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> Or just buy a lottery ticket. I'd argue the odds are much similar, with much less effort. No one pays you a salary to buy lottery tickets. Wage income or RS

by rdl 13y ago

> Or just buy a lottery ticket. I'd argue the odds are much similar, with much less effort. No one pays you a salary to buy lottery tickets. Wage income or RSUs from Google, Apple, etc. are pretty low risk. Wage income and options from a post-B successful company are pretty low risk, too (e.g. if you're an IT guy at Dropbox, you probably make $80-120k in salary, and the bar to be hired as an internal IT support person is a whole lot lower than lead developer at a 1-10 person startup. You'll get some equity upside which is pretty much guaranteed to be worth something -- if Dropbox IPOs at $10b, it's worth $x, and if it goes up to $30-40b (which is speculative), it's worth more -- but it seems unlikely Dropbox would be worth <$5b, and very unlikely less than $1b, and your salary checks from the previous 4 years would not be taken back even if Dropbox somehow goes out of business.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
"...a startling 93% of the companies that get accepted by Y Combinator eventually fail.": http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-... Good luck picking that 7% that won't, AND that's only Y Combinator startups. Lottery tickets it is.
- rdl 13y ago
  Being engineer #1-5 at a doomed-to-eventually-fail company, say Color, is actually still a better bet than being engineer #102303 at Microsoft in a lot of ways. Your equity is worth less (often worthless, sometimes not), but you get other upside.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    It all depends on your outcome. Also, I didn't know who I was conversing with. Checked out your profile, and am humbled.
- argonaut 13y ago
  Did you even read the article carefully? The 7% figure corresponds to $40MM+ exits for YC. There are a huge, absolutely huge number of YC startups that get acquired for less than that. Many of those are acquihires ($<1MM-5MM) where the founders make probably as much as they would if they had taken a corporate job, except they now have the invaluable experience and credibility of having founded a company; others are small acquisitions where the founders still make a profit ($5MM-40MM). rdl is suggesting you pick top startups that are post Series B and which already have multi-hundred-million to billion dollar valuations (think: Stripe, Pinterest, Airbnb). He is not suggesting you join a 5 person YC startup that is still trying to get product market fit. Hugely different categories. rdl is essentially suggesting you work for the roughly one YC company out of every batch that becomes a great success - and that you make that leap when the startup had already proved itself. From reading your other posts it seems like you are willfully misunderstanding his point.

by rdl 13y ago

toomuchtodo 13y ago

"...a startling 93% of the companies that get accepted by Y Combinator eventually fail.": http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-... Good luck picking that 7% that won't, AND that's only Y Combinator startups. Lottery tickets it is.

rdl 13y ago
Being engineer #1-5 at a doomed-to-eventually-fail company, say Color, is actually still a better bet than being engineer #102303 at Microsoft in a lot of ways. Your equity is worth less (often worthless, sometimes not), but you get other upside.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  It all depends on your outcome. Also, I didn't know who I was conversing with. Checked out your profile, and am humbled.
argonaut 13y ago
Did you even read the article carefully? The 7% figure corresponds to $40MM+ exits for YC. There are a huge, absolutely huge number of YC startups that get acquired for less than that. Many of those are acquihires ($<1MM-5MM) where the founders make probably as much as they would if they had taken a corporate job, except they now have the invaluable experience and credibility of having founded a company; others are small acquisitions where the founders still make a profit ($5MM-40MM). rdl is suggesting you pick top startups that are post Series B and which already have multi-hundred-million to billion dollar valuations (think: Stripe, Pinterest, Airbnb). He is not suggesting you join a 5 person YC startup that is still trying to get product market fit. Hugely different categories. rdl is essentially suggesting you work for the roughly one YC company out of every batch that becomes a great success - and that you make that leap when the startup had already proved itself. From reading your other posts it seems like you are willfully misunderstanding his point.