3 ms·

Google has 88k employees today, almost 20 years of existence, and an average tenure of about two years. I would estimate that people who have worked at Google a

by bertil 8y ago

Google has 88k employees today, almost 20 years of existence, and an average tenure of about two years. I would estimate that people who have worked at Google and learned valuable lessons, and able to secure director-level roles in start-ups to be in the thousands; many have gone to Facebook (25k employees, 14 years, similar retention). There are hundreds of people who similarly left Facebook for Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Booking, Coinbase, etc. I personally know at least a dozen who made that move before their new employer raised more money, and can name three friends who went from Google to Facebook and to a third now-10B$ company, moving to pre-IPO company each time. And I don’t even live in the US. If you include probably several dozen people from PayPal (not just the six founders but the people who reported to them); hundreds of YCombinator alumni, who learned from their own failed company but leveraged the success of the friends they made in YC, and probably ended up working with; if you include people who have done their four years at DropBox, Zynga, SurveyMonkey, Twilio, etc. overall, yes, I expect to find several people with relevant experience at key positions in hundreds of companies. Some might have gone to investing full time, but they are if anything more likely to trust and advise appropriately their former colleagues. A lot of them are “anonymous” in the sense that TechCrunch wouldn’t name-drop them, but they would be familiar with, say, SQLite, AirFlow, or know from experience whether RedShift is the right solution at scale; they would know how to setup a Salesforce cluster; who to ask about address format in South-East Asia; they know about bugs in Samsung’s Android video codecs; they would have coordinated a launch in Arab-speaking countries before, know that React works well with Big5, or know that VAT is processed differently in Islamic finance. I expect those people to be asking for, and justifying convincingly compensations several times higher than what people could justify in 2000. You are certainly right about marketing: I should have mentioned far better targeting and control tools. CPA probably went up overall, but more importantly: the ability to measure it, to optimise campaign, interrupt ridiculous PR stunts before they cost too much, leverage them, etc. all that has become better. Analysts measure LTV with less ridiculous estimations now. That justifies trusting people with more money because when you hit the product-market fit, you know that this money will make more.

user5994461 8y ago
Working at any of the big tech companies gives you zero experience in growing a small company. Startups don't care about Salesforce or Arabic translations before they are many years old and have thousands of employees.
- dmritard96 8y ago
  Agreed for the most part. With that said, startups at the seed and pre-A don't need or care about any of that. Startups with 100M in financing might, although most likely don't care that much either. Skills startups do care about at the early stages - Self management/motivation and independence more generally - 0 to MVP fast, well and affordably - 0 to N customers fast, affordably - etc. There are so many caveats of course. Some startups (ours for instance) builds hardware so you need a few engineers that are truly full stack (plastic forming -> css). Bio startups don't need any of this. The nuances of VATs really don't matter.
  - bertil 8y ago
    I would have to disagree: it’s probably different in the US, but I worked for a start-up that decided to go through international expansion (12 countries at once) after Series B: that the CFO knew about nuances of VAT in each country was key to lower the burn rate. I’m seen many people from the companies that I listed, some who joined very early, some who joined after they had more than 100M raised, have the right experience to start a company, or join early. My point is not that those people are essential, or even that their are a majority at big companies; my point is that, with people who can justify several significant failures and success, especially public ones like accelerators and major companies, you have stronger signal, more trust and one could interpret larger rounds as a sign of institutional progress.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      US companies don't need to care about this, that's why their startups are so much more successful. They have a single market with 300 million customers. Don't get me wrong, there are nuances between states and a few subtleties, but it's negligible compared to expanding across European countries or Asia.
timr 8y ago
"Google has 88k employees today, almost 20 years of existence, and an average tenure of about two years. I would estimate that people who have worked at Google and learned valuable lessons, and able to secure director-level roles in start-ups to be in the thousands; many have gone to Facebook (25k employees, 14 years, similar retention). There are hundreds of people who similarly left Facebook for Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Booking, Coinbase, etc. I personally know at least a dozen who made that move before their new employer raised more money, and can name three friends who went from Google to Facebook and to a third now-10B$ company, moving to pre-IPO company each time." So basically, you're counting almost anyone who worked at a big company or a successful startup in the last 20 years, even though virtually none of these people have any experience founding or building a company.
- bertil 8y ago
  I’m counting on people who can leverage their experience there into becoming a valued contributor for a start-up with 15-150 employees. That’s neither only the founders, or every single early employee. For the second time: I don’t think that the strict dichotomy everyone-or-the-founder that you cast on top of my point helps you understand it. I think the engineers who worked in the teams that built things like BigTable at Google, RedShift at Amazon, React at Facebook, AirFlow at AirBnB, etc. all have a CV that, in a company trying to address a related problem, would be valuable. Many are given more responsibility, so you probably want to think less of a specific role and more of progression: an engineer who went from junior to senior internally in a handful or years, and was then promoted to principal at a new company, or from senior to principal and promoted to director. I know (from my own repeated experience) that either that experience or the ability to reproduce framework rapidly is not just a big trump card in interviews, but also often quoted to investors, especially early on. I reported for a year and a half to someone who introduced himself as having “killed the Fail Whale” (Twitter’s infamous symbol that the service was down): he lead an engineering team in charge of the refactoring and service reliability. His name won’t mean much to you, but I know that this experience justified a comfortable compensation when he changed jobs, and a title of VP; his experience also justified an order of magnitude more money raised. There was little doubt he could use that money to grow and lead the then 35-engineer team and prevent the website from going down as often as it used to. It took him several months, some external consultants, a dozen more engineers, but at not point was he worried: he knew the culture, the methods, the priorities that would lead to a stable site, in spite of the insane growth. When he refused to my team some key requests, he was very convincing because he was able to detail how that would make keeping the site up more difficult; and he was clear about priorities. We found a solution asking someone else, a principal engineer: he had joined as his first job a competitor to AirBnB, worked there four years until he was senior, wasn’t convinced they could win market shares, got hired by us as a principal because of his experience. He was also one of the dozen of personnel whose skill was explicitly known by the investors. About half of the senior engineers (that’s more than a dozen) were hired from companies where either I, or one of those two people worked, on our explicit recommendations. I don’t know if there are early staff at Google that “do not have experience […] building a company”. I’ve had the pleasure to talk to chefs (i.e. senior cooking staff) who moved from Google to Facebook, the facilities manager who did the same, a couple of the bus drivers: they all got recommended, promoted, because they genuinely provided exceptional service, shown fantastic initiative and understood what that type of company values. I couldn’t imagine companies without that kind of support, managerial, operational, technical, etc. I would certainly never describe the people who built those companies with me like you did, and I can’t imagine that the founders and CEOs of the companies that I‘ve named would either. None lives under the illusion that they did it alone.

by bertil 8y ago

user5994461 8y ago

Working at any of the big tech companies gives you zero experience in growing a small company. Startups don't care about Salesforce or Arabic translations before they are many years old and have thousands of employees.

dmritard96 8y ago
Agreed for the most part. With that said, startups at the seed and pre-A don't need or care about any of that. Startups with 100M in financing might, although most likely don't care that much either. Skills startups do care about at the early stages - Self management/motivation and independence more generally - 0 to MVP fast, well and affordably - 0 to N customers fast, affordably - etc. There are so many caveats of course. Some startups (ours for instance) builds hardware so you need a few engineers that are truly full stack (plastic forming -> css). Bio startups don't need any of this. The nuances of VATs really don't matter.
- bertil 8y ago
  I would have to disagree: it’s probably different in the US, but I worked for a start-up that decided to go through international expansion (12 countries at once) after Series B: that the CFO knew about nuances of VAT in each country was key to lower the burn rate. I’m seen many people from the companies that I listed, some who joined very early, some who joined after they had more than 100M raised, have the right experience to start a company, or join early. My point is not that those people are essential, or even that their are a majority at big companies; my point is that, with people who can justify several significant failures and success, especially public ones like accelerators and major companies, you have stronger signal, more trust and one could interpret larger rounds as a sign of institutional progress.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    US companies don't need to care about this, that's why their startups are so much more successful. They have a single market with 300 million customers. Don't get me wrong, there are nuances between states and a few subtleties, but it's negligible compared to expanding across European countries or Asia.

timr 8y ago

"Google has 88k employees today, almost 20 years of existence, and an average tenure of about two years. I would estimate that people who have worked at Google and learned valuable lessons, and able to secure director-level roles in start-ups to be in the thousands; many have gone to Facebook (25k employees, 14 years, similar retention). There are hundreds of people who similarly left Facebook for Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Booking, Coinbase, etc. I personally know at least a dozen who made that move before their new employer raised more money, and can name three friends who went from Google to Facebook and to a third now-10B$ company, moving to pre-IPO company each time." So basically, you're counting almost anyone who worked at a big company or a successful startup in the last 20 years, even though virtually none of these people have any experience founding or building a company.

bertil 8y ago
I’m counting on people who can leverage their experience there into becoming a valued contributor for a start-up with 15-150 employees. That’s neither only the founders, or every single early employee. For the second time: I don’t think that the strict dichotomy everyone-or-the-founder that you cast on top of my point helps you understand it. I think the engineers who worked in the teams that built things like BigTable at Google, RedShift at Amazon, React at Facebook, AirFlow at AirBnB, etc. all have a CV that, in a company trying to address a related problem, would be valuable. Many are given more responsibility, so you probably want to think less of a specific role and more of progression: an engineer who went from junior to senior internally in a handful or years, and was then promoted to principal at a new company, or from senior to principal and promoted to director. I know (from my own repeated experience) that either that experience or the ability to reproduce framework rapidly is not just a big trump card in interviews, but also often quoted to investors, especially early on. I reported for a year and a half to someone who introduced himself as having “killed the Fail Whale” (Twitter’s infamous symbol that the service was down): he lead an engineering team in charge of the refactoring and service reliability. His name won’t mean much to you, but I know that this experience justified a comfortable compensation when he changed jobs, and a title of VP; his experience also justified an order of magnitude more money raised. There was little doubt he could use that money to grow and lead the then 35-engineer team and prevent the website from going down as often as it used to. It took him several months, some external consultants, a dozen more engineers, but at not point was he worried: he knew the culture, the methods, the priorities that would lead to a stable site, in spite of the insane growth. When he refused to my team some key requests, he was very convincing because he was able to detail how that would make keeping the site up more difficult; and he was clear about priorities. We found a solution asking someone else, a principal engineer: he had joined as his first job a competitor to AirBnB, worked there four years until he was senior, wasn’t convinced they could win market shares, got hired by us as a principal because of his experience. He was also one of the dozen of personnel whose skill was explicitly known by the investors. About half of the senior engineers (that’s more than a dozen) were hired from companies where either I, or one of those two people worked, on our explicit recommendations. I don’t know if there are early staff at Google that “do not have experience […] building a company”. I’ve had the pleasure to talk to chefs (i.e. senior cooking staff) who moved from Google to Facebook, the facilities manager who did the same, a couple of the bus drivers: they all got recommended, promoted, because they genuinely provided exceptional service, shown fantastic initiative and understood what that type of company values. I couldn’t imagine companies without that kind of support, managerial, operational, technical, etc. I would certainly never describe the people who built those companies with me like you did, and I can’t imagine that the founders and CEOs of the companies that I‘ve named would either. None lives under the illusion that they did it alone.