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Ask HN: Have you had trouble getting a job after a failed startup?

• tomasien 13y ago
  Having done a startup has significantly increased my job opportunities, in fact took them from roughly 0 to roughly I could have whatever job I want in my field any time. In the United States, things are incredibly different from Japan, your resume is rapidly becoming what you're done. If you're worried about failing as a startup, consider that the company failing won't mean that the PRODUCT failed - you may fail with a beautiful product that people love and use that attains reach that many profitable companies can not. The only way I can see failure as a startup to be seen as a negative is if you did something unethical or built absolute crap, or perhaps didn't launch at all.
• USNetizen 13y ago
  Employers find any reason possible to turn someone down if they want to. It sounds like in your case it was just an excuse on their part. If you just don't "fit in" with the culture of the organization they will try to find something tangible to deny you to save face (and for possible legal reasons). IMO regarding the startup thing, it all depends on what/who/where you are interviewing for. I've talked with hiring managers who saw it as a major asset and others who saw it as being akin to an excuse for being unemployed for a couple years. It all revolves around the manager's perception of entrepreneurship. It's not a global perspective but rather much more individual.
• mathattack 13y ago
  It would be worth noting geography in the answers to these questions. Japan is very different than Silicon Valley in terms of work culture and expectations. Silicon Valley is very different than Tulsa, Oklahoma. Interesting question, I hope it gets some traction.
• VLM 13y ago
  "I'm not worried about the major markets (Silicon Valley and New York) but about the rest." I've worked for employers that have gone out of business but not as an entrepreneur. I've never worked more than 300 miles from Chicago. No one cares, no resume stain. You're going to have a lot of trouble collecting more than anecdotes. Outside major markets, the market is smaller and subjectively better connected and personal relationships are going to be pretty important. People will know you and what you personally did and that narrative is going to be more important than the narrative in company financial papers etc.
• gozmike 13y ago
  Failing is hard. It hurts. You go into a tailspin of destruction. If you built up skills that are marketable and achieved great things along the way, you'll be pleasantly surprised - I came out worth almost 2x on the market as what I did when I quit. It was incredible. That said, being an entrepreneur will change you - you will become a maverick, you will lose your fear of authority, you will be a value creator as you're so used to the survival mentality you used to foster in your startup. This alone justifies why any company that cares about innovation would want you leading their team.
• onion2k 13y ago
  After Usable failed I applied for several jobs and was turned down by more than one for sounding likely I'd get bored and leave after a few months. It's a fair comment - once you've experienced the freedom of the startup industry going back to a normal job is tough.
  • redspark 13y ago
    I went through the interview process with a major startup and was basically told the same thing. "You will get bored as a software engineer for our company. Looking at your past history, you are probably not a good fit for this position. We like you and are more than happy to support you in any way we can with your next endeavor." Leaves you with mixed emotions.
• troels 13y ago
  In big corporates, your startup experience might not count for much, but I doubt that many places would consider it a downright negative. For SMB's I would expect it to count as a positive. At least when I have been hiring (in SMB's) I would certainly prefer a developer who had some non-tech perspective over someone who's strictly technically strong. A lot of programming jobs are really something like 20% programming and 80% figuring out what the customer wants.
• peterjancelis 13y ago
  I had no trouble finding a job as a developer after being a business guy turned startup founder. And to be honest I agree with the bias that ex-founder types may not be the most stable of employees.
• jasonkester 13y ago
  The short answer is no. Trying and failing at a startup probably won't ruin your chances of ever getting another job. But here's the thing. Hiring is not an exact science. There are tons of variables in play beyond simple work experience and skill set. There's a whole art to negotiating employment (from the employee side) that most programmer types just don't get at all. Engineers want everything to be a skills test. But in reality, skills come roughly 18th in a hiring situation, way behind questions like "did this candidate tell me any amusing anecdotes?", "was this candidate tall?", and "did this candidate say anything that inadvertently made me look bad?" Somewhere further down the list you might indeed find "did this candidate try to strike out on his own and fail?", but it'll be lost in the noise. So if you want to work on something, work on your "being a guy that a CTO would want to have a beer with" skills. That, combined with a bit of networking, will often let you skip the "previous work experience" and "resume" portions of the hiring process entirely.
  • orenbarzilai 13y ago
    Not sure if it's a joke or not... work on your "being a guy that a CTO would want to have a beer with"... is probably not the best advice. Starting a startup and failing doesn't look bad in your CV, don't worry about that. But if you are looking for a job, you should definitely work on your technical skills, learn new technologies etc instead of your networking skills...
    • RTigger 13y ago
      I don't think it's a joke at all - I know lots of companies and people (myself included) who stress their culture and fit so much that technical skills often fall by the wayside. Sure, we want to know if you can code, but that can usually be figured out with a 15 minute white board test. If you're truly a pain to work with, unable to work in a team environment, or generally not collaborative, you probably won't get a job at my company. Conversely, if you're a self-motivated learner, a good team member, and able to contribute, but don't quite have the technical skills we're looking for, we'll gladly take a training hit (usually 2 to 4 weeks) to get you up to speed on language X in exchange for an engaged and valuable employee. But that might just be my company.
• johngrefe 13y ago
  I've only ever had more job offers, recruiters, even offered a gig at an accelerator as an exec advisor. This was USA focused. In the UK attitudes are horrible though, there is a stigma where if you fail your first entrepreneurial enterprise, you are somehow blackmarked for life. I think that just because of this there are lots of start ups in the UK, where the founders have not killed them because they are not working. There is a point where you know something is not going to work, and you should kill it, this stigma breeds a lot of waste.
• sfjailbird 13y ago
  For big corporations, having been an entrepreneur is a negative on your resumé. They will assume (probably correctly) that you prefer to work on your own, and that you will be less of a heads-down, "team player" type engineer which is easy to manage/throw around. Like it or not, the IT field is largely made up of this type of position. If you are applying such a place you should remove, spin or tone down your entrepreneurial endeavors. For nimbler and more clued-in companies it will likely be a positive, since they are usually happy to have someone who doesn't settle for a comfortable desk jockey position at a corporation, and can handle the turmoil of younger companies. Only thing to be aware of is if you are applying for a technical position, they usually want someone who is happy to fill that niche, i.e. not a jack-of-all-trades who can code but also wants to be a salesman and a marketer etc. (Unless you are employee number one or two or somesuch). These are lessons learned over a decade of being a corporate consultant, a freelancer, a startup employee and a startup founder.
  • at-fates-hands 13y ago
    >>> These are lessons learned over a decade of being a corporate consultant, a freelancer, a startup employee and a startup founder. Great advice and something I can confirm. Worked at two smaller start ups and they loved the idea I could think outside the box and wouldn't be bothered by a fast moving, sometimes chaotic process. Since then, I've been in the corporate world. First few interviews I was proud of the start up work I did. Didn't get either job. Was told by a recruiter to tone my start up stuff down and communicate that I'm a more of "team" player. Next interviewed with a fortune 500 corp. Played down my start up experience while highlighting some of my successes and focusing on the bigger "team" wins. Used the same formula in the last two interviews with success as well at large corporations.
• jmngomes 13y ago
  I'd venture in saying that if recruiters have any kind of idea of what it is to build a startup, they'll consider it a major plus. That being said, and considering what you usually see from recruiters, I'd say they'd have to be in a startup to know... At a startup you're put into a situation where you are under major pressure and you're constantly faced with tough/unsolved problems and or all imaginable difficulties when it comes to sales. This can be an amazing growth experience, depending on how you deal with it. 7 months into my startup, I find that I've grown by leaps and bounds when compared to my former jobs, where I was already quite entrepreneurial. As to an eventual stigma in the UK, it's only worse in other EU countries; I know it is in mine. Here, people are more valued for obedience rather than for entrepreneurial attitude.
• timharding 13y ago
  I interviewed someone who had a failed startup. He couldn't tell me what he would do differently if he was to do it all over again. It didn't fill me with confidence that he's learned anything during the experience. Make sure you can answer that question when you start interviewing.
• codex 13y ago
  Unfortunately many employers may assume that you're more experienced with failure than success. Failure can be a teacher, but success can as well.
• iends 13y ago
  Craft a narrative about your startup experiences that addresses any concerns the hiring company may have. For example, when the startup I worked for ended abruptly while I was out of the country (and came back without a job), it was easy for me to talk about wanting more stability in jobs I interviewed with. I also talked about working til 2am regularly, and hoping to scale back those hours to something more reasonable so that I could spend time with my wife. When I knew the company I was interviewing with had better technical processes, I talked about getting overwhelmed that it was standard practice to push to production at 3am when nobody was using the service and debug things live. Would I use the same narrative when interviewing with another startup? No. Instead I talk about loving the flexibility to work until 2am, being able to eat lunch with my wife more while working from home, and not having to jump through hoops to deploy code to production.
• tbrownaw 13y ago
  Anything that shows initiative is a large plus (other things we care about are basic techical competence and, and jasonkester said, whether we like talking to you). Working at a startup probably shows some amount of initiative, since said startup wouldn't keep you around otherwise. Showing less initiative (and less apparent willingness to learn) would mean you would need to show greater technical skills.
• deleted 13y ago
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• paulbjensen 13y ago
  I was let go from a social networking startup because I wasn't implementing features as fast as they wanted. At the time it felt like a death sentence on my career as a programmer. I spent about a week in the doldrums, but then I felt angry, and decided I wasn't going to let their decision define me. I decided to build an app to show what I could do. I spent 2 1/2 months building an app called Dashku. It was a realtime dashboard, and when I put it on Hacker News, it went to #1 within 45 minutes, and then the server fucked up because the ulimit config on the app server (which I had set but not persisted between reboots) was 1024, and got the flak I deserved for not making sure that the ulimit config has persisted when I configured the machines. After doing it, these things happened: - Bechtel contacted me and asked if they could use it internally. They did. - I had a meeting with Geckoboard. They asked if I wanted to work for them, and I offered to sell Dashku to them. No bite. - I interviewed at Forward Labs in London. I had about 4 interviews in the space of 2-3 days, but did not get the job offer. I failed to refactor a fill detection algorithm which was functional and fully tested, but memory inefficient. I had stayed up all night to crack it, slept for 2 hours and had no food when I came in for the interview and was asked to refactor it. ProTip: Sleep well and eat before you go for an interview, otherwise your brain suffers for it. Eventually, I got a job in London working for webcasting company, and then open sourced Dashku. Here's what happened next: - Ninja Blocks gave me a free Ninja Block, and asked me if I would like to work with them. - An Indian health startup asked to integrate Dashku into their IoT robotics app. - A BI startup basically took Dashku, slapped a coat of paint on it, and called it their own. - Another IoT startup asked to use it. - An energy company told me they were going to drop Geckoboard for my app. - I discovered a professional social network (called Viadeo) had created a wonderful collection of widgets for it. Then, - I got an email from someone at Facebook, they said that they were evaluating it for internal use, and asked me if I would like to interview with them in California. I had to decline as my mother has health problems and I could not move to another country. All of this, within 14 months of being fired from a startup. Failure feels like crap, but don't let it define who you are; you have to move on and prove to yourself and to others what you can achieve. I've done that now and found peace with that period in my life. I should probably thank the guy who fired me.
  • kohanz 13y ago
    Bravo for creating your own opportunities and thank you for sharing your story!
• igorgue 13y ago
  I had someone turn me down for a programming job because they said my GPA was too high That's called a lie. Similar to the it wasn't a good fit one, most of the time there's another reason, maybe you weren't not that great of a programmer, or they didn't like your editor or tools. From 10 years of experience working for a lot of companies and starting and failing some companies I can tell you, if they like you, they'll hire you even if you're an ex-convict. At a company I worked at we hired a guy with a recent conviction (battery). Great programmer nonetheless and he said was trying to get his shit together. There was something weird about him, like he smoked crack in the morning... But hey, he wrote good code and was never a problem, in fact he was the first one in the office.
  • michaelt 13y ago
    I've got a buddy who has a mail order business, he hires people to put things into envelopes and stick on labels. He tells me when he hires people with degrees and advanced education and stuff they tend to quit because the job is boring, as well as being poorly paid and having no career advancement opportunities. Perhaps the job was the programming equivalent of putting things into envelopes.
    • dismiss21x 13y ago
      I've heard a story that someone with a PhD couldn't find a job in his field after being laid off, so he started applying to other lower-paying fields. He eventually removed the PhD from his resume, because he realized he was not being hired as employers saw him as 'overqualified' and likely to quit.
      • deleted 13y ago
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      • igorgue 13y ago
        That's what he said, probably he was a bad programmer too. We also hired a PhD and the guy couldn't write code to safe his life, he, of course, applied to the programming position. It made me sad he complained about us using an editor and not a IDE. Real life is very different than school, very different.
• kilocore 13y ago
  Depends on geography and industry. e.g. in Europe/UK it would make it hard to get recruiters to take interest; but if you're for example a world class ios/game developer it doesnt really matter.
• frankdenbow 13y ago
  I've been helping folks who are new to the startup world get jobs at startups in nyc. The short answer is no: having failed (especially in the industry you are looking for a job in) can be immensely helpful. Companies I have spoken to like having someone with some skin in the game, and that have learned some lessons that can be carried over to their business.
• bsbechtel 13y ago
  Yes, for certain industries and positions...most especially outside of entrepreneurial hotbeds.
• jpeg_hero 13y ago
  In a word: yes. It ain't all roses. You can find that it f's up your resume. Example: maybe your startup takes 5-yrs to fail. Maybe for year 3 and the last half of year 5 you just kind of wallowed around the house, and didn't do much. You will try to start circulating again and trying to get a job because your savings are gone. You'll find things quite different in 2019 ( do the math). There are different people in the hiring positions with different mind sets, looking for different skills. This is just one example of how things can go bad. But, for me, it's worth it to take the risk.
• mnw21cam 13y ago
  Yes, I know it's only a lmgtfy away, but what's GPA? Some American thing?
  • mctx 13y ago
    Grade Point Average - we have it in Australia too
  • gamegoblin 13y ago
    Grade Point Average. Unsurprisingly, it is a way of averaging your grades (so that the whole of your academic career is compressed to one real number). In the American system, the grades A,B,C,D,F are mapped to the numbers 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 0.0, respectively. Your GPA is a weighted average of your grades from 0.0-4.0 Usually a 3.0+ is considered to be decent.
    • mnw21cam 13y ago
      Thanks. I only commented because, well, there's a whole 95% of the world out there that won't know what a GPA is, and it'd be wonderful if region-specific stuff was kept out of submission comments. "Grades" is only three more characters than "GPA".
• codingdave 13y ago
  No. There are always questions of why the startup failed, what your role was, and what could have made it succeed. Your answers could save you or sink you. But most people have at least some sense of the ups and downs of startups, so it will not automatically remove you from consideration for almost anything. They will want to see that you have learned something. They also will want to know your personal reaction to the experience, and whether that will make you a more or less stable hire. Maybe your failure made you hungry for another startup, more fired up to succeed. Maybe it burned you out on startups, and you now want a stable corporate gig for a few years. Maybe something in between. As long as your answers, your personality, and current desires match their needs, you can get a job. Maybe you are not a match for every job out there, but nobody ever is.
• deleted 13y ago
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• fmavituna 13y ago
  As an employer I'm quite cautious about hiring people who previously ran one or more startups. The chances they've got the "Entrepreneurial Bug". The obvious advantage is that it's quite likely that they'll be well rounded, knows different stuff and got lots of experience in the world, there are tons of great skills especially found in founders. At the same time the chances are he/she will be leaving the company after 9 months, because she just discovered "the next best thing" and want to work on that because she saved some money in the last 9 months. I try to talk the person and understand what's the long term plan, whether they are actually committed or just want to take a breath and get financially better in between projects.
  • pavlov 13y ago
    If the person does great work for those 9 months, why do you prioritize commitment? Would you really prefer to hire someone who will perform worse but makes you feel better because you know he probably won't get a job elsewhere or have independent ideas? Isn't that the very definition of "B people hire C people"?
    • f7t7ft7 13y ago
      Heh, I hear that off and on and I'm curious where that comes from. Is it just something that people repeat because it sounds good, or is there solid evidence for it?
      • ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
        No one wants to hire someone that can take their job in 6 months. People don't like hiring threats to themselves.
    • snom380 13y ago
      No, he might prefer to wait with hiring someone. In some jobs, it can take a few months just getting a person up to speed, certified etc, so hiring someone is an investment.
    • kennethtilton 13y ago
• scrdhrt 13y ago
  I had a startup fail a couple of years ago, nothing big but enough to be sort of known to the local market place. After failing to raise enough capital to keep it going, I had to pull the plug, and consequently look for a job my self. This is when I realized that employers who care about the wording "failed" emphasize the same in the work place. I struggled to continue on to final interviews in every case where the employer spent more than a couple of minutes discussing WHY my startup failed, instead of discussing what we did successfully. This became super obvious when I met with people who asked what we did successfully, and really didn't care about that it failed. The hard part is to be lucky enough to meet the people that don't care that my startup failed, and who believes what I did is more important.
• mkramlich 13y ago
  My general rule is that if someone wants it to work, it will. if they truly want you, they will. many people, arguably everybody, is interacting more with the mental contstructs in their head than with the physical reality and true nature of the other party. Last person with qualities X burned you? The next person you see with qualities X you'll superimpose upon them that expectation, and treat them accordingly, perhaps causing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do both parties want to come to some arrangement where they engage in mutual tangible reciprocity? Then they will. But if at least one party does not, it won't happen. The "takes two to tango" phenomenon, or the logical AND operator. But you only have control over yourself, not another party. You can try to communicate better, you can try to reduce your exposure to being falsely bitten/categorized, but you can never eliminate it. Everybody brings their own baggage to a relationship, whether personal, business or employment-wise.
• DenisM 13y ago
  There are amazingly few first-hand accounts in this thread, and far too many "I do/do not think it should, because I imagine blah...".
• f7t7ft7 13y ago
  I have been in interview debriefs where people were concerned about a candidate not advancing enough in a previous position, but I can't imagine one failed startup being detrimental, at least where I currently work if you get interviewed by those same exact people. :) The important thing is what you can talk about from the startup.
• rada 13y ago
  I'm not worried about the major markets (Silicon Valley and New York) but about the rest. I am in Minneapolis and my resume has "founder" on it. I've had no problems finding employment. In my current job, it actually helped me get hired: my boss specifically wanted to assemble a team of entrepreneurially minded people. In my previous job, it didn't help but it didn't hurt either. So my personal anecdata says it's not a problem at all.
• Mankhool 13y ago
  No, but I had trouble getting a job after working abroad for 10 years. There was huge unspoken resentment from most employers that I had dared to leave Canada to work elsewhere. In her book, "Eight Months on Gaza Street", Hilary Mantel wrote something like, "It's almost as if by going away that you were offering some criticism of their own lives". That's exactly what it felt like.
• ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
  Every time I post my failures on HN I get like 3-5 freelance job offers. Posting my successes doesn't get me anything. ===== Psychological Theory on Why ===== - Employers may feel threatened by you if you are successful. - Employers may feel that you will leave them. - Employers want a subordinate they can control. - Employers want YOU to empower THEIR company, not them empowering you and you leaving with the knowledge and experience they helped give you.
• brianbarker 13y ago
  We interviewed a guy who had a startup and he definitely got rejected for it. I didn't agree at all and thought he'd be good, but other guys thought he "wouldn't be able to take directions since he's not in charge now." Bullshit. Oh well. People are dumb.
• meira 13y ago
  I'm having some bad times seeking for a job after my startup failed. But I can talk only about my experience and the brazillian startup ecossystem. I worked on Engarte for the last 2 years. In this 2 years, I learned a lot about startup management and growth, but on the other hand, my technical skills stuck in time. But I don't feel like this is the main reason for the troubles in finding a job. Headhunters seems to get a little scared when they realize that as soon as I can, I'll start another project. And so, they think that I'll not be in the company in the next 1 or 2 years. Perhaps we don't have a lot of successful startups in Brazil, the failure is threatened in a very bad way here, very different from the US and SV concept.
  • jhhn 13y ago
    Well... I prefer to say that I worked as freelancer or even as a employee, only describing the project and how I participated technically, strongly avoiding to mention shareholding in companies or startups. Even doing it, I already heard from recruiters that the position is not suitable to me because I'm seeing to be a lot autodidact only due to my diversity of experience in technical areas without any related formal education. Sometimes I think that there are not positions in Brazilian labor market for who is really competent and resourceful. They prefer to hire a bigger set of poorly prepared people because this is how the corrupt outsourcing market makes money.
    • meira 13y ago
      Agree with it, people here in Brazil prefer to hire 2 bad developers rather than 1 really good one.
• jsun 13y ago
  no, failing at a startup won't prevent you from getting hired however making us feel like you're just going to collect a paycheck while waiting for your next thing to take off probably will. tread carefully on how much you want to rep your startup experience.