6 ms·

The only valid reasons for working at a seed-stage / series A startup: You are a founder. They are working with a technology or in an industry that you specif

• amyjess 8y ago
  I agree with you, though I'd say that this may not apply fully to late-stage startups in Series C or Series D.
  • seibelj 8y ago
    This is more seed / A stage. Once solid revenues are established it's a different game. I edited the original comment to reflect this.
  • JJMcJ 8y ago
    > late-stage At that point, it's just another job. Unless the company is clearly headed for a unicorn IPO, your tiny slice of the company is unlikely to be worth much.
• weka 8y ago
  > You need experience and you have no other option to get experience. This was me and I paid for it. Right now I'm on week 8 of 30 hour weeks. It sucks.
  • aw1621107 8y ago
    I thought standard work weeks were 40 hours (at least in the US)? Are your work weeks normally shorter?
    • jimmy1 8y ago
      40 hours is the target. In practice, most salaried employees work around 50-60 hours a week -- more if you count checking and responding to email after work / pager duty / etc
      • ascar 8y ago
        I don't think that is true in general. Heavily depends on the employer, industry and country. Also unions play a big part in worktime.
      • chipotle_coyote 8y ago
        While I'm aware some would call this a rather contrarian opinion, I truly believe that if you're in a salaried position and routinely required to work 45 or more hours a week, whether by actual mandate or "but that's just what we all do here" cultural pressure, there is something wrong with that company, more than likely starting at the top. Many companies have extraordinary crunch periods for one reason or another, and that's fine, but if you're in a crunch period more often than you aren't, that's no longer extraordinary.
    • LaGrange 8y ago
      Even outside of US, 40h is standard, some places have 35 hour work week. 30 is less than 4 days a week, or 5x6h. I actually think that _might_ be more efficient _and_ healthier, but it's unusually little, I think it's a typo.
      • C1sc0cat 8y ago
        in the UK 37.5 after accounting for lunch is common at BT it was 36 hours a week on average (not counting lunch).
• ken 8y ago
  > You need experience and you have no other option to get experience. I don't know how else to get the kind of experience you get at a startup. A big company will give you depth, but a startup will give you breadth. Also, if you ever plan to be a founder yourself, working at a big company might not give you any useful experience at all.
  • iamdave 8y ago
    Also, if you ever plan to be a founder yourself, working at a big company might not give you any useful experience at all. Alternatively, from experience, while big company might not give you valuable experience it can give you some good people to have in your network. Even if its to ask your former company accountant for advice choosing a billing partner.
  • laythea 8y ago
    Better to be a contractor at large companies and move around. Then you get the depth, plus you can change role when you stop learning.
• tdumitrescu 8y ago
  I joined a series A startup years ago for none of your "valid" reasons and have never regretted it. It was a company that I already knew of and admired their product, and they had enough traction at that point to offer at least several years' worth of runway/stability ie I didn't have to worry about my job disappearing unexpectedly (at least not more so than any other California job). Work-life balance was always totally fine. I learned a ton right from the start, was able to make a big impact, and worked in the smaller "get stuff done" environment that I prefer over bureaucratic organizations.
  • decebalus1 8y ago
    Sounds super great! Congratulations on your anecdotal experience which means absolutely nothing in this context. I just hope a wide-eyed college grad doesn't come across it and influences his/hers decision about joining.
    • master-litty 8y ago
      Subjective meets subjective. It's the appropriate context. I hope it helps college grads make an informed decision that's right for them.
    • zakm 8y ago
      So do you have some kinda data breakdown on the typical startup, or just other anecdotal experience?
      • decebalus1 8y ago
        Do I need to provide data breakdown to prove that an anecdote is just an anecdote? I'm trying to figure out if you're trying a full fledged 'On the spot fallacy' or just a basic 'shifting the burden of proof'.
        • dang 8y ago
          The flamey unsubstantive sort of comments you've posted in this thread are just what we're trying to avoid here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules of the site, we'd appreciate it. HN threads are conversation. Anecdotes are the life blood of conversation. This is an internet forum, not a peer-reviewed journal.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ummonk 8y ago
  >You are getting a significant title bump that moves your career forwards. The title bump rarely moves your career forwards.
  • desireco42 8y ago
    You would be surprised. Added responsibility can help you understand things from next level perspective.
    • 8ytecoder 8y ago
      While we are talking anecdata, I can personally vouch that startups do move your career forward. However, one should be willing to take more responsibility and demonstrate leadership.
• mbesto 8y ago
  > You are getting a significant title bump that moves your career forwards. To add to this. The title of "early member of <insert famous startup company>" holds a lot of weight in SV circles. Whether or not you legitimately helped those companies in the early days, it's a strong signal that you are valuable. And those <insert famous startup company> doesn't have to be a company that necessarily had a huge exit or has a strong economic reputation. For example - early engineer of Yahoo? Ya, people probably think you're worth one's salt. IMHO - I think this is the main driver people join startups. It's taboo, but vanity feels much more tangible than equity.
  • ummonk 8y ago
    The fraction of startups that achieve that level of name recognition is even more miniscule than the fraction of startups that achieve successful exits and let you break even financially.
    • mbesto 8y ago
      100% agree - which is part of my point...it's a very irrational view that more often than not doesn't net a high return.
• jakecodes 8y ago
  I joined GitLab as #29. My work life balance has never been this good. I've been working here for ~3 years, my benefits have been excellent, I have learned so much. GitLab may be an anomaly and YMMV, but it has been the best company I've ever worked for, period. Nothing has comes close. In the end I love what I do. I don't agree with this post.
  • samblr 8y ago
    would you mind sharing how much equity was granted at gitlab ?
  • Judgmentality 8y ago
    > GitLab may be an anomaly and YMMV I think this is the crux of his argument. Of course there are outliers, but 90% of the time (I don't know the actual percentage, but I'd venture it's around there - if we're only talking about money I'd say 99.9%) someone will be happier if they go to a more established company. And people are often disillusioned when their equity becomes worthless, because for years they were told that would be worth millions and they accepted low salaries because of it. Of course sometimes it does work out great, and I'm happy that it did for you! But statistically, you are incredibly lucky.
    • jakecodes 8y ago
      Do you have links to any data that shows the statistics on my luck?
      • Judgmentality 8y ago
        There are a lot of assumptions in my argument, but the one with the hardest data will be how many startups succeed. Most people don't join startups thinking they'll fail (they understand it might fail, but if you knew it would fail would you still join?) Of the high-growth tech startups we're looking at, here's an analysis pointing towards 92% failure rate - https://s3.amazonaws.com/startupcompass-public/StartupGenomeReport2_Why_Startups_Fail_v2.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/startupcompass-public/StartupGenome... - I suspect the real number is actually much higher if we're including seed stage companies. Beyond that though, it's mostly me piecing together anecdotal evidence of disgruntled startup employees who left for larger companies and regret not joining immediately after college. There are of course plenty of people who join for the experience, for the smaller team sizes, the autonomy, etcetera. But I think my argument is largely driven by equity. Unless you'd happily except the job offer without the equity it's pretty hard to refute that people join startups because they want equity. And that equity is almost never worth it. If you aren't a single digit employee number at a company with a 10 digit exit, and this is still assuming you didn't get fucked by dilution because of asshole investors, the math just doesn't add up. The odds of being in that cohort is much less than 1/1000, probably closer to 1/10000. It would take me a bit of effort to find a hard number on it (looking at total number of employees at large exits, find large companies that failed, approximate number of employees at various other startups) - but I actually know people that were employee #X at a company with a 10 digit exit who didn't get screwed by investors and they still would've been better off going to Google in terms of financial compensation. Also I think a lot of it is ignorance. Many people at startups don't realize how much better it could be at a FAANG company because they've never worked there.
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  valid: you do not enjoy big company politics. (you’d rather have small company politics) valid: you want a sense of ownership and responsibility. if you don’t perform, there is a noticeable effect on the company. valid: you want to be in an environment where others are just as committed as you to the success of the company. you want to treat your work as an endeavor, not as a means to a paycheck.
  • freewilly1040 8y ago
    I think the implicit point is that if you are NOT a cofounder those feelings of ownership are unlikely to be matched by reality. As a non-founder you do not have the input and upside of an owner.
    • jiveturkey 8y ago
      please note that i am referring to the sense of ownership and responsibility that comes from being one of the important cogs. this is reality in a startup. i don't mean it in a legal/financial sense, and i am not referring to any extrinsic reward, eg financial upside.
      • derefr 8y ago
        > this is reality in a startup Five-year-old well-funded-and-profitable companies with 50 employees, where you as employee #50 are just there to toil away writing some dumb CRUD backoffice code—are still referred to as "start-ups." And, in fact, since the other kind of startup dies more often than it succeeds and grows into this kind, most startups that are hiring at any given moment are this kind of startup.
        • jiveturkey 8y ago
          The context in this sub-thread is specifically seed or series A startups.
  • LaGrange 8y ago
    > valid: you do not enjoy big company politics. (you’d rather have small company politics) Are there big investors? Welcome to big company politics. > valid: you want a sense of ownership and responsibility. if you don’t perform, there is a noticeable effect on the company. Responsibility? Sure. Ownership? Unless you're a founder or a big investor, haha, no. Unless you mean the corpo-speak "ownership," which is just another word for responsibility. Responsibility might make the work more emotionally rewarding, but it also makes the work more stressful, so I won't sell it for free. > valid: you want to be in an environment where others are just as committed as you to the success of the company. They may measure the "success" in terms wildly different from you, the employee, though. > you want to treat your work as an endeavor, not as a means to a paycheck. Actually while I might want something more, endeavour doesn't pay rent.
• XCSme 8y ago
  Stability is bad yes, but work life balance can definitely be good in a start-up.
• sgustard 8y ago
  Do I like going to work every day? Do I like my coworkers and the kind of work I'm doing? These questions have always guided me well.
• ab992_throwaway 8y ago
  I guess this might fall under "You need experience and you have no other option to get experience.", but I ended up on the path of working for startups because 1. I never graduated from university (life came up, and I couldn't afford to keep going); but, also, 2. I don't live in the US (I'm Canadian.) Any of the US bigcorps that want to hire programmers, expect them to get a visa and move to the US. You know what you need, to get a work visa as a programmer coming to the US? A college degree! So, my employer pool was instantly limited to non-US companies. Mostly local Canadian companies. Most of those are very conservative and also expect a college degree. The only ones that aren't, are startups. So that's what I had to do. The really annoying thing is, I ended up doing work for these Canadian startups that would netted me a $300k USD salary if I had been doing it for a US bigcorp. But, because Canadian salaries are lower, and startup salaries are lower, I was only getting ~$60k. After years of doing that, I'm a Canadian startup founder... and still only making (i.e. paying myself) $60k. I guess I'm an object lesson in the value of a college degree!
  • as300 8y ago
    > I guess I'm an object lesson in the value of a college degree! As well as the really innefective way we judge talent in the US
    • wholien 8y ago
      pretty sure college degrees are beneficial to getting a visa/work permit in other countries, like Canada or China.
  • ab993_throwaway 8y ago
    Actually you dont need to have college degree. I don't have high school diploma and I got L1B visa. In case you have enough years of experience, this experience is "translatable" to years of college/degree. There is companies that specialize in writing letters for US Visa applications in which they are go through your experience and how it translated to visa degree requirements. My 18 years of experience were placing me somewhere between BS and MS. Letter for visa application supporting it was 6 pages long.
• joezydeco 8y ago
  Is "stability" in terms of overall job security, or day-to-day chaos? Because I would add "chaos" to the list of negatives. The odds are likely you're going to get a C-suite or board that has ADHD-like tendencies, especially when chasing large customers and/or funding rounds. You will continually be dropping or delaying long-term work for short-term projects to help the company achieve other goals.
• reaperducer 8y ago
  Salary - you would make (much) more at a big company. Benefits - very bad. Both of these are valid reasons to work at a startup, if you have a family to feed and care for. Sometimes any job is a good job, even if it's only temporary while you try to find the perfect gig. Edit to add: I've been in exactly this position. I took a dev job with a startup I knew was a complete loser, run by scam artists. But I had to put food on the table. Fortunately, I was only there about eight months before I landed a real job with a real company. The dodgy company imploded, exactly as I expected it to.
  • azag0 8y ago
    Well, sure, but those are not specific reasons to take a job in a startup, which the comment was about, those are reasons to take any job.
• foobiekr 8y ago
  I'd add one more to the "valid reasons": rehab You see guys working late at their little startup and maybe thing you should tell them it’s not going to happen. Because honestly for most of them it’s not. But... I want to make the case that it's OK. Even if it’s never happening they may be happy. If one stops viewing startups as $$$ opportunities and starts viewing them as rehab from the soulless corporate jobs full of soul-wilting mediocrity, politics, legacy, same old shit over and over, and backstabbing, then it might make a kind of sense to work at a startup instead. Take a pay cut and "try some different shit out" with a tightly-knit team. It’s a chance to work with things that are greenfield and/or new/different/experiment. Maybe it works. It’s a chance to not be bored. You aren’t wedded to it and don’t need to do it forever. Stay up late and code for awhile. Have pizza. Debug. Try. Care. The gotcha is if people focus on the IMGONNARICH including the management (where it translates to UNDERMARKETYOURCOMP, though maybe one doesn’t care). That’s poisonous but I think there are lots of options where this isn’t true. The more people I talk to outside the Bay Area, the more I encounter who I think are doing it right. A lot of them are not crazy, they don’t really think IMGONNARICH. They don’t end up in the FEELINGSWILLBECRUSHED state after it doesn't work (because, honestly, it doesn't). I like people and being around them. I love the feeling of a team pulling together and exploring the dark corners of a problem. So when a break is in order, the answer might be startup rehab. It's cheaper and better for your career than a full-on year off.
  • texmex20 8y ago
    I'm currently deciding whether or not to go with a startup for the first time and this post really resonated with me. Thanks!
• sweezyjeezy 8y ago
  > Learning - they will not have any formal training nor time to train you, so be prepared to self-learn. Disagree with this one - yes you will need to self-learn, but learning to self-learn is an invaluable tool in itself. You will learn to be extremely non-reliant on other people, and you will probably need to learn about parts of the stack you did not know about before, and fast. You might learn about project management or giving sales pitches. If you are thinking about starting your own company, you will learn a huge amount about how this happens, and what that means (I learned that I didn't want to do it for example!) I have learned a huge deal from my startup experience, probably double the rate I was learning at the bigger company I was working at before.