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Startup guy who’s now at FAANG. I’m technical technical technical (IC track). I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a

Startup guy who’s now at FAANG. I’m technical technical technical (IC track). I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing. Get to work with excellent SWEs, PMs, PgMs, etc. In startup land I was doing so much, pitches, recruiting, coding, landing page design, dev ops, pretty much the full stack. In FAANG land I can just focus on existence proofs and then there’s a whole support structure helping that happen and bringing the product to market. You could argue that setting up this pipeline is the goal of a startup, but it’s a LOONG road. The opportunity cost is immense. It’s immensely difficult to recruit. You have to effectively pause your life. Scary to have children with startup level uncertainty. At a certain $$ where you can live a comfortable life, enjoy 95% of what you do day to day, get to be in an environment with top notch colleagues, it’s a tough sell to start something from scratch with all that risk.

nicce 2y ago
> I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing. How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end? That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?
- brotchie 2y ago
  Hit and miss. It’s pretty equivalent to % of finding product market fit in startup land. Mostly worked on internal products. One HUGE hit, a few moderate hits, and quite a few failures. The calculus for projects at a large bigco are different from a startup though. It’s not necessarily clear bottom line revenue, especially for innovation teams. Crypto, for example, bigco needs at least some folks working on it to build an understanding of the technology, market, pain points. Some of these projects are started with literally no intention of profitability, but as an explicit build-to-learn. There’s a wide spectrum of SWE interest and capabilities. Some folks love the creativity of greenfield new product exploration. Others love the focus of crafting a perfectly scalable, maintainable system. These are really just points along a product lifecycle. I understand myself enough and am unapologetic about getting “bored” easily, and need to be constantly working on creative things. Others at the other end of the spectrum have a visceral reaction to that. They can’t do what I do, and I can’t do what they do.

nicce 2y ago

> I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing. How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end? That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?

brotchie 2y ago
Hit and miss. It’s pretty equivalent to % of finding product market fit in startup land. Mostly worked on internal products. One HUGE hit, a few moderate hits, and quite a few failures. The calculus for projects at a large bigco are different from a startup though. It’s not necessarily clear bottom line revenue, especially for innovation teams. Crypto, for example, bigco needs at least some folks working on it to build an understanding of the technology, market, pain points. Some of these projects are started with literally no intention of profitability, but as an explicit build-to-learn. There’s a wide spectrum of SWE interest and capabilities. Some folks love the creativity of greenfield new product exploration. Others love the focus of crafting a perfectly scalable, maintainable system. These are really just points along a product lifecycle. I understand myself enough and am unapologetic about getting “bored” easily, and need to be constantly working on creative things. Others at the other end of the spectrum have a visceral reaction to that. They can’t do what I do, and I can’t do what they do.