5 ms·

Rubrik for early stage: 1. No product: -> went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) -> held director level at faang -> funded -> e

Rubrik for early stage: 1. No product: -> went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) -> held director level at faang -> funded -> everyone else -> probably not funded 2. Have product: -> not prestigious -> need real ARR with good growth -> prestigious -> need a product -> everyone else -> not funded

jakey_bakey 3y ago
It's the whole fairground saying, right? (I'm definitely in the middle-class bucket)
zomglings 3y ago
This is almost accurate. I would add one more thing: -> Have previous success (as founder or as employee) in same space -> funded
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  Yeah i was more so thinking of first time founders. Second time founder is a different thing, though I dont think early employees ("founding engineers") get much respect.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    “Founding ____” is not “founder”. It’s just a fancy way of saying “employee”. This is always been the case.
    - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
      Never said it was, its a scam title. Only time it holds relevance is again if the founder already had a success. Then the chances of the equity being worth something are higher
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      Seems sort of clearly misleading at any rate.
    - jakey_bakey 3y ago
      Do they still call themselves founding engineer at Series C? Just seems like a cute way to convince graduates it's worth being paid 1/4 what Google/Meta could cough up.
      - llbeansandrice 3y ago
        Is there any real benefit to taking ~$160k and 1% as a “founding” engineer? We’re not even close to series C yet but it’s starting to feel like I need to be more aggressive about compensation or a role change. If you don’t become a +$100mm company (and have the ability to cash out at that position) it seems to be a pretty rough deal honestly.
        zomglings 3y ago
        Depends - how much conviction do you have in the product you are building?
        llbeansandrice 3y ago
        I think we’re building a great product. But 1% (undiluted) from an even $100mm company feels like a long shot.
        zomglings 3y ago
        If you stick around, you should regularly get topped up so that dilution doesn't completely destroy your stake. Your salary should also increase to become competitive with the market as your company continues to raise. If the founders know what they're doing and you are bringing outsize value to the company, your salary should far exceed the market salary as your company gains success.
        jonathankoren 3y ago
        No. As someone said earlier, “Founding” is a scam title. It’s just sparkle. If they’re passing that out post-A, they must really think you’re a sucker, because that’s nowhere near founding.
  - zomglings 3y ago
    They do - they just have to have had larger successes. "Founding X" doesn't count for shit. Being part of a team that built a hugely successful product teaches you a lot - it teaches you about the counterintuitive dynamics of superlinear growth. That is a very important mindset to bring to the table if you want to create a successful VC-funded startup.
    - awesomeMilou 3y ago
      I had to look up "superlinear growth" because I've never seen that term used under posts with VC related topics. If you're as confused as me, Paul Graham wrote a blog post about this last October (figures): http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html tl:dr: Just make a product that's so cool it'll go viral in it's respective market.
      - behnamoh 3y ago
        so basically exponential but fancier.
        zomglings 3y ago
        The reason I don't use the world exponential, is that superlinear growth in a product is generally not exponential. It is usually at best quadratic because there is some kind of network effect at play - the number of edges in a complete graph with `n` vertices is `n(n-1)/2`. The point is that the value of your product to your users should increase with the number of users OR the marginal cost to you of maintaining the product should decrease with the number of users. "Superlinear" captures that more effectively than "exponential".
        jefftk 3y ago
        True viral growth is exponential: each of your users gets you N>1 additional users, and so the growth of your userbase is proportional to your current scale. Superlinear but subexponential growth can still be pretty impressive, though, especially if it's fast (who cares about 0.1% weekly growth?)
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  No, definitely not as employee. Maybe founder. Failing as (a funded) founder is ok too.
dheera 3y ago
-> went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) I'd edit this to -> white male went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) Source: I know lots of female and non-white Harvard grads who didn't get funded. I'm a non-white MIT grad and also found funding very, very difficult even when we had a product. We almost continuously had to spend >1/2 of our working hours just trying to get funding. Hundreds and hundreds of coffee chats plus travel time. We were building hardware, so bootstrapping wasn't an option. White male Harvard grads I know routinely got funded very quickly, though. They often had time to get actual work done. Even still, most of them didn't succeed in the end.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  Hardware is a different category and doesnt really fit the traditional VC model. Also, indians/east asians are the majority in tech, not the minority. Plenty of examples of open discrimination in big tech from those groups
- behnamoh 3y ago
  I'm not white either but seriously, this mindset of "victimization of non-white people" needs to stop. I'd rather be taken seriously for my merits than my minority privileges (due to DEI for example).
  - stilist 3y ago
    You're looking at it backwards. White people get an automatic advantage because they're white. Any advantages given to minorities are an attempt to balance the game.
    - behnamoh 3y ago
      > White people get an automatic advantage because they're white. By whom? By other white people? Homophily is a real phenomenon in every ethnicity. But if you're saying that white people get advantages by non-white people, then it's a cultural issue of those non-white people who, for some reason, have internalized racism (look up inferiority syndrome).
matrix_overload 3y ago
-> went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) -> held director level at faang -> funded It's the chain of trust. It means that the investor is already 2-3 handshakes away from the founder, and hence can discuss certain things that require utmost discretion, and have reasonable grounds to believe they won't get double-crossed on that (because it would erode away the trust along the handshake path).
- behnamoh 3y ago
  two precious things in this economy: - attention - trust
yieldcrv 3y ago
a lot of this is reputation laundering the outside capital is real, quickly landing a lead investor that gets the other investors to close comes from controlling the pools of capital your family’s donor advised fund and private foundation are the lead investors, or they are the only limited partners in the private equity fund thats functionally a family office this same capability allows for top university background too, or nonchalantly dropping out of it in the mean time you get all the headlines in the world, alongside your PR agent, and you’re a genius star Stanford drop out that gets funded no questions asked The “friends and family round” is actually more important than the stanford aspect, if we were really min-maxing here, but it all goes hand in hand as people with that support system do things together the reason it is important to view it this way is because this is all window dressing for a bourgeoisie that doesnt want to be seen as different. in turn, it makes everyone else think they really have a chance of receiving the same consideration from their ambition and cognitive abilities. the answer is to just have capital and a predilection for de-risking with other people’s money.
- pnw 3y ago
  I've never seen a donor advised fund or private foundation on a startup cap table, and I've seen quite a few. Got any examples?
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    have you checked the incorporation status of every entity on the cap tables? this would be difficult to know from a passing glance, they wont necessarily say any combination of “Charitable Non-Profit Foundation”, although I have seen that on cap tables and other disclosures they can be any entity type and trusts. Trusts dont need to have “Trust” in the name donor advised funds are not separately incorporated, and may also be on the cap table as the sponsoring charity and again, as a limited partner in a fund, neither would show up on the cap table, just the fund they invested through
VirusNewbie 3y ago
This is super weird to me. In the tech circles I've run in, being from Harvard is about the same as being from UCLA or something. I've never heard it considered a sign of exclusivity. CMU, Stanford, MIT, yes. But Harvard? It's not exactly known for a rigorous engineering program, and even less so the last fifteen years or so.
- est31 3y ago
  When looking for CEOs, they don't look for top notch engineering talent, they look for top notch CEO talent, where talent means capability. CEOs do need deep technical understanding, anything else and you have an enviroment that scares away engineers, but they don't need to be the best engineer in the entire company. If you've been to Harvard, you are on a first name basis with highly ranking finance people. It's not a coincidence that among all the dot com carnage, Amazon emerged as the ecommerce champion: they lived thanks to Jeff Bezos being able to get continued funding despite making continued losses. For that, you need, among other things, good contacts into the finance industry and know how they work and think. A membership in the exclusive club of Harvard graduates gives you the ability to find customers, advice, funding, employees. Stuff that makes it more likely that your company is more successful.
  - VirusNewbie 3y ago
    This sounds totally backwards, but I say this as someone who has no personal experience raising money, so maybe you're a VC or a founder? If someone can get in front of VCs, presumably it doesn't matter if they know a bunch of other rich people from school. I really don't get the sense that VCs are impressed by someone's ability to convince some nepo hedge fund manager to invest a few million. I think they're impressed by business accumen combined with technical chops. If you want to bootstrap, then yeah, maybe a school with the most amount of money matters so you can get a huge seed round. But you think people with strong ideas and impressive technical backgrounds who get in front of VCs are going to be less impressive by less technical people who rub shoulders with finance bros? Certainly Harvard/Yale is a good choice if you're going into medicine, law, or I dunno, maybe banking? But tech? I wouldn't think it's a top choice at all.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
geodel 3y ago
Like the 'No child left behind' did wonders to education, maybe 'No startup left behind' is needed to fund all of them irrespective of business model or founders' background.

jakey_bakey 3y ago

It's the whole fairground saying, right? (I'm definitely in the middle-class bucket)

zomglings 3y ago

This is almost accurate. I would add one more thing: -> Have previous success (as founder or as employee) in same space -> funded

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Yeah i was more so thinking of first time founders. Second time founder is a different thing, though I dont think early employees ("founding engineers") get much respect.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  “Founding ____” is not “founder”. It’s just a fancy way of saying “employee”. This is always been the case.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    Never said it was, its a scam title. Only time it holds relevance is again if the founder already had a success. Then the chances of the equity being worth something are higher
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Seems sort of clearly misleading at any rate.
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    Do they still call themselves founding engineer at Series C? Just seems like a cute way to convince graduates it's worth being paid 1/4 what Google/Meta could cough up.
    - llbeansandrice 3y ago
      Is there any real benefit to taking ~$160k and 1% as a “founding” engineer? We’re not even close to series C yet but it’s starting to feel like I need to be more aggressive about compensation or a role change. If you don’t become a +$100mm company (and have the ability to cash out at that position) it seems to be a pretty rough deal honestly.
      - zomglings 3y ago
        Depends - how much conviction do you have in the product you are building?
        llbeansandrice 3y ago
        I think we’re building a great product. But 1% (undiluted) from an even $100mm company feels like a long shot.
        zomglings 3y ago
        If you stick around, you should regularly get topped up so that dilution doesn't completely destroy your stake. Your salary should also increase to become competitive with the market as your company continues to raise. If the founders know what they're doing and you are bringing outsize value to the company, your salary should far exceed the market salary as your company gains success.
      - jonathankoren 3y ago
        No. As someone said earlier, “Founding” is a scam title. It’s just sparkle. If they’re passing that out post-A, they must really think you’re a sucker, because that’s nowhere near founding.
- zomglings 3y ago
  They do - they just have to have had larger successes. "Founding X" doesn't count for shit. Being part of a team that built a hugely successful product teaches you a lot - it teaches you about the counterintuitive dynamics of superlinear growth. That is a very important mindset to bring to the table if you want to create a successful VC-funded startup.
  - awesomeMilou 3y ago
    I had to look up "superlinear growth" because I've never seen that term used under posts with VC related topics. If you're as confused as me, Paul Graham wrote a blog post about this last October (figures): http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html tl:dr: Just make a product that's so cool it'll go viral in it's respective market.
    - behnamoh 3y ago
      so basically exponential but fancier.
      - zomglings 3y ago
        The reason I don't use the world exponential, is that superlinear growth in a product is generally not exponential. It is usually at best quadratic because there is some kind of network effect at play - the number of edges in a complete graph with `n` vertices is `n(n-1)/2`. The point is that the value of your product to your users should increase with the number of users OR the marginal cost to you of maintaining the product should decrease with the number of users. "Superlinear" captures that more effectively than "exponential".
        jefftk 3y ago
        True viral growth is exponential: each of your users gets you N>1 additional users, and so the growth of your userbase is proportional to your current scale. Superlinear but subexponential growth can still be pretty impressive, though, especially if it's fast (who cares about 0.1% weekly growth?)
throwawaymaths 3y ago
No, definitely not as employee. Maybe founder. Failing as (a funded) founder is ok too.

dheera 3y ago

-> went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) I'd edit this to -> white male went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) Source: I know lots of female and non-white Harvard grads who didn't get funded. I'm a non-white MIT grad and also found funding very, very difficult even when we had a product. We almost continuously had to spend >1/2 of our working hours just trying to get funding. Hundreds and hundreds of coffee chats plus travel time. We were building hardware, so bootstrapping wasn't an option. White male Harvard grads I know routinely got funded very quickly, though. They often had time to get actual work done. Even still, most of them didn't succeed in the end.

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Hardware is a different category and doesnt really fit the traditional VC model. Also, indians/east asians are the majority in tech, not the minority. Plenty of examples of open discrimination in big tech from those groups
behnamoh 3y ago
I'm not white either but seriously, this mindset of "victimization of non-white people" needs to stop. I'd rather be taken seriously for my merits than my minority privileges (due to DEI for example).
- stilist 3y ago
  You're looking at it backwards. White people get an automatic advantage because they're white. Any advantages given to minorities are an attempt to balance the game.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    > White people get an automatic advantage because they're white. By whom? By other white people? Homophily is a real phenomenon in every ethnicity. But if you're saying that white people get advantages by non-white people, then it's a cultural issue of those non-white people who, for some reason, have internalized racism (look up inferiority syndrome).

matrix_overload 3y ago

-> went to stanford or harvard -> funded (no questions asked) -> held director level at faang -> funded It's the chain of trust. It means that the investor is already 2-3 handshakes away from the founder, and hence can discuss certain things that require utmost discretion, and have reasonable grounds to believe they won't get double-crossed on that (because it would erode away the trust along the handshake path).

behnamoh 3y ago
two precious things in this economy: - attention - trust

yieldcrv 3y ago

a lot of this is reputation laundering the outside capital is real, quickly landing a lead investor that gets the other investors to close comes from controlling the pools of capital your family’s donor advised fund and private foundation are the lead investors, or they are the only limited partners in the private equity fund thats functionally a family office this same capability allows for top university background too, or nonchalantly dropping out of it in the mean time you get all the headlines in the world, alongside your PR agent, and you’re a genius star Stanford drop out that gets funded no questions asked The “friends and family round” is actually more important than the stanford aspect, if we were really min-maxing here, but it all goes hand in hand as people with that support system do things together the reason it is important to view it this way is because this is all window dressing for a bourgeoisie that doesnt want to be seen as different. in turn, it makes everyone else think they really have a chance of receiving the same consideration from their ambition and cognitive abilities. the answer is to just have capital and a predilection for de-risking with other people’s money.

pnw 3y ago
I've never seen a donor advised fund or private foundation on a startup cap table, and I've seen quite a few. Got any examples?
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  have you checked the incorporation status of every entity on the cap tables? this would be difficult to know from a passing glance, they wont necessarily say any combination of “Charitable Non-Profit Foundation”, although I have seen that on cap tables and other disclosures they can be any entity type and trusts. Trusts dont need to have “Trust” in the name donor advised funds are not separately incorporated, and may also be on the cap table as the sponsoring charity and again, as a limited partner in a fund, neither would show up on the cap table, just the fund they invested through

VirusNewbie 3y ago

This is super weird to me. In the tech circles I've run in, being from Harvard is about the same as being from UCLA or something. I've never heard it considered a sign of exclusivity. CMU, Stanford, MIT, yes. But Harvard? It's not exactly known for a rigorous engineering program, and even less so the last fifteen years or so.

est31 3y ago
When looking for CEOs, they don't look for top notch engineering talent, they look for top notch CEO talent, where talent means capability. CEOs do need deep technical understanding, anything else and you have an enviroment that scares away engineers, but they don't need to be the best engineer in the entire company. If you've been to Harvard, you are on a first name basis with highly ranking finance people. It's not a coincidence that among all the dot com carnage, Amazon emerged as the ecommerce champion: they lived thanks to Jeff Bezos being able to get continued funding despite making continued losses. For that, you need, among other things, good contacts into the finance industry and know how they work and think. A membership in the exclusive club of Harvard graduates gives you the ability to find customers, advice, funding, employees. Stuff that makes it more likely that your company is more successful.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  This sounds totally backwards, but I say this as someone who has no personal experience raising money, so maybe you're a VC or a founder? If someone can get in front of VCs, presumably it doesn't matter if they know a bunch of other rich people from school. I really don't get the sense that VCs are impressed by someone's ability to convince some nepo hedge fund manager to invest a few million. I think they're impressed by business accumen combined with technical chops. If you want to bootstrap, then yeah, maybe a school with the most amount of money matters so you can get a huge seed round. But you think people with strong ideas and impressive technical backgrounds who get in front of VCs are going to be less impressive by less technical people who rub shoulders with finance bros? Certainly Harvard/Yale is a good choice if you're going into medicine, law, or I dunno, maybe banking? But tech? I wouldn't think it's a top choice at all.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

geodel 3y ago

Like the 'No child left behind' did wonders to education, maybe 'No startup left behind' is needed to fund all of them irrespective of business model or founders' background.