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Downsides to working at a tech giant

• lordleft 7y ago
  The simple truth is that working for the equity of an unproven start-up is a gamble, and statistically unlikely to pay off. And sadly more and more start-ups are undermining access to equity in shady ways. Not that one should never work for a start up on the hopes it breaks big, but we should also never forget that the successes are outliers, by a massive margin. Just understand the trade-offs of your decision and the probabilities involved with your decision.
  • thecleaner 7y ago
    I mean this is really not talked about more frequently. At this point, with all the shady tactics that most startups now pull, it would appear that only an idiot would really want to be swindled this way. Furthermore, this is not something that will go away since with less IPOs actually being successful and a mature tech market, hoarding the most value you can from your company seems to be in vogue these days.
    • dang 7y ago
      It's the leading response on HN to the topic, so I'd say it's talked about frequently.
    • chaos_emergent 7y ago
      > Furthermore, this is not something that will go away since with less IPOs actually being successful and a mature tech market You’re implying that less successful IPOs mean less liquidity options for private company employees. That increasingly isn’t the case as private markets opens up to sales of startup equity. Success is no longer the same as an IPO and the number of companies that are becoming successful and the cumulative value in those companies are both increasing
  • stoicShell 7y ago
    > statistically unlikely to pay off > probabilities involved with your decision While this is a good general approach to life IMHO as well — if you mean "be rational, not just emotional" and "work on your cognitive biases, seek objectivity" — it might also prove terribly counterproductive in this context. It would take a book or five but briefly: - you just can't use statistics when they say "95% fail", otherwise you just don't do startups, ever. With that mindset, joining an established company is more likely to "succeed" for you and maximize serenity. - another stat for you: most entrepreneurs fail "about twice" before making it, i.e. you'll probably fail 1-3 times for sure before entering the 5% of those who create a profitable business. Trick #1, thus: you can roll the dice several times (consider 2-5 years per "real try"). - most valuable ideas were either not identified (rarely) or not well executed (often) before someone eventually nails a product. You thus iterate quickly on the market (MVP, feedback, lean cycles, etc) to find your best fit curve, to hone in on the product that works. Chances are you'll find a local minimum, not "the best", you'll pivot, you'll reconsider, you'll maybe focus entirely on a subsystem, a 'feature' become 'product' — think how Docker, the company, appeared after the same name product. The reality is that a "fast scaling startup" a la California is rare and a moonshot most often — unicorns and all that — but a diligently conducted, ground, sustained effort to make a business growing organically to reach sustainability for you and a few others in 2-5 years is a realistic goal (but all things considered, e.g. probably not on your first try, likely 10 years after you began for the first time). I don't want to claim that it's easy to create a business, it's by far harder than working the jobs in most cases; but SMBs make up anywhere from 80 to 90% of our economies, they're the real bread and butter of our collective wealth, and these 'small' entrepreneurs are our true heroes. Not many of them make it big, and that's the 'gamble' you speak of, but it's not the only way, nor is it at all required to go down that path.
    • senordevnyc 7y ago
      You just can't use statistics when they say "95% fail", otherwise you just don't do startups, ever. With that mindset, joining an established company is more likely to "succeed" for you and maximize serenity. Actually, you certainly can do that. Most people do. And depending on what you're optimizing for, it seems pretty rational to me. Another stat for you: most entrepreneurs fail "about twice" before making it, i.e. you'll probably fail 1-3 times for sure before entering the 5% of those who create a profitable business. Trick #1, thus: you can roll the dice several times (consider 2-5 years per "real try"). Yes, but that's for founders, not employees. If "success" here is defined as "made more in risk-adjusted income as early-stage startup employee than I would have made as big tech company employee", I doubt any early stage employees are "successful". Every failed startup you participate in (2-5 years of your life gone) adds to the opportunity cost "debt" you have to make up once one succeeds.
• isseu 7y ago
  Survivorship bias
• adamnemecek 7y ago
  OK this is a lot of money, but you really wish you had been involved with palantir? Like the company whose product is fascism?
  • wrigby 7y ago
    To be fair, he actually did join Palantir a couple years later.
    • Apocryphon 7y ago
      So he ceded both the early options and the moral high ground? Lose-lose.
• throwaway2048 7y ago
  This is a lot like saying not buying a winning lottery ticket "Cost you" the jackpot. Opportunity cost is a very real thing, the vast majority of startups fail, or do not deliver any meaningful amount of equity to their employees (compared to the huge pay cut they take). This is a blog by a VC so its pretty obvious where his interests are aligned on this.
• williesleg 7y ago
  That's funny, now you write a blog.
• wrigby 7y ago
  There's a LOT of survivorship bias in this article. I personally worked in small companies (30 - 200 employees total) and startups (4 employees, including myself) before ending up at a big tech company, and I would have preferred to do this journey in the opposite direction - that is, work a few years at a BigCorp, and then work for a startup. Getting to see what works and what doesn't work in the context of a bigcorp is really valuable, and I think this post discounts that. A lot of technical mistakes I've made could have been remedied by simply seeing industry best practices, and there was no way I would have learned these things in school.
  • dmix 7y ago
    I just cringed at the thought of some BigCo software company project management tracking obsessive approach being pigeonholed onto a startup. Or the various other ‘processes’ that built up continually over the years at BigCo to minimize any sort of risk at the expense of speed and flexibility. The bigger benefit is working with really smart people. I think you’re over valuing the utility of a lot of the stuff that goes on at bigger firms, mostly out of necessity but also many times due to managers trying to justify their own existence in the company so they create ‘processes’. But also just merely the scale of the operation where highly automated fancy systems would be a complete waste of time for a startup with a small team and a short run way.
    • seattle_spring 7y ago
      GP comment never said "processes," so I'm not sure why you're focusing on that. They said "best practices", which is totally different.
      • dmix 7y ago
        Sorry I just think I wanted to go on a rant at all the big software co "project managers" that got hired into startups I worked at and ruined everything. That wasn't a proper response to OP's comment.
    • wrigby 7y ago
• evmar 7y ago
  His "cost me $200m" is of a $20b company, so by the math he's suggesting he would've had 1% of the company after it went through all the dilutions on its path to $20b. So yeah, if you have a chance to get nearly a cofounder's amount of equity in a company that will end up 20x a unicorn (which got that name because of how rare they are), then definitely go for it.
  • ng12 7y ago
    Not to mention it's 1% of a $20b company that has yet to go public and seems intent on staying private.
    • askafriend 7y ago
      They do biannual liquidity events internally. If you’re an employee you can sell your stock back to the company for cash.
      • sneak 7y ago
        Another big iff here: iff the true owners of the company permit you to do so. Most startups do not permit this, afaik, which further indicates what a longshot it was that he turned down an offer from one that does.
      • jzl 7y ago
        I think they only started doing that recently, after they stayed private so long that many employees started approaching the 10 year mark at which point their options would expire.
    • nytesky 7y ago
      Since Plantir is not going private for while, would his $200M be at all liquid in any way?
  • garry 7y ago
    If you spend enough time in tech, you meet a lot of people who have this kind of story. It's ridiculous, but not that rare.
• nostromo 7y ago
  Not buying Apple Stock in 1999 cost me $200M too. Not to mention what not picking those winning lottery numbers cost me...
  • konfusinomicon 7y ago
    Captain hindsight strikes again!
  • thaumasiotes 7y ago
    It might not be too late for the lottery numbers! I can't find it now, but I remember reading about a guy who was arrested in China for buying winning lottery numbers after they'd already been announced. The semi-surprising thing, to me, was that he did this more than once. Seems like a clear example of when you should take the win, and then leave in dignified haste.
    • baby 7y ago
      Most criminals get caught because they can’t stop getting bigger. Same with most diseases
      • toyg 7y ago
        After all, it worked once, why would it not work again...?
        • deogeo 7y ago
          "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - perhaps they are too sane for their own good :)
      • MiracleUser 7y ago
        You mean the criminals that we catch are the ones who cant help getting too big
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
• thecleaner 7y ago
  This vlog is more of a cheap advertisement for the "oh work for a startup it's great" nonsense school. I don't really understand why I would work in an environment where the pay is shit and the issued stocks can be re-classified or diluted or just taken away by lay-offs. Makes no sense.
  • Tempest1981 7y ago
    There is a medium-high probability of what you mentioned. But for many, it's about having a (tiny) shot at changing the world. It can be a thrill. You are also a bigger fish in a small pond - more responsibility, no bureaucracy. And usually the pay is enough to live modestly on.
    • thecleaner 7y ago
      > But for many, it's about having a (tiny) shot at changing the world. It can be a thrill. Honestly this seems like Silicon Valley bait for getting people for work in an abusive mismanaged environment. And I hope most people stopped drinking the Kool Aid. > You are also a bigger fish in a small pond - more responsibility, no bureaucracy This I can understand, I mean if you are talented enough that you don't want to jump through corporate hoops, then it makes sense. But I would only do it for a company that has competitors. Atleast that way if you do well and get mistreated (because some founder assumes that employees are sheep), then you can always take your talent to a competitor. Better if you have the ability to take others with you.
      • nikki93 7y ago
        There are a lot of envs that are not abusive. Having your workplace generalized and called abusive on the internet when it's not in real life, definitely feels abusive, however. I've seen people join abusive personal relationships with worse pay than startups, it happens with friendships and marriages everywhere. I've also seen very bad relationships between founders and teams that have caused lots of pain... The only way this is worthwhile is if you really believe in some product + are working with non-abusive people you trust and have known for a while + actually get paid enough to live a comfortable life. You can't join a startup thinking that the world owes you and will make you rich and the startup is how it will do that. But I just hope people reading your comment don't think that any small group of friends working on something is abusive to new folks that join.
• gunshai 7y ago
  Flipping the coin on survivor-ship bias here, I worked at a start up for 4 years that was going to "change the world". Came out with experience in all sorts of problems solved, projects implemented, customers reached, hell I even have some equity(not that it's worth much). I was young and wanted to work on problems I thought would have high impact, shit they did have large impact. Yet when I left finally as a jack of all and a master of none. I essentially had to start completely over.
  • thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > I was young and wanted to work on problems I thought would have high impact, shit they did have large impact. I read something to the effect that post-WWII, the British government decided the future was in three technologies: nuclear power, aviation, and computers. So they set out to make sure the UK took its rightful place as master of the future, slanting policy heavily towards those ideas. And wow, they were three for three on predictions. But somehow the place of the UK in those technologies isn't quite what they would have hoped.
    • pjc50 7y ago
      I'd be interested in seeing where you read that, because they absolutely failed to do anything useful about it almost all of the time. And at the expense of the rocket program too.
      • Tehdasi 7y ago
        Dunno about the government, but ARM and Rolls Royce have certainly done very well in their given fields. Curiously they are parts suppliers, not whole product manufacturers.
        • pjc50 7y ago
          RR are only alive because they're strategically important enough to warrant being bailed out several times. They were nationalised in the 70s, and looks like they're in trouble again: https://bdaily.co.uk/articles/2018/06/14/government-has-to-intervene-loss-making-rolls-royce-to-slash-4600-jobs https://bdaily.co.uk/articles/2018/06/14/government-has-to-i... ARM are one of the few fully homegrown tech success stories, along with Racal/Vodafone. Unfortunately the UK has a history of "technologically successful but economically unviable" projects, and isn't able to take advantage of the startup logic where investors cover the losses.
• cmdshiftf4 7y ago
  How many countless others have invested years of their lives, in exchange for equity and comparatively low pay, in promising-sounding startups only to see those companies fail? Should they be retroactively counting the money they could have had if they'd went to a more stable firm and had the same years of pay increases, bonuses, RSUs, etc. as a loss? This is hollow clickbait, but the author is clearly intelligent enough to know that hence why it's mainly focused on a youtube video which I'm presuming he's doing in the name of trying to build an audience and "clout" for himself with.
  • garry 7y ago
    This gives me a good idea for a video: How and when to quit. To be frank I also quit Palantir far earlier than maybe I should have. A story for another day. Thank you for the feedback though, I do appreciate it.
  • hellomyguys 7y ago
    > How many countless others have invested years of their lives, in exchange for equity and comparatively low pay, in promising-sounding startups only to see those companies fail? My intuition leads me to believe its more than the cumulation of these "I could have made $N" stories :)
• ogre_codes 7y ago
  My big mistake? Not being buddies with Peter Thiel in 2003. Don't make my mistake, go back in time and be buddies with Peter Thiel in 2003. Just the fact that he had a buddy who could cut him a check for $70,000 before his startup succeeded says a whole lot about the situation he was in. If you have a buddy who tosses around this kind of cash, your options are different from the options available to the overwhelming majority of us.
  • dpcan 7y ago
    Life is a lottery. I had the opportunity to take a job as lead programmer at a dot com that ended up becoming one of the biggest entertainment companies of the early 2000's and I passed for a job at a company that went bust in 6 months. The only lesson I got from this post is one I already know - don't regret your decisions because you can't see the damn future.
    • Apocryphon 7y ago
      The butterfly effect is also worth considering. There’s no telling that the current outcome is inevitable if you had chosen to participate.
      • cryptica 7y ago
        >> There’s no telling that the current outcome is inevitable if you had chosen to participate. True. Judging from the author's terrible decision-making abilities, the company would probably have gone belly up before it got to series A if the author had joined sooner as a director.
    • friendlybus 7y ago
      Going into the unknown can be guided by things other than luck and randomness. Did you figure out why you chose what you did?
  • dang 7y ago
    This is a shallow dismissal, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do, and especially not out of indignation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It's obvious from early in the article that Garry wasn't "buddies" with Thiel. He had just graduated, and a college friend was the connection. That means your point reduces to: people who go to elite colleges encounter opportunities as a result. No one disagrees with that, certainly not Garry, but it's a tangential, generic and therefore a weak response to the point of this article, which is about taking the opportunities that do come your way.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• csomar 7y ago
  > "Garry, "what are you doing at Microsoft? "You're wasting your time." > "Garry, I'm so sure this is the right thing for you, "you need to quit your job right now." How much does Pieter know the OP at the time? I'd probably be very wary working with someone with such a pitch.
• senordevnyc 7y ago
  This is such a weird post. Big fan of Garry, but I don't agree with most of this. 1. Just because it turned out that you would have made $200mm doesn't make it a mistake. If anything, that outsized return proves just how rare this kind of outcome is. If you look at the YC startups graduating every year, maybe 1 will ever generate $20mm for an early employee, let alone $200mm. Joining a new startup for that kind of outcome is stupid, even (especially?) if the founder is a big personality. 2. What is the bizarre pie chart in the middle of this post supposed to show? I'm very skeptical that it's actually based on data of any kind. 3. What is the line about it being hard to believe that any company other than Google is going to make money? Apple and Microsoft both earn more than Google, don't they? Bottom line, if you care about comp, you should know that no early stage startup of any kind offers an expected outcome remotely close to the big tech companies. Yeah, you might make a few million after working your ass off for many years. But realistically, you won't. But you would make close to that (or more) if you worked for the big tech companies for those same number of years, at a much lower risk. If you want to do the startup thing, do it as a founder, not an employee. Start with 30-100% of the equity, not 1% or 2%. Again, I'm a fan of Garry's, but I'm very skeptical of these posts by VCs trying to convince you it's a good idea to work at an early stage startup. Startups are great for them since they have a whole portfolio of companies to spread their risk across, but it's a shit deal for employees if you care much about comp. I don't envy the hassle of trying to hire at a startup when big tech companies literally pay 2-3x as more, but that's where we are. EDIT: apparently the graph I referenced in #2 is showing that the top 5 companies in the S&P500 (as of sometime back in 2018) are equal in market cap to the bottom 282: https://www.newworldadvisors.com/post/the-role-of-private-market-investments https://www.newworldadvisors.com/post/the-role-of-private-ma... Interesting, I guess, but pretty useless stat for the topic of this post. It also ignores about 200 companies in the middle that have huge market caps as well. Like Visa or Walmart or Disney. More here: https://disfold.com/top-us-companies-sp500/ https://disfold.com/top-us-companies-sp500/
  • DaniloDias 7y ago
    Could you recommend good reading from this guy? That article doesn’t reflect well on his judgment- the story, the decision to post this story- the idea that Peter Thiel literally told him to quit his job (after he answered the question of his current salary?!?)- none of it makes any sense to me.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• stiray 7y ago
  I really hate speeches like that. They are always told by one permile (or even less) of people that succeeded. The voice of all those that have lost are never heard. Same as blockchains, there are a few very loud people explaining how easy is to get rich, while those who gave them their money are rarely heard. I would laugh if it wouldnt be sad. An anecdote (just a detail, I am developer for almost 30 years, I know the industry from downside up), a month or two back, two greenhorns were fanatically explaining me, how they were on a talk of X billionaire that told them it was never so easy to be a billionaire as right now. You only need a 2k laptop. I laughed on inside, but today kids really believe stories like that. Sure, gauss will do its game and a few will get filthy rich. But lottery seems a better game to me.
  • garry 7y ago
    Maybe more poker than a lottery. A lot of luck, but there's still a little bit of skill in there. I appreciate the feedback though. I know this is just one voice of many, but it's also what I experienced. I think it's up to the viewer to decide if my experience is applicable. I think Paul Buchheit said it best: Advice is merely n=1 experience. This was my n=1.
    • sabas123 7y ago
      > I appreciate the feedback though. I know this is just one voice of many, but it's also what I experienced. I think it's up to the viewer to decide if my experience is applicable. How do you feel comfortable spreading your own experiance in a manner that purposefully tries to persuade opinions while you know your experiance is non-generalizable?
      • garry 7y ago
        Hm, is it truly totally non-generalizable? There are a lot of people who are very capable for whom the real risk is not taking risk at all. I meet them regularly. It's not the norm, but just because it applies to a set of the very skilled doesn't mean it is not generalizable. It just isn't applicable to all people. I admit that.
  • 7y ago
• artiscode 7y ago
  It took me a good number of years to realize that working for startups cost me years of being underpaid, working long hours and no real benefits in the end. I joined a corporation a couple of months ago and now I'm getting twice as much in compensation, plus financial incentives to actually stick around for a longer time. Survivorship bias is real.
• gameswithgo 7y ago
  On the bright side you didn't have to associate with Peter Thiel or Palantir.
  • anaisbetts 7y ago
    Seriously - not earning $200m in blood money by helping the US Government imprison and torture refugees is imho a Bullet Dodged
    • friendlybus 7y ago
      Got a link? I'm in the dark
    • chrshawkes 7y ago
      You realize they use React as well too right? Java and other tech helps them do the same thing.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• choiway 7y ago
  Is the $200M net of what he made as employee number 10? Also, Microsoft's stock is up 5x since 2003 so he would have done well by just staying put.
• OmarIsmail 7y ago
  For people trying to draw false equivalencies between buying Apple stock, buying lottery tickets, etc I think it's useful to look at the difference in circumstances and how _close_ Garry was to joining. If you compare this to Apple stock it would be like if you had the cash in your bank account and your stock broker called you up and said "You should buy 1000 shares of Apple stock. In fact, I'll just give you 1000 shares of Apple stock, there's no risk to you". And you said no. Or if someone said "I'll give you this lottery ticket, do you want it?" And you said no. Now obviously, not many people find themselves in such a situation. But if you're a developer this situation isn't _that_ uncommon. i.e. you have a friend from school, or a someone you used to work with that is starting something new and asks you to join. This percentage goes up the "better" school you go to and the companies you join. i.e. I'm sure a large percentage of MIT/Stanford CompSci grads and early Goog/FB engineers know someone within 1 to 2 degrees of separation that have started fairly large companies. Probably the most sure way to wealth (50M+) in modern times right now is to go to a good CompSci school, join a larger hot startup 200-500 people, spend a few years solving hard problems, getting a good salary and building a strong network. Then when one of your network starts a company joining that company as employee < 10. For 1-5M the surest way is to join a 1000+ employee tech company as an engineer.
  • pathseeker 7y ago
    >In fact, I'll just give you 1000 shares of Apple stock, there's no risk to you". And you said no. That's not the same. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
    • OmarIsmail 7y ago
      In the video Garry mentioned that Thiel offered him a check for his salary. Not quite no risk, but effectively so. He'd be able to go back to MS after 6 months/1 year no problem and would have only lost out on some vesting. He probably would be able to go back to a better position which often happens.
      • geofft 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
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• jerkstate 7y ago
  This is more of a humble brag than useful advice
  • geofft 7y ago
    It's also self-serving. There simply doesn't exist $200M for every software engineer out of college. But if this guy, a venture capitalist, can get a thousand more people to think they'll win the lottery, invests in all of them, and 999 go bust, he'll still make money on the one startup that succeeds by being in the right place at the right time.
    • garry 7y ago
      I started learning about startups only after I started reading Hacker News in 2006. I was an engineer for most of my career up until then. Reading Paul Graham's essays changed my life, and it changed the life of thousands of people I've met now known for over 10 years, as an alum, a partner at Y Combinator and now an investor. Guilty, it is self-serving. It's my business. But I also know from direct experience people who can make software are capable of building billions of dollars worth of value. I funded more than 200 companies worth over $36B now. And I started just like you, here, reading Hacker News.
      • geofft 7y ago
        Do you think that every reader of Hacker News can do that? Logistically, how would it work? I'm not disputing that "people who can make software are capable of building billions of dollars worth of value." Of course that's true. I'm disputing that everyone who makes software can individually capture even hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value.
• genS3 7y ago
  If anyone can write me a 1year salary check so I can create my startup I ll gladly frame your picture in my office.
• zainamro 7y ago
  VCs feel the need to constantly remind us that working at a startup is worth our time as a means to fuel the startup workforce. I understand that he was simply sharing an anecdote, but I found the conclusions and headline misleading even verging on dishonest. I've worked at an early stage bay area startup -- hiring progressively got harder and harder because candidates were becoming more aware of the career risks involved and the perks they'd be missing out on at big companies. In almost every case, you're working far more for less with very little structure -- if that's your cup of tea and have an obsession for the product, then go for it. If you're hoping to make $200 million, don't bother.
  • garry 7y ago
    Yeah, at the end of the post I tried to reference this: You probably shouldn't work at a startup for the money per se. The real value is short cycles with users and being able to make decisions and ship. This is also cautionary for startups. You have to be an actually rewarding place to work, otherwise there is literally no reason to work there.
    • zainamro 7y ago
      I agree -- ideally, it shouldn't be about the money. But, everything comes at a cost, and the cost to short cycles with users and more control over your product is quite literally thousands of dollars, endless perks, and a cushion not affordable by most startups. That's the classic early-stage startup dilemma I've experienced -- when left to the decision of good potential hires, I've noticed a disproportionate number not willing to forgo all of that. Big companies are only getting larger and the requirement for startups to outcompete them on everything besides money and perks is higher than ever. At the very least, I think startups should be fully transparent about this instead of waving equity in front of you as though it will be worth anything.
    • rsanek 7y ago
      To me it comes off as a bit contradictory to say "you shouldn't work at a startup for the money" when the title of your post and video prominently feature the "$200 million" figure.
• mkettn 7y ago
  So he's $200M in debt now?
• cj 7y ago
  I think it's interesting part of this is that there was literally no bad decision in Garry's situation. 1) Stay with Microsoft, get promoted over the years end up a multi-millionaire. 2) Join Palantir and end up a multi-millionaire. It sure does illustrate the meaning of being in the right place at the right time (e.g. starting a career in the early 2000's working as a designer / engineer in a tech hub).
• ericjang 7y ago
  A lot of the comments are rightly pointing out the logical fallacy of survivorship bias in the article, but I don't think Garry intended to say that "choosing to work for Palantir in 2003 was the expected-wealth maximizing career decision and that's why you should join a startup". I think the title and lede, "working for Microsoft cost me $200M" is intended to be provocative and encourage clicks on the article, while providing an interesting example of a "road not taken" in Garry's professional life. The dollar magnitude is unusual, but the feeling of regret is relatable to us all, even if you took the opposite bet that Garry did (e.g. turning down a LinkedIn or Coinbase offer in 2016 to work at a failed startup instead). Since this article is on the top of HN today, I'd say Garry succeeded at sharing his personal anecdote. On the content itself (startup vs. bigco), he is right about "you only can make a fraction of the value you create if you don't own equity" and "If you don't work on your dreams, someone will put you to work on theirs." But then it follows that everyone should start their own company if they are capable, or work for a bigco if they are not. The current SV labor market reflects this reality as well. It's possible to sell some top-tier talent on taking less than 1% equity to work on your dreams, but they must really believe in the founder's vision and the founder's ability to provide a working environment that complements what the employee is not able to de-risk by themselves.
  • garry 7y ago
    Apologies for the clickbait— I'm trying to build a YouTube following and having some collaborations drop this week. Just trying to make it work on that platform. The values and what is acceptable on different social networks is so different! I didn't really think it would appear on here, so tuning it for different audiences is hard.
    • ericjang 7y ago
      I, for one, thought it was an excellent title. It's always fascinating to read about the eccentric Peter Thiel, and this gave me some inspiration for how to structure my own future writing. Thanks :)
    • dang 7y ago
      We've tuned the title above for this audience. If there's a better one that represents the point of the article, happy to change again.
• draklor40 7y ago
  Work in a startup only if it is yours or you have a significant stake in it, or if you have no other options. The payoff for "working" at a startup with respect to the risk is IMHO simply not worth it.
• cryptica 7y ago
  >> He asked, "How much a year do you make at Microsoft?" >> It was $72,000 a year, really the lowest of the low coming right out of college. He got out his checkbook and wrote me that check. >> "Cash this check, quit your job. This is a zero risk opportunity for you." >> I said, "Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to Level 60 next year." Wow. This is probably the most impressive combination of arrogance and stupidity that I've ever read about or witnessed in my life.
  • geofft 7y ago
    It's the safe and rational choice. I went to work at a startup after college and the company ran out of money in three years and valued my equity at zero. I absolutely would have been better off financially working for Microsoft. That Palantir worked out is hindsight bias. There's no way he could or should have expected it to succeed at the time.
  • jamestimmins 7y ago
    I don't think this is fair. In part, because valuations are so high today, but 2004 was totally different. This was shortly after the bubble burst. An enormous number of people went to interesting startups and lost their jobs/equity when the companies went under. Nowadays, startups have been de-risked quite a bit and there's obviously a lot of money if you operate well, but at the time, a career in Microsoft probably seemed extremely rational.
• Apocryphon 7y ago
  The response to this post is startling. Would it received the same reception had it been written and posted a decade ago, I wonder. Has HN gotten more jaded- and mature?
• timboisvert 7y ago
  If you have a family or you have a chronic illness, working at a big company -- at least in the US -- generally means better health benefits. I'd wager that health insurance alone is the most compelling reason why many people choose big companies over startups.
  • sjg007 7y ago
    I mean if this is true we'd expect to see more startups out of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Maybe the stats bear that out I dunno. I do know that the ACA has been credited by lots of folks as the reason they were able to start a company.
• zadkey 7y ago
  It seems like he has found the problem with companies. "Even though these companies pay a lot of money, in real terms, what software is doing in society is creating a lot more value than what they pay you. Google's pure profit per employee is actually $1.6 million per year, after all costs." "If you're in the engineering, product, design, marketing, sort of the builder's side of that organization, you've got to know that you're creating a lot more value than that, possibly 10 times, maybe 100 times that value, and the only way you can really access that is by owning equity, and that means either being a founder or working at an early stage startup that gives significant equity. " In other words, companies either purposefully or absentmindedly fail to pay regular employees anywhere close to their real value. This is the real problem. Not getting in a profitable startup early on isn't the problem. It's the mindset that it's somehow okay to pay employees very small fractions of what they are really worth.
  • modwest 7y ago
    Well said. You’re also describing a fundamental tension between capitalism and socialism.
    • pjlegato 7y ago
      Yes, but not in the way I imagine you intended. In capitalism, perhaps 80% of the value you create as an employee is captured by others (see sibling comment.) You can also opt out -- by becoming self employed, by joining a commune or collective, or by becoming a vagrant. In socialism, the percentage of value you create captured by others is nearly 100%, and opting out is illegal -- in many socialist countries, even talking about opting out gets you sent to a "re-education camp."
      • modwest 7y ago
        No, this argument you’ve made is question-begging. What I was referring to has more to do with the labor theory of value https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value I understand why I got downvoted, it seemed like a political drive-by comment. I should’ve explained what I was referring to in the first place. But this implication that socialism somehow naturally leads to slavery/internment in ways capitalism doesn’t is a canard.
• webkike 7y ago
  Damn, sorry you didn’t make $200m profiting off a company that makes ICE more efficient
• catalystic 7y ago
  I feel a lot of the folks here are focusing on the wrong parts here. The $200M loss was a cheap way of getting user attention, but hey it worked! The core of what he was trying to convey was the sooner you get to understand real user / customer problems the better off you'll be in life as an entrepreneur. He stayed away from this in his early days as he opted for stability and that he seems to regret.
  • hellomyguys 7y ago
    > The core of what he was trying to convey was the sooner you get to understand real user / customer problems the better off you'll be in life as an entrepreneur. And sometimes you're better off learning this at an actual company that ships products to millions of people than grinding away at a startup that won't exist in a year or two, with options that are worth nothing and a salary much lower than you'd get at a more established company. And there's a good chance the startup never ends up shipping anything of value. Startup vs Big Co isn't always a no brainer, lots of factors to consider.
  • minimaxir 7y ago
    > The $200M loss was a cheap way of getting user attention, but hey it worked! Many Hacker News submissions get flagged to death for such tactics alone.
    • catalystic 7y ago
      I feel they should be as well. If left unmonitored, this can lead to spammy / crappy experience. In this case the individual speaking is a well known and experienced figure who has a lot of insights to offer, hence I feel this made the cut.
    • dang 7y ago
      True, but the ones where upvotes win the tug-of-war stay afloat, and usually (well, sometimes at least) that's because there's countervailing substance in the article. In such cases we eventually notice the titles and change them to stick to the site guidelines—preferably using representative language from the article itself. I've attempted to do that above. In this case the countervailing substance is at least partly that Garry has had a close relationship with HN over the years. And vice versa.
• friendlybus 7y ago
  Why did he value Microsoft over Their? There is something in his character that held in higher regard one decision over the other, there's no exploration of what caused the conflict in the first instance and a likelihood it will happen again. What should he have done with himself at that point and all future similar points where he has opportunity again? This post seems to be more about signalling than lessons learned. Better luck next time!
  • garry 7y ago
    I'll try to make a longer post about this. It's hard to get it right in 5 minutes of video.
    • friendlybus 7y ago
      Seems like a good topic to talk on, soothing the burn on missed opportunity, perceived or otherwise.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• keithwhor 7y ago
  The pessimism in this thread really bothers me. I’ve read anecdotes on entrepreneurship being on the decline, but it pains me to read so many negative takes on startups. We’re actively training our young people to avoid taking risks, and it’s going to fuck us — especially if some of those young people have the ambition be early employees at, say, a startup that takes on climate change in a big way. Look — the fact that Garry knew Peter Thiel when he was 23 is nuts. When I was 23 I was broke and living with my parents in the suburbs outside Toronto. I didn’t even personally know any other software engineers. I think many people here would relate more similarly to that position. Just because he won the social lottery early, doesn’t mean his lessons are wrong. I got a junior engineering job in Toronto when I was 23, at a startup, making less than Garry. $57.5k CAD. I worked on my open source portfolio and next took a job in another startup in SF for $120k USD the next year. That startup failed. I took a brief job at a biotech startup after being turned down by Google and Facebook (twice). After three months I quit that startup to run the company I’m still running today, four years later. Today, we’re very fortunate to work with some of the largest companies in SV. Reflecting on this: I think a better story Garry could’ve told is not that he missed out on $200M, but that startups basically built his network so that — years later — he’d be a prominent VC working with Alexis Ohanian, funding the next round of exciting companies. $200M is an eye-catching clickbait headline, but not the real substance. The real substance is — how the fuck did he meet Peter Thiel at 23, and how can somebody recreate that? In the story I just told about myself, I got really lucky as a function of working at startups. I didn’t really make any money doing it. But a whole bunch of interesting things happened: - The first job in SF I worked at introduced me to a product manager who went to school with Aston Motes, employee #1 at Dropbox who would eventually be an investor in the company I run today. - The founder of that first failed company introduced me to AngelPad, the accelerator that gave me my first $50k in financing. The fact I stuck it out as an engineering lead at a failing startup helped: I gave it my all. (Aside: YC turned me down. Twice.) - The biotech company I worked at was founded by two early SpaceX employees, one who would also become an investor later on. Don’t work at startups to make $200M. Work at startups because you’ll work with people who have risk profiles that are much more likely to generate outsized returns as a group. You’ll have the opportunity to join or create a community of high-performing folks that, in aggregate, outperform anything you can do on your own. Maybe you’ll be the CEO one day, maybe not, but no matter what you are very likely to come out ahead if you apply yourself. And don’t let the comments here dissuade you. Startups are hard, but they kick ass. I’ve cried myself to sleep some nights — as both an employee and CEO — and still wouldn’t change the experience for anything. I’m a better person because of what I’ve been through.
• bitcurious 7y ago
  I think the real lesson here is that if a friend that believes in you to the point of offering you $70k simply to remove money as a decision factor for you, try and remove money from the decision.
• davidw 7y ago
  My uncle had a jeep he called his million dollar jeep, because he cashed out of some Intel stock in the early 80ies to buy it.
  • sjg007 7y ago
    I refer to my student loans as my BMW M...
• alecbenzer 7y ago
  > The real reason you should consider working at a startup or starting your own: It's not the money I think this is correct, but makes the post's title seem really click-baity. I think expected financial upside is exactly where Big Tech unequivocally wins over startups (esp. joining and not founding), so it seems weird to frame the post around money.
  • garry 7y ago
    Sorry, I made this post for YouTube originally, and didn't expect it to show up on HN. :-)
  • peteey 7y ago
    It doesn't seem correct at all. Money is very much a factor. To prove, How many people here would show up tomorrow if their company stopped paying them? How many people would join a startup for less pay without any stock offers? I suspect the answer to both will be equal to the number polled.
    • alecbenzer 7y ago
      Not sure I understand the point you're trying to make... Money is a factor but it's not the thing that should draw you to a startup -- expected money is better at Big Tech. A startup is the right choice only once you start to consider non-money factors.
• thrownaway954 7y ago
  The "could of", "would of", "should of" game... Ah.... how I love to play thee. But wait... let's go further and play the "what if" game as well!!! What if... you took the job and moved out to Palo Alto only to trip walking up the stairs on your first day of work to break your spine and be confined to a wheel chair the rest of your life??? Point being... life turns out the way it does for a reason and you never know what events will unfold or are avoided cause of the decisions you choose. Be happy that you are alive and have what you have. Life isn't always about getting or having more things.
  • garry 7y ago
    This is a good reminder and I agree with this. By the end of the video my point is: Try to make stuff for other people, and a smaller place generally lets you do that. That is the true reward.
• justicezyx 7y ago
  Once a while a celebrity showcasing their true intellectual capability, and everyone found that they owe their success mostly to luck more than anything else...
• 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 7y ago
  Most people who have been around tech for the past 15 years have stories like this. Maybe they didn't have check's written, but had opportunities to join firms that later boomed huge. Also the title is super-clickbaity. Poor form.
• dkarras 7y ago
  If I guessed just 6 simple numbers correctly for the powerball I'd be a millionaire!
• leowoo91 7y ago
  Well, it did cost me 200M not working for a giant.. Edit: I don't understand getting downvoted here, does someone think that it can not vary for a person?
• eaguyhn 7y ago
  I worked at four startups and gained so much experience at each. Even with the long long hours I really liked it. Three of the four failed - the fourth one eventually succeeded after 15 years and I received about $4,000 for my original shares as employee #3 (I can relate to the point in one comment about being a founder instead of an employee).
  • milofeynman 7y ago
    The founders entire job early on is to convince schmucks that they'll be rich if the idea succeeds while simultaneously making sure to give away as little in stock as possible. It takes people like Peter Thiel to pull that off
    • eaguyhn 7y ago
      True, that. I was a schmuck that saw his equity diluted with every angel round in the one successful startup. But I'm still glad I went through it all. People can take this as a cautionary tale to make sure your equity is protected or from an optimistic view that, at least, you gained something other than abundant riches :)
• droppedpkt8080 7y ago
  This is a great post, but it was a choice he made. Either way really entertaining
• malisper 7y ago
  If you want a good reason to not join Google in particular, Google does not train their managers. When I was interviewing with Google, I interviewed around 8 friends of mine that worked or previously worked at Google. Lack of management training was a something that every one of them brought up. Two of them had even been managers at Google and basically said "yeah, we weren't trained". The way it's been described to me is that most managers at Google are TLMs - Tech Lead Managers. They are responsible primarily for the tech lead part and are only coincidentally responsible for the management part. Some teams do have separate Tech Leads and Managers, but for most teams, it's a single person.
  • jldugger 7y ago
    Nobody in tech trains managers. The only difference AFAICT, is that google spreads those underprepared managers across more people. The only place I hear stories of managers with 50 directs is from Google.
    • adamt 7y ago
      That is extremely rare at google these days. The average tech manager has more like 6-8 directs.
  • marcyb5st 7y ago
    Googler here. I'm not sure when you interviewed or your friends worked at Google, but nowadays managers undergo some training (I can't tell you how thorough that is, because I didn't do it yet). Also, right now, I believe the norm is to have managers and TLs as separate positions, even in small teams (like mine, 5 people in total).
    • malisper 7y ago
      Over half of them worked for Google within the past two years. This is across New York, San Francisco, and Mountain View. One of them said they had a friend that wanted to become a manager and they were made a manager just like that.
• asdfman123 7y ago
  He met Peter Thiel before he got so famous. It's important to be in an industry that's about to blow up. Getting access to future billionaires is much easier than access to current ones. I agree with the sentiment that you can do a lot more in smaller companies, which is why I work at one that doesn't happen to be a startup. However, thus far I've received no $200 million checks. Working in Silicon Valley might have felt like fighting the status quo a few years back, but right now, to me, an outsider, it feels a whole lot like the status quo. With respect to the author, I do not believe this is legitimate life advice but instead is mostly humblebragging.
  • beardedman 7y ago
    I think quite a few people on here think this. Funny enough - I'm pretty sure the article would have garnered a lot of criticism if it were authored by someone else.
• beardedman 7y ago
  Articles like this irritate me more than anything else. Why? The ENTIRE paradigm is based on $. Article could just as easily have been written as "Working for Microsoft allowed me to be a better father". And strange a VC would invest in a (very socialist) statement as "Google's pure profit per employee is actually $1.6 million per year, after all costs.": easy buy in, very low practical value. There are very tangible reasons for wage differences.
• BooneJS 7y ago
  Joining a startup and missing out on entry-level wages seems like an appropriate trade-off. It's the same reason most people go to college after high school - the opportunity cost is quite low and you can learn a lot of things quickly.
  • oliverx0 7y ago
    This is a very good point. On a more general note, the younger you are, generally the more risk you can take. And in this case specifically, entry-level wages can be only slightly lower than Big Co (not always), but what you learn and the risk you take can make it worth it. If it doesn’t work out, you can always join a bigger company that will value what you learned.
• actuator 7y ago
  I joined a startup right out of school, I wouldn't do it any other way even now but the picture he paints is far from reality for most. I learned a lot, had a lot of ownership and was involved with the product from a user level itself which I loved and even made my skill set very diverse. But the 200 million line is just outright rare. The equity I was given was pretty low and even though the startup is a leader in its space the equity growth hasn't materialized to any noteworthy level and I can't exit right now. I would have made much more at any FAANG level of companies in RSUs by now like my friends over there have done. This is why even now while discussing offers with companies I am interested in, I don't give ESOPs much value in the package.
• khazhoux 7y ago
  Like Garry, I wholeheartedly encourage every engineer to work at a startup for .00x% equity (unless you're employee #1, and you can ask for a whopping 1%). The founders and VCs will have hundreds or thousands times more upside than you (and they'll have preferential shares, etc), but at least you'll be In This Together (in that you're working "together" to try to help the founders+VCs join the Billionaire class -- a noble effort indeed!).
  • msoad 7y ago
    A friend of mine who's helping a VC firm has told me for the right talent they are doing better these days. Like 10% equity for founding engineer + 200k salary. With those numbers I can totally consider a startup job.
• sbilstein 7y ago
  The safest risk reward ratio in terms of career development, networking, and financial gain is to work at a startup that is in their explosive growth stage. You will likely get shares valued at some multiple of 100k. Make sure you understand the business and feel confident they will IPO or exit. The scaling needs, technically or culturally, of a company at this stage are unlikely to be available at a risky early startup that may never see massive growth. At a BigCo, unless you are in infra or deep in the technical stack, many of these scaling problems will have been solved for you. In terms of networking, you will get to learn from grizzled engineers who were around in the early days, veterans from big companies who have come in to fix the shit that is wrong, and have a front seat to these cultures colliding. Not only that, you'll be surrounded by soon to be angel investors. I spent one year working at a pre-IPO unicorn and it was highest in ROI for my career as an entrepreneur later and the IPO made me enough cash to not be sweating my rent all the time.
  • patrickxrivera 7y ago
    Agreed. I think this type of company (high-growth and 2-3 years away from IPO) is a much better first job out of school than working at a big tech company. Sure, your cash comp will be 10 - 25% lower, but if you want to start a company someday, this type of experience is on average much more valuable than big tech co. I've been working at a high-growth company for the past year and as OP mentioned, have learned from early engineers, experienced engineers from big tech co's, and started leading medium sized projects six months in. I'm on the growth engineering team so I've also been able to learn about best practices in growth from people who led teams at big tech co's. From this experience, I now feel ready to be an early engineer at a startup or build my own thing. I was able to get the benefit of working with the best people from big tech co's but in a high-growth environment where there are more problems to be solved than people to solve them. For this reason, working at a high-growth unicorn is seen as just as valuable as a big tech co. If not more, for product/growth eng roles.
  • stevenwliao 7y ago
    What are the right metrics to look at for growth?
• Justsignedup 7y ago
  Building a network is an important thing... But let's not kid ourselves: Most startups offer very little % for equity. And that equity often amounts to next to nothing. Look at Uber or WeWork. Most founders end up as assholes. Some are great, some care, some what to learn. Learning as a manager/founder is someone else's job. Stress is real. People do shut down from stress. If you are a founder, that's great. If you are like first or 2nd employee, and end up as CTO and such, that's great. If you can get a few % equity. Overall most startups you work at you will make just barely what you'd make at Google or Microsoft (I'm taking post exit). During 2003 engineers didn't have the leverage we do now. Right now a junior engineer can make close to 200k+ in total compensation at a large firm. The work is different, but definitely more money most startups will ever give you.
  • askafriend 7y ago
    > And that equity often amounts to next to nothing. Look at Uber What are you talking about? Everyone who was early Uber is a millionaire now.
    • darkwizard42 7y ago
      Sure, but they spent 6+ years getting underpaid and could have made much more at a Google/FB whose stock value has tripled with maximum liquidity throughout that time. FYI if you joined Uber after 2014 your shares are currently underwater aka you have LOST money on your initial grant... your actual total compensation over the years went DOWN...
• pinopinopino 7y ago
  I feel the comments in the threads are a bit too sour. Sure, you probably will not make 200 million dollars or even 20 million dollars. I am going to make that a bit stronger: It is highly likely you will end up broke as fuck. But so what? Starting something up is really fun and if you are young (20 something) and don't have many obligations yet, just go for it. It doesn't matter if you fail. You will learn a broad skill set, which will be useful in the rest of your life. It will build character. Even if you fail, it is not a worthless experience.
  • Apocryphon 7y ago
    Not everyone has the luxury of failing. Everyone’s cost-benefit analysis is different, and one takeaway from this discussion is that founders need to stop skewing the cost by depreciating the shares non-founder early stage employees get.
• ojbyrne 7y ago
  Another upside to working at a tech giant: you make enough to be an accredited investor. Which means you can do angel investments, which is an arguably better way (Than being an early employee) to get those “outsize” returns from startups.
  • niravs 7y ago
    good luck with getting into anything good with insane amounts of time & effort. capital is cheap.
    • ojbyrne 7y ago
      How is the luck different from the luck involved with being an early employee? Labor is cheaper than capital.
• justapassenger 7y ago
  > The two things I really like about working for smaller places or starting a company is you get very direct access to users and customers and their problems, which means you can actually have empathy for what's actually going on with them, and then you can directly solve it. That cycle is so powerful, the sooner you learn how to make that cycle happen in your career, the better off you'll be. I think that author is confusing ability to get access vs being forced to do it. At big company, there's so many other things and layers, that you can easily spend your whole career without touching anything related to users. But, you can also just work on directly customer facing parts - that gives you direct access to customer problems. Just be careful - there's more problems that you can imagine, the bigger the company and customer base.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  >Working for Microsoft cost me $200 million And not playing the Mega Millions Jackpot lotto cost me $1.6 billion. I had the opportunity to pick the winning numbers, but instead, I didn't even play! What a chump I was. Don't make my mistakes.
  • unnouinceput 7y ago
    Well, if is to use your analogy then you had the opportunity to turn down somebody that gave you free money to play the lottery, because that's what Thiel did to Garry, it gave him a check that covered one year of what Microsoft paid him.
    • vchak1 7y ago
      The analogy does not hold because you still lose time, which is IMHO the most valuable commodity because it represents opportunity cost. In built into a lot of these discussions is a major assumption - that a startup is a "typical" silicon valley startup with the goal of being a massively valued entity. That changes the risk structure dramatically. If instead you tried to bootstrap something into a 2M annual revenue enterprise with minimal (say 200k) worth of investment, the equation changes quite significantly. I'd assert that in that situation, playing the role of "early tech adopter" into new problem spaces dramatically reduces the risk as well.
• streetcat1 7y ago
  The real issue with startups is that there is currently no efficient secondary market for startup equity. This makes the game much riskier than it should be since: 1) There is no way to diversify for founders and employees. 2) There is no exit for employees. 3) It gives VC monopolistic power. There were attempts to solve this (e.g. ICO) but those were misused. Once such a market exists, it would be much easier to join/leave this ecosystem.
  • codingslave 7y ago
    This is secondary, the real issue is employees don't get enough equity to even sell it on a secondary market.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  > [at a startup] you get very direct access to users and customers and their problems, which means you can actually have empathy for what's actually going on with them, and then you can directly solve it. I'm calling BS on this. The empathy fairy doesn't bless you just for working at a startup, just like it doesn't disappear when you work for big tech. You have to actually create and nurture empathy yourself. You have to engage in the work: learning about the products, all the people you've never met that build things you didn't know existed, how all of it eventually becomes a thing for a customer to use, and how to make it better. In that process, you learn to care about things you didn't before. Can you "directly solve" a problem for customers in a big company? Sometimes. But more often, you have to work together with other people to solve it. You have to use initiative, talk to people, coordinate things, lead initiatives. It's more work. And because it's more work, it's even more rewarding when you solve something. You may have even improved a lot more than the original problem in the process.
• bartread 7y ago
  Garry, where do you get that figure of $1.6 million per employee per year in profit for Google, please? In Q2 2019 Alphabet (GOOGL), Google's parent, made $9.81 billion in profit[1]. At the end of the previous quarter, they reportedly had 103,549 employees[2]. Doing the division yields $88,654 profit per employee in Q2 2019. Doing the naive thing of multiplying that by 4, which I know will be somewhat off, gives $354,615 profit per employee per year. That's a tidy sum, but only a quarter of what you claimed so, again, can you tell us where you got that figure, please? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/25/google-alphabet-earnings-shares-q2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/25/google-al... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/29/tech/alphabet-q1-earnings/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/29/tech/alphabet-q1-earnings...
  • Hermel 7y ago
    He probably confused profits and revenue.
    • bartread 7y ago
      Could be: Google's annual revenue for 2018 was $136.22 billion[1], which yields $1,315,512 revenue per employee. Controlling for employee growth from 2018 to 2019 (they only had 85,050 employees at the end of Q1 2018[2]) and assuming linear growth and revenue earn through the year, that gives an average number of employees of 94,300 over the year (I realise this is an oversimplification), and revenue per employee of $1,444,546. That's still lower than Garry's quoted figure of $1.6M, although it's close, and possibly close enough. The reason I queried it is that he goes out of his way to make the point about profit: "Google's pure profit per employee is actually $1.6 million per year, after all costs." (Emphasis mine.) [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/29/tech/alphabet-q1-earnings/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/29/tech/alphabet-q1-earnings...
      • garry 7y ago
        You're absolutely right — I annualized net revenue which I interpreted as "net" but certainly is not profit. I've corrected this and will put a note about it. I'm sorry for the mistake. I'll do better next time.
• jarjoura 7y ago
  For all the startup founders and VCs in this conversation, you are cheap motherf*ckers. When I read that engineers and employees prefer FAANG companies because they pay better, I want to remind you that it wasn't always like this. 10-15 years ago startups paid way better than big tech. Big Tech rewarded you by getting to specialize on problems and working at scale. The reason FB and Google pay well is because when they were startups, they were paying WELL! Let me ask you all this, if you could make the same (or more) money working at a startup that you make working at a big tech company for 4 years, would you pick the startup? The answer should be based on what kind of working style and project you prefer, not finances.
  • paxys 7y ago
    > The reason FB and Google pay well is because when they were startups, they were paying WELL 100% this. Most people didn't work at Google or Facebook back in the day in the hopes of winning the lottery. Those companies paid really well, had the best benefits, culture, and mostly they were working on a ton of challenging problems unlike most of the "giant tech companies" of the time.
  • partyboat1586 7y ago
    This hits home. I worked at 3 different small startups in my career. The first two failed and I left the last one for finances. I started contracting because it pays better but it's sapping my soul. I loved each one of those startups. I loved the people, the creative freedom and even just the vibe of trust and determination in the office. I loved the parts closer to the end even more because of the thrill of being on the edge. I didn't mind liquidation because I have a good recruiter and I was always ready to get back on the horse. Now I contract out days for an agency. I estimate predefined tasks and then execute them. I talk nicely and calmly to clients who don't do me the same courtesy. I work only with the technology I have the most experience with and don't have opportunity to try new tech. But I have to pay my rent and I have to start putting money away to eventually get on the property ladder so working at a startup isn't really an option for me any more.
  • opportune 7y ago
    Absolutely this. A lot of startups these days skimp by hiring sub-FAANG SWEs with less than 5 yoe, and it shows in their products. Lack of product maturity, bad engineering (worst horror story I’ve heard recently is Wayfair), resume driven development / over-engineering / cargo culting, huge teams to work on simple features. All so they can hire two middle-skill 22 year olds instead of a skilled 35 year old. If you’re able to work at FAANG it is just bad financial sense to work at most startups unless you want to play the lottery. If a place offered 40-50hr/week, $250k salary, 15% target bonus AND generous RSUs/options it would be able to compete with FAANG. But not a lot of places do that, and those that do are often the very bubbly ones with uncertain futures
• m3kw9 7y ago
  Is ok bud, if we all brought MSFT early we would have all been millionaires
• spectramax 7y ago
  Besides the main points raised (and debated here), there a few things that are off-putting to me: 1) This whole thing smells like a PR stunt to get his name out, starting with a click-bait highly attractive title "How I lost $200M". 2) The production value of his video to get the message out. Why? Why put so much effort into that video? You know, you could just write a blog post. 3) I am cynically presuming Garry wants his name to get out there as much as possible as a VC that he is today. Besides that, this whole thing smells of humble-brag. Really off-putting approach. Sorry, Garry, but this is how I feel.
• chrshawkes 7y ago
  Why is this guy trending on HackerNews? To boost his channel?
• tlbsofware 7y ago
  What if these aren’t stars that are disappearing but instead the appearances and disappearances of wormholes that are either allowing us to see to another place in space where that star is or perhaps a wormhole blocking where that star previously was for us and we are now looking into another section of space where a star is not?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• robocat 7y ago
  This is cherry picking. We all have heaps of extermely valuable opportunities: the trick is to pick the right one. He is using hindsight to pick the best. However we don’t have that future information when an opportunity passes us by. Any longtime HN readers had the bitcoin opportunity pass us by. Much better since it doesn’t require hideous life-force investment (our own life time). $200MM also includes an implicit lie that he would still own 1% after dilution. Garry: what equity were you offered?
• mc3 7y ago
  The question is what is Expectation(Total Wealth) working at tech Giant vs. joining a typical startup (with no crystal ball bias). Esp. given that most single peeps working at tech Giant can live in a slave box eating supermarket food and save most of their income and invest it. They can probably use their income for leverage build a property investment portfolio, which if the rent covers the mortgage, they will still have savings to invest in stocks. Now take into account the $10M lifestyle and the $200M lifestyle, and for a hacker who isn't into 1st class flights, balls and cristal (see what I did!) I think 10M would be enough money to retire in a humble house somewhere in suburbia and hack on side project, even with a family to support.
• scottlegrand2 7y ago
  I've had a simple rule for the past 20 years. If you offer me less than 1% of the startup I'm not interested in working with you because I am a plebe if I accept that offer. It hasn't failed me yet. OTOH I chose to pursue a PhD in biochemistry rather than be the third member of the Yost group and that led to 3D Studio. So I will boil my heuristic down to TLA or BigCo. I'd miss out on the next Facebook or Google with such a heuristic but what are the chances I would get an opportunity to join one of those companies at the ground floor in the first place? in recent years, there was one startup bought out at a modest price for which I might have made epsilon more money being their CTO but it would have come with sleepless nights and anxiety at no additional cost.
• mmmBacon 7y ago
  I worked at 4 startups in my youth. All were formed at the tail end of the dot com crash. Of the 4, 2 outright failed and were totally miserable places to work. At one I even had to work for minimum wage until they realized they violated our exempt status. Of the other 2, one was acquired for peanuts. I got a check for $1200. The last company went public. They had had huge funding (almost $500M) and had had several down rounds. Due to this, management was extremely miserly with stock. My stock was briefly worth $250k until the lockout expired and quickly sank to $120k and got as low as $45k. Looking back on it, I totally wasted my time there. The pay wasn’t the worst of it, I encountered many tyrants who made things even worse. Now as an older person I have many business ideas but I am unable to take the risk due to having to support a family. I need to make a certain income to cover expenses. The only way I would join a startup is as a founder and at that I’d have to be able to pay myself enough to keep things going for my family.
• Roritharr 7y ago
  Having spent the past 15 years chasing the dream, working as a Founder and a couple of C-Level positions while not really amassing any sort of wealth I can't recommend enough to do your financial due diligence when accepting trade-offs for chances to reach your life-goals. I'm close to 32 and have two kids now, so the financial pressure is there, while having accepted relatively low pay in high cost-of-living locations for roughly a decade left me without a semi-large cushion to reorient my career or even take a sabbatical to spend with my kids. This also limits my options, just leaving for another country for a potentially higher paying job with lower job security is a risk that might be too large... Use your twenties wisely, i'd recommend first amassing a cushion at a FANG or freelancing if possible, before trying to "learn the art" at a startup. There surely is a great many things I can teach now, having picked and fought and won my own battles for quite some time now, but there is a high chance it leaves you and your loved ones in an unenviable position compared to just grinding away in your FANG Job.
  • mancerayder 7y ago
    Do startups even bother hiring people not in their 20's or early 30's, though? 32 is one thing, one if you're 35, 38, 40? You come back with your financial cushion, ready to hit the startup circuit, but who will actually hire an older guy (or gal) with salivating 25 year-old grads waiting around the corner?
    • Roritharr 7y ago
      35-40 wouldn't be an issue at our startup, but we can't afford corporate salaries/benefits. That's the hit you would have to take, accepting a lower salary again, which most can't combine with a less comfortable environment where your responsibilities are less narrowly defined and many of the support structures that a large org can offer are not in place yet.
• throwaway423342 7y ago
  Don't be an employee at a startup unless they pay you really well. If you want to play the startup game, found your own company that does not rely on burning VC money.
• KaiserPro 7y ago
  The problem is that people seem to think that one must drink the coolaid to do well. I have worked for both small, large, internationals and startups. A startup is a massive risk. 99.5% of them fail, of that 0.5%, >50% are acquired which is a spectacularly brutal experience. Odds are, your startup will fail, and take you with it. (especially as those of you in the US have to think about health insurance.) Most of the time you'll be making fudge after fudge, using stuff cause its shiny and regretting every choice you made 6 months previous. then you have to deal with the batshit social rules are de rigueur. Either way, you can either choose to believe that your company is looking after your interests, or treating you like cattle (Kobe beef, if you're lucky enough) Far too many startups require their staff to blindly worship the co-founders, even though they are obviously deficient, only useful for tax write-down fodder. Look the other direction as your boss has a spectacular mental breakdown, or decides to initiate conjugal relations via blackmail and obnoxious power plays. Basically, you can't just slap the word startup on a thing and allow it to fuck with peoples lives.
  • 11thEarlOfMar 7y ago
    Begging your forgiveness, it's Kool-Aid.
    • grzm 7y ago
      Acksually, it was Flavor Aid, but who’s counting except us pedants?
      • KaiserPro 7y ago
        I treasure this chain of pedantry.
• c_r_e_a_m 7y ago
  > If you're in the engineering, product, design, marketing, sort of the builder's side of that organization, you've got to know that you're creating a lot more value than that, possibly 10 times, maybe 100 times that value Very dubious. From personal experience I'd guess that most non-sales employees at the big tech companies are actually creating negative value for the business (not contributing enough to profit to pay their comp and benefits). This mainly seems to happen for two reasons: 1. Career incentives for decision-makers (Eng. and PM management and directors) are almost totally disconnected from the profitability of the business. You can definitely become a superstar by building something wildly profitable, but that's the hard approach. The easier and more common approach is simple empire-building: Gather a larger and larger team, and have more projects and launches under you. The projects don't necessarily even need to intend to make or save money - you get to pick the metrics you target, and you can probably find some that indicate you're successful! The overall impact is mis-allocation of talent on a pretty grand scale. 2. On a more micro-scale (within teams), engineers are terrible at focusing on things that are good for the business. If you leave an engineering team alone, they will spend 90% of the time rewriting systems that already exist to make them simpler, easier to modify, etc. They will normally accomplish this! But the rewritten systems will do almost nothing to increase how much money the company makes, and it's rare that it will save enough resources to be worth it (engineers are expensive). Both big tech companies I've worked at had what seemed like a relatively small set of teams focused on the core of the business, who were laser-focused on improving revenue or reducing the cost of core infrastructure used around the business. There were a much larger set of teams working on projects with less clear business value.
• femto113 7y ago
  Now I personally can't stand to work for big companies, but it's definitely not because its a bad financial move. Might as well write a post about "downsides of not picking the right lottery numbers". I know more people who have retired young and comfortably from a career at Microsoft (or Google, or Amazon) than I do who have achieved wealth from startups (and I know plenty of both types here in Seattle). In every single case there was substantial risk and a big element of luck for the startups that succeeded, while those who worked for the big firms never once worried that their paycheck might bounce.
• muststopmyths 7y ago
  only takeaway worth anything from this article >My friend, Bede Jordan of Shelf Engine here in Seattle, actually said it best, "If you don't work on your dreams, "someone will put you to work on theirs."
• tow21 7y ago
  ... but Palantir? That rather deflated the vision of regret. Honestly, maybe I’m way out of the normal HN demographic, but my first reaction was, this sounds like, “how I had a lucky escape and didn’t spend most of my early career actively making the world a much worse place.” I’m no great fan of MS, but given the choice between a job there; or the possibility to work on bringing about a dystopic surveillance future, I just don’t see the hard decision.
• abetusk 7y ago
  Does anyone know the source of the graphic in the article [1]? [1] https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/2382754/KHwPQPhY6TaSSqhK_DxI7YwPOWU/xlarge_MW-GM758_market_NS_20180718204202.jpg https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/...
• sjg007 7y ago
  It'd be hard to realize that $200m though because Palantir is not public...
• inertiatic 7y ago
  Do people torture themselves over mistakes that only prove to be so after the fact? I thought I was a master of this art but this form of it escaped me.
• inertiatic 7y ago
  Most startups solve boring problems in boring ways, require you to work too much and deal with a wild west environment without proper procedures of coexistence. Even with compensation equal, I'd take the tech giant.
• johnmarcus 7y ago
  employee #10 at palantir, that investor would fly down from anywhere just to interview and write checks to at the table - this is not your average developer. If your that talented of an engineer - than yes, you would be selling yourself short working as a cog - at a shitty startup whos management is too cocky to know when they are wrong - or a big company whom needs a level-ish playing field for everyone.
• 11thEarlOfMar 7y ago
  Would it be overreaching to say that no two startup experiences are the same and therefore, generalizing startups vs. tech giants is not an adequate analysis for deciding whether to join a startup? I'd guess it would be enlightening to compare 'the strangest day ever at my startup' vs. 'the strangest day ever at my tech giant'. Do you have an anecdote?
• TuringNYC 7y ago
  Dear @garry - Thanks for your article. I'm curious if you could comment on VC-driven "founder salaries" for startups. I've seen some fair setups and some very unfair setups. I can appreciate this from the VC's perspective, they want the founder to be working to grow equity worth, not just to draw salary. But I can also see how sub-market "founder salaries" would bias startup ownership towards either those with extreme risk appetites or towards those with family safety nets and wealth. How do you approach founder salaries? Also, when judging founder salaries (knowing full well that will bias towards a small set of the population) how do you determine the comparable (e.g., Is it FAANG? Is it based on YoE as an Engineer? School? Degree?) Is this something that just is necessarily biased in favour of <25yos?
  • sjg007 7y ago
    Trade more salary for less equity? Or ?
• seem_2211 7y ago
  I think the equity situation is bad, and only going to get worse. FAANG stocks have been on an absolute tear and VC firms have got more money to deploy than ever before. If I were to bet on it, I think we'll see the tech industry move to a model that mirrors the financial world, with fixed year end bonuses, and no equity opportunities. That's what this thread is basically advocating for, even though right now it means working at Google and getting options. $1b+ Venture Funds and employees getting generous equity grants don't match. I don't think VC is going away as an asset class anytime soon, and I don't think fund sizes will be dramatically (3-5x) smaller. If anything, I'd say it's probably for the best for the average person working in tech. Most startup options aren't worth anything, and are highly illiquid.
  • mancerayder 7y ago
    I've been working in finance for years, and a couple of startups. From my own personal experience and from the experience of many people I know, you get stock but the stock is viewed as a 'nice little bonus' versus something that you expect to change your life. In New York City: Small tech startup -> very low salaries, questionable options Fintech -> higher salaries (than tech), "nice to have bonus" type of stock options, plus a bonus Banks and Hedge Funds -> For tech people, this is the "FANG equivalent". High salaries, big bonuses, and stocks that aren't theoretical. The pay is probably is not in the millions, but close to half a million if you're a Director or above on the tech side. Bankers always make more than tech, and tech is always viewed as a cost. Now, Amazon and Google are expanding. I'm not sure how this will change the landscape. I read a substantial part of this thread, and honestly I don't know a single person making 200K a year in equity as per some comments here. Maybe I'm in the wrong part of the country. Fintec
• g_langenderfer 7y ago
  Optimal strategy seems to be work at FAANG while iterating on side projects until something sticks.
• Grimm1 7y ago
  Edit: The sites I'm using make it seem like the RSU compensation is the one time grant for 100k+ over the 4 year period so if its really a 400k+ stock grant over the 4year period then yes there's really no way to compete with that for early stage companies and leaving that amount of money on the table is inadvisable if you can avoid it. That said I still hold my point about the type of experience you'll gain at a startup and how quickly you'll gain it. People keep talking about how "they don't know anyone at the big tech companies making less than a 225k salary with the average being more like 300k". Those numbers are bunk, the salary is the base amount before stock contributions and you are most certainly including RSUs to get those numbers. Including RSU's in your annual salary is a crazy and incorrect thing to do. The average turn over at large tech co is a little over 2 years. This means 50% of people never see more than half of their RSU compensation. An L5 (5 years or so xp and roughly the same across companies) for instance has an average base salary of 165k and an additional 100k in RSUs. Assuming that person works at large tech co for the average 2 years and they sell the RSUs as soon as they can their total compensation in a given year is 165k + 25k, or 190k. Successful startups most certainly can come close to that. Anyone making a base + 225k salary before RSU is an L7 or distinguished contributor with 10+ years of experience. So while maybe startups can't compete for compensation for people who are very established in there careers, I've seen more than a few who can compete for people in the 0-10yr range. I've always seen startups as a way for people to prove themselves very quickly in ways that would take people who took the corporate path 15 years to do. High risk, high personal growth, and hopefully high reward. That said I think startups do need to rework their equity compensation structure for earlier employees to make them more fair. It is very easy to get screwed as an IC in startups right now even as an early one.
  • tracer4201 7y ago
    Maybe I misunderstood what you’re saying here but I don’t think it’s accurate. My salary plus stock compensation has been $300K+ each year as long as I’ve been with my company. Of course there’s market volatility in RSUs but I have yet to take home less than $300K in any year during the 5 years I’ve been at a FAANG. I’m an engineer FWIW.
    • 7y ago
• shuckles 7y ago
  A fellow named Paul Graham once speculated that it was not beyond reason to offer your first employee a >6% share in your company [1]. I've received first employee offers from startups for under 1%. This explains most of the difference for my decision. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html
• tanilama 7y ago
  This is so scammy at so many different levels. TL;DR: He doesn't have that 200M to start with, that is the imaginary money he never earned.
• NoblePublius 7y ago
  Maybe him joining earlier would have destroyed the company.
• KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
  Let me make sure I get this straight. On the one hand, by not working for a startup, you're missing out on at least $1.6M of value you're creating every year for your employer. You might even be missing out on $200M like Mr. Tan did. On the other hand, working for a startup "is not about the money". So you should be ok with getting less money because you're getting access to users and customers. That's a pretty muddled message. Is Mr. Tan offering unbiased advice or does he have some kind of ax to grind here?
  • teachrdan 7y ago
    No ax to grind. Tan's trying to encourage more junior[0] engineers to work at a steep discount for startup founders so that they might make a massive profit for VCs like him. 0. Experienced engineers know better
• clpwn 7y ago
  Please, engineers, pay attention to the ethical implications of your creations. You can't talk about how much money you make (or could have made) and disregard the pain you cause people in the process. Not all startups are equally unethical, and Palantir is famously one of the most closely tied to so much human suffering in the world.
• thesausageking 7y ago
  Palantir built a lot of ICE's software systems. Among other things, when ICE was using children crossing the border to go after and arrest their family member, "the key place where that information was stored and communicated to be able to prosecute them was through the ICM and Palantir’s information sharing."[0] I would encourage anyone to think twice about taking money from Gary or similar VCs who only care they lost out on $200m and not the many families that have been broken up and children imprisoned because of what their companies do. [0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/08/20/palantirs-controversial-ice-contract-renewed/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/08/20/palantirs-controversi...
  • debt 7y ago
    Also, I think this point might be missed to some young people, once you work on drone software that kills people or ICE software that detains people, you cannot reverse your contributions. That work will permanently be part of you and your career.
  • elamje 7y ago
    Not everyone has the same views on business and morality. Morality is completely gray for almost everyone. I understand where you are coming from, but retroactively punishing people who are associated with a business who only recently (last 2 years) had bad publicity is why people are scared to actually have public opinions about anything. Even typing this comment will be misinterpreted in 30 years. Palantir is in an untenable position to defend since it engages in government contracts. You could also roast Lockheed Martin and a huge list of others for similar things. Palantir is a personal example Garry can use to get a point across.
    • thesausageking 7y ago
      It’s not the bad publicity that’s the issue. It’s their helping the government put 7 year olds who have done nothing wrong into detention centers for months and lock up their parents when they come to claim them. Read the ACLU’s reports on this if you believe it’s just “bad publicity”: https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-patrol-abuses/ice-cruelty-knows-no-bounds https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-p... Does everyone agree with this? Of course not. A large % of the US are encouraging these policies and want ICE to be even more aggressive. Everyone needs to decide for themselves what their ethics are. What’s important is that founders ask these questions and understand who they’re taking money from.
• jeromebaek 7y ago
  A little-discussed issue is that big tech cos tend to do better on diversity and inclusion. Obviously it varies by startup, but when you’re in a survival mentality it is difficult to be open to people of different sexualities, races and experiences. You tend to get clumps of similar overachievers. Paul Graham said this was an “advantage” but for people like me in the LGBTQ community it certainly isn’t.
• vjktyu 7y ago
  Many comments here about skethcy startups and for good reasons. But isn't the solution obvious? Allow software developers to work for multiple companies at a time: 10-20, whatever. Just like investors diversify the risks by investing into many, often competing, startups, employees could also work for many companies.
• michaelcampbell 7y ago
  Miss a chance at working for a horrible person at a horrible company... how much are your ethics worth? $200MM, seems.
• ping_pong 7y ago
  This article is garbage. Over the last 8 years or so, FANG stock has gone through the roof. Most FANG engineers are multi-millionaires if they have been there going back 8 years. I have a friend whose Facebook stock doubled in the last 3 years and she will have been paid over 3M over 4 years. Meanwhile, I have a friend who has been bouncing around startups, making zero in equity (because they all failed) and he gave up a job at Google. His equity would have been worth over 2M had he stayed. I myself worked at a YC startup that had a large exit, and only made about $80k over 4 years (most of the money went to the founders even though I was employee 40). I then joined one of the unicorns and also made about 250k in equity over 5 years. Had I concentrated on my FANG interviews more, I would have made much much much more money over the last 5 years.
• harshaw 7y ago
  Startups don't necessarily have good management or the core values necessary to help weather changes. You will have problems and if you don't have either really good management or something like the Amazon leadership principles it's likely you will fail. Also, at least for many of the startups where I worked there was no appreciation for the lessons of the lean startup movement (or appreciation of the lessons of Steve Blank). That would be my reason to consider big tech, or at least a company with solid values. Unfortunately in my career I learned a lot at startups but don't have anything financial to show from it.
• yaih 7y ago
  Valuation and share prices of FAANGs (and Microsoft) started really taking off 2-3 years after the financial crisis of 2008. There are two theories: a lot of money could suddenly be borrowed at near zero cost and needed a place to go, prompting a lot of investors to invest in big tech in the hope of better than average returns. Alternate theory: all big tech companies just simultaneously, suddenly became lot better companies and lot better investments sometime around 2011. I tend to side with the first theory. Recently, it also became easier to do stock buybacks, leading to another big bounce in share prices. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/17/investing/stock-buybacks-trillion-dollars/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/17/investing/stock-buybacks-... So I wonder if the real problem lies elsewhere - the out of control monetary policies practiced by various central banks. Or maybe my statements are just completely wrong. If so, I would like to know if someone has done any kind of analysis on this.
• skrebbel 7y ago
  This is the first time I read about someone who regrets not working for Palantir.
• p0nce 7y ago
  > I'm a Venture Capitalist. Sums up the article nicely.
• L_Rahman 7y ago
  The choice in front of Garry is fundamentally different from the one he tells most people to make. I think virtually everyone here would quit their job and try a startup for a year if a famous investor believed in them and wrote a check for a year's worth of comp (assuming this includes healthcare). BigCo jobs are revolving doors. The only thing you would be putting on the line by doing the startup is the small amount of money you would have gotten from a raise/promotion. This is vastly different from telling a 23 year old not connected to Peter Thiel, without a check 1yr salary to go work for a startup.
• Schnitz 7y ago
  The author forgot the part where they mention how purposeless and boring working in a scrum chain gang at a big tech company is. ;-)
• xondono 7y ago
  From a spaniard perspective, the fact that he started with no experience making double what I make now (10y) blows my mind. I know outside of Spain is different and all of that, but man it is depressing
• marta_morena 7y ago
  This article seems like clickbait and bad advice. This is like selling this ridiculous American dream to someone. Oh, come to us, work hard, wash some dishes and you gonna get far! What pile of garbage. Yes, it works for some lucky few, but that's about it. The truth is that most startups fail and most people in startups that don't fail, worked their asses off and still only get scraps. Comparing today with 2003 is nuts. The times are so different that there isn't even a remote resemblance. Yes founding a unicorn can make you rich. Doh! Who would have thought... But also if you worked at Amazon in 2008, saved all the stocks, re-invested excess money in stock, even as an entry level engineer you would be a MULTI MILLIONAIRE ten years later... Its just crazy to give advise to people to prefer insane risk for a chance to get 200 million, over guaranteed few millions in a safe job. Yes there are people who really can't work at big tech and who want to hack some startup code together. Go for it! Sure. For everyone else, big tech is preferable by a large margin. And there I can work on projects startups could never even dream of doing. The reason for that is that big tech works with economy of scale. What is profitable for Google and Amazon might very well be suicidal for startups. And to top it all off, the author even says that Peter Thiel wrote him a yearly salary as check. That devalues this article even more. Anyone, yes ANYONE should have taken this offer. This wasn't about risk whatsoever. This was about a 23 year old guy who didn't understand how the world works. And that applies to literally anyone young.
• skillvisor19 7y ago
  Advice to VCs on this thread trying to convince hiring folks away from tech. giants. Re-consider (if you can) how you attract engineering talent and capitalize the "product-market-fit" stage of your startups - higher early stage valuations and higher pay for the market rates for the talent. Most talent (I know of) at FAANG is tired of being "cog-in-a-giant-wheel" and, some, would love the opportunities that startups always offered (I am assuming I don't have to enumerate these opportunities for this crowd)? If you think higher valuations at earlier stages is not a fair ask - just look at capitalization at Series-C, Series-D growth stage companies - most of this money is being used to "buy" revenue these days. In other words, to pay commissions for sales and marketing folks. Buying engineering talent at early stages should be no different in 2019 in my opinion. We don't have to rob Peter(Founders) to pay Paul(non-founding employees) and pitch one against the other. Just make the pie bigger at early stages. From what I hear, there is plenty of capital chasing good startups.