3 ms·

Thanks for sharing your experience. People are getting caught up in Ruby v Java v whatever and not seeing the forest for the trees - you have a valuable perspec

Thanks for sharing your experience. People are getting caught up in Ruby v Java v whatever and not seeing the forest for the trees - you have a valuable perspective and an effective way of communicating it. Appreciate it! May I ask you about your first 'biggest learning': how do you eschew cofounder responsibilities in an early company? Someone who genuinely cares and/or is really interested in the core business (pretty common among first hires of startups) may have a hard time turning work away or willfully not participating in major discussions/planning when they believe their contributions could be valuable. In other words, situations when you know you can contribute but the company will get the 'better end of the deal' as you take on more responsibility without taking on more compensation. It sounds difficult to ride that out - were you able to do that successfully or are you saying "This happened to me, don't let it happen to you?"

timewarrior 10y ago
Just saw this comment. Not sure if you will see the response. You raise a really good point. If someone is joining a startup at an early stage, work like it is your own baby. You are spending your most valuable currency by being here - which is your time! With time, hopefully, you will get rewarded for your effort and results. You will likely not get a founder level say and stake but your role should gradually expand. In the end founders take almost the same risk as the first employee, but get a lot more equity because founder was there at the start. Join a startup as an early employee only if you are able to accept this fact - otherwise you are setting yourself up for a lot of resentment and pain. This above advise applied to me too for the first two years of my employment, before I started working on the ultimate successful product. We were building an offline search engine and as a part of that I build distributed file systems, crawled a billion pages and I was appropriately rewarded with career growth. However with the new social product that I built, the situation was dramatically different. For that product I was there from day 0. I was owning the whole engineering (sole engineer at start and head engineering till I left) and significant portion of product. Till we got 5M users, I had a co-founder level say (but not the stake of course) and I worked with a co-founder level of involvement and dedication till that time. However once we got 5M users, multiple levels above me started doing meetings and taking critical decisions without involving me. I still had a co-founder level passion and it hurt to see the product flounder and being unable to do anything about it. So I was in a uniquely bad situation and it is not common to be in this situation. However if someone really is and there is no way to get a founder level control - move out as soon as you can. And this is what I did - albeit 2 years too late.

timewarrior 10y ago

Just saw this comment. Not sure if you will see the response. You raise a really good point. If someone is joining a startup at an early stage, work like it is your own baby. You are spending your most valuable currency by being here - which is your time! With time, hopefully, you will get rewarded for your effort and results. You will likely not get a founder level say and stake but your role should gradually expand. In the end founders take almost the same risk as the first employee, but get a lot more equity because founder was there at the start. Join a startup as an early employee only if you are able to accept this fact - otherwise you are setting yourself up for a lot of resentment and pain. This above advise applied to me too for the first two years of my employment, before I started working on the ultimate successful product. We were building an offline search engine and as a part of that I build distributed file systems, crawled a billion pages and I was appropriately rewarded with career growth. However with the new social product that I built, the situation was dramatically different. For that product I was there from day 0. I was owning the whole engineering (sole engineer at start and head engineering till I left) and significant portion of product. Till we got 5M users, I had a co-founder level say (but not the stake of course) and I worked with a co-founder level of involvement and dedication till that time. However once we got 5M users, multiple levels above me started doing meetings and taking critical decisions without involving me. I still had a co-founder level passion and it hurt to see the product flounder and being unable to do anything about it. So I was in a uniquely bad situation and it is not common to be in this situation. However if someone really is and there is no way to get a founder level control - move out as soon as you can. And this is what I did - albeit 2 years too late.