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She's confused. Startups are the Wild West of America. Wild West comes with Wild West rules. The rules are simple: 1) The loudest ones get heard 2) The most r

She's confused. Startups are the Wild West of America. Wild West comes with Wild West rules. The rules are simple: 1) The loudest ones get heard 2) The most ruthless get some combination of (fear + respect) 3) Those from a combination of (1 and 2) get funded 4) A fraction of (3) succeed, and a fraction of those does phenomenally well. 5) Everyone else in a pool will murder to be (4) 6) When (4) for some reason stops performing as (4) is supposed to perform, it becomes not "Jack is drunk at work again but we are exiting soon and I will be multi-hundred millionaire so I'm just going to figure out how not to piss off Jack as he is my payday" but "That drunk Jack pissed off a big customer by hitting on his wife and now he is hitting on me and I'm just not paid enough to deal with his shit" That's when the cracks start showing. That's when the "culture" becomes not a culture of "we win rararara!" but "these people are behaving like frat boys!" We saw this at Zenefits. We see that at Uber. We are starting to see it at Tesla. AirBNB is going to be next - there are already grubmings about its "culture" [Edit: Formatting]

hueving 9y ago
So you're saying earlier IPOs are the answer?
- notyourday 9y ago
  If I knew what was the answer, I would be posting on HN on Sunday while watching a long running processes that did not quite work overnight. We do have empirical evidence that people who think they are going to make gobs of money are willing to put up with a lot more than people who know that they wont make that pile of money. Scenario #1: Boring job - $120k/year salary + benefits. HR would send you home if your shirt is untucked. That kind of a company. Scenario #2: Same Boring job - $120k/year + benefits. Potential to make > $20MM on exit but one has to deal with "bro culture". #2 is probably going to be a preferred by anyone who at any point in their life had a crappy job. Remove the > $20MM exit and #1 is a winner. Remove it after it has been implied and that person would be rather mad at the company.

hueving 9y ago

So you're saying earlier IPOs are the answer?

notyourday 9y ago
If I knew what was the answer, I would be posting on HN on Sunday while watching a long running processes that did not quite work overnight. We do have empirical evidence that people who think they are going to make gobs of money are willing to put up with a lot more than people who know that they wont make that pile of money. Scenario #1: Boring job - $120k/year salary + benefits. HR would send you home if your shirt is untucked. That kind of a company. Scenario #2: Same Boring job - $120k/year + benefits. Potential to make > $20MM on exit but one has to deal with "bro culture". #2 is probably going to be a preferred by anyone who at any point in their life had a crappy job. Remove the > $20MM exit and #1 is a winner. Remove it after it has been implied and that person would be rather mad at the company.