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It's absolutely wrong! Employees are the ones who put in the work to actually build the company. As you said, investors only put in capital (and sometimes advi
by tyre 10y ago
It's absolutely wrong! Employees are the ones who put in the work to actually build the company.
As you said, investors only put in capital (and sometimes advice and/or intros.) Employees work full-time on the company, oftentimes for below-market rates (what they could reasonably assume to make in salary + benefits at larger companies.)
A company at any size is far, far, far more likely to succeed or fail based on its employees than its investors.
- idiot_stick 10y ago>Employees are the ones who put in the work to actually build the company. Company and work that, in most cases, wouldn't exist without a capital investment.
- mianos 10y agoIt may be the chicken or the egg, but, if you have some employee that can achieve something that others can't, he can go somewhere else and achieve the same. The money could be equally applied and it will not bring success. No money means failure but no employee means no chance of success, money or not.
- nostrademons 10y agoI'd question that, actually. The vast majority of huge tech companies that you've heard of today - Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, EBay, AirBnB, Whatsapp, Snapchat, GitHub - managed to construct a working product without taking investment. Several others - DropBox, Stripe, Instagram, Slack - had only a relatively small seed or angel round before launching a product. Meanwhile the track record for companies that take a huge amount of investment before delivering a product - Theranos, Webvan, Go, Magic Leap, etc. - is pretty abysmal. YC and several other top-tier VCs recommend that you keep the startup as small as possible, oftentimes just the founding team, until you've built a product that's popular enough that you're swamped with demand. Then you can go and raise working capital to fund expansion and fuel growth, but not before. It's not true that the company wouldn't exist without the capital investment, though - it's actually pretty critical that the company does exist before raising capital.
- aanm1988 10y agoYou can bootstrap a company without VC investment. Good luck trying to build anything without hiring some people.
- maxxxxx 10y agoEmployees also take more risk. Investors just lose money but employees lose years of their career if things go wrong.
- jacquesm 10y agoDepending on how the investors got their money it could translate into years of their careers as well.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 10y agoWhy would employees lose years of their career? While it's true that early work-ex in a company that eventually becomes Google is great to have, it's not exactly a black mark on your resume if you have worked in a company that didn't do well. You still got plenty of engineering experience.
- maxxxxx 10y agoI was at a failing startup during the .COM bubble. I lost my job in 2002 and was unemployed for almost a year due to the terrible job market back then. Definitely a very existential problem compared to the investors who either lost a small percentage of a large fortune or lost other people's money.
- 100k 10y agoSadly, four years of "heroic effort at failing startup" doesn't look as good on the resume as "worked at Google".
- maxxxxx 10y agoA lot of startups aren't even technically very advanced so the only thing you may have learned is to work 80 hours per week without complaining
- sharkweek 10y agoDisagree - not saying that a failed startup is better than Google, but honestly there is a lot of appeal to hiring someone who took a shot on something less established. Both have their merits.