.
So is a newly-opened mom & pop grocery store, then, I guess. But that kind of business isn't likely to generate blog write-ups.
I'll take the former, please.
If you're going to take a risk, may as well maximise the risk/reward and be (co) founder. In the mean time enjoy a well-paying job you enjoy in a space that you'd like to disrupt; learn on the job, build your network, then leave to found the startup that will disrupt your previous employer...
One word of warning - It would be nice if most startups became happy "CEO-on-Forbes" unicorns at round C, but not all do. I've seen a startup take a handfull of millions into Round F.
Which is of course, rather much the flunk round. And a lot of very health companies continuing to raise many small series rounds.
I think most people know this - but don't equate funding stage or amount of money raised with startup success. A better gauge would be paying customers and while you can't often get a feel for burn rate, find out as much as you can.
All being said, I've had some good educational times on slowly sinking ships too.
Sometimes the product is a little bit ahead of it's time.
My experience is that MBAs looking for money go into corporate roles, not startups. Around me it have been the more idealistic ones that join or start a startup, and for very different reasons than getting rich. e.g. feeling that they can be more valuable here than in corporate, wanting to create something new, etc. (all the normal reasons for start-ups, MBAs are no different)
disclaimer: I have an MBA, and I did apply to Mondo (did not work out, but no hard feelings), and I usually don't daydream about making a billion dollars
In any case, this is changing all the time. The seed-stage startup in 2016 might be three or four people from all over the world, working over Slack.
Want to work from home? Ask them. Most normal/bigger corps won't let you do this. A Startup probably will.
It's also good if you like green field projects, haha.
