16 ms·

To expand on your last point there: if you do work for a startup, pay attention to everything, and learn from all the things that get done well and all the thi

by akeefer 17y ago

To expand on your last point there: if you do work for a startup, pay attention to everything, and learn from all the things that get done well and all the things that don't. There's a lot to learn and a lot to screw up. For example: Did you hire well? Did you grow the team too slowly or too quickly? Did your development process work well? Did it adapt as your product and team matured? Was the management transparent in the right ways? If the company grew, how did it handle the addition of new employees, new customers to support, and new or larger product offerings? How was your employee retention and burnout? And so on . . . There are invaluable lessons that you can really only learn by going through those things, and you can still learn them (and perhaps even be more objective about it) when you're not a founder. And if your startup isn't transparent enough that you can learn those sorts of lessons, you should consider that a major strike against it.

nostrademons 17y ago
> you can still learn them (and perhaps even be more objective about it) when you're not a founder. I wonder, sometimes, how true that is. I went into the startup world for exactly that reason: I wanted to start my own company eventually, knew that I didn't have the knowledge or experience to do it immediately, so I figured I'd learn the ropes on somebody else's dime. I picked companies that would give me a lot of responsibility, and ones where I could directly observe what the founders did and why they did it. And I took careful mental notes whenever something worked well or didn't work well, and resolved to do the same thing (or not do it) when I started my own company. And then I actually did start my own company, and found that I made nearly every mistake that my old bosses had made, I just made them in new ways, and stopped making them a little quicker. I found there're three main problems with the "learn how to start your own company by working at someone else's company" school of thought: 1.) There are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed. Therefore, if you pick any random strategy out of a random company, and you don't yet know whether the company is failing or succeeding, it's probably a failing strategy. Orson Scott Card once said, "There are a million wrong ways to tell a story, and a thousand right ways." That's probably true of entrepreneurship too, just multiply the numbers by a few orders of magnitude. 2.) If you haven't yet worked at a successful company, you probably don't know how to tell the difference between a successful strategy and a failing one. A lot of the things I respected most about my past employers turned out to be mistakes. For example, one of them was big on code ownership, and seeing how hard coders worked at getting their code running, I thought it was a great way to encourage people to take pride in the code they produce. Another was building a platform for financial apps, and I thought they were geniuses for their strategic insight - after all, they get recurring revenue and their customers can't easily switch away. It was only after I tried building a platform myself that this reached the top of the list for "things startups should never do" - and given the number of YC startups that get funded with their own webapp platforms, I guess lots of other founders haven't yet learned that either. 3.) Many times mistakes don't look like mistakes, because the circumstances that surround them are different. Very occasionally, they aren't mistakes, because the circumstances that surround them are different. For example, while I was building my platform to create casual games, I thought I'd sidestep all the complexity & adoption problems my financial employer had faced, because I was purposely limiting the scope of my platform to games and wasn't trying to have it do everything. I found that no, the platform part really was the problem, and no matter how much I polished it up, that approach just didn't work.
- akeefer 17y ago
  All very valid points. I might suggest that the longer you're with a company the easier it is to discern success from failure, at least. Something that looks like a good idea in year one might look terrible by year three or four. I have no idea how that applies to your personal experiences, though. I haven't yet left my first startup-employee experience (after more than 7 years), so perhaps it's too early for me to say I've learned that much, since I haven't really had to put that knowledge to the test (except when it comes to correcting problems and making forward-looking decisions). I certainly feel like I've seen a lot of things done well and a lot of things done not so well, and like I've been around long enough to see many of those decisions play out for a fairly long time. I don't think I would be able to say that if I'd only been here for one or two years. On some level, though, you personally often have to make mistakes in order to learn from them; as much as we all want to learn from the mistakes of others, it's hard. So perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and will be doomed to a future of repeating mistakes that I should theoretically know better than to make . . . ask me again in ten years, I guess . . .
- smg 17y ago
  Do you find working for google better preparation for your next startup?
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    Hard to say - I find that I'm a lot more confident technically than I was beforehand. Like many younger founders, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I'd do if I had to scale, if I had to internationalize, how to deploy to multiple servers, what should I log, etc. I knew intellectually how those things worked (and that I shouldn't worry about them), but I'd never had firsthand experience with a product that needed them. And now I have, and it's not really a big deal. Plus I've got a bunch more experience with algorithms and data collection, and the quality standards at Google are higher than at many of the startups I've worked at. I'm also a lot less scared of big companies, having worked in one and having some sense of how they operate. I certainly wouldn't challenge a big company head-on in its core competency, but knowing how hard it is to gain executive attention for little market niches, I wouldn't be scared at all of them as a startup. OTOH, there're some things that if you just naively copy from Google, you'll fail miserably in the startup world. There're different tradeoffs for risk vs. reward, and for quality vs. time to market. And I'm much more comfortable with ambiguity having worked in startups. I feel like I'm a better programmer through having worked at Google, but a better entrepreneur through having worked at startups. Moreover, the time in startups taught me that being a good programmer/marketer/salesman is more important than being a good entrepreneur when you're starting a company. Worry about the product, not the trappings. If you have the chance, I'd really recommend working in both a large, well-functioning company and a couple startups before starting your own. They're both really important perspectives.

by akeefer 17y ago

nostrademons 17y ago

> you can still learn them (and perhaps even be more objective about it) when you're not a founder. I wonder, sometimes, how true that is. I went into the startup world for exactly that reason: I wanted to start my own company eventually, knew that I didn't have the knowledge or experience to do it immediately, so I figured I'd learn the ropes on somebody else's dime. I picked companies that would give me a lot of responsibility, and ones where I could directly observe what the founders did and why they did it. And I took careful mental notes whenever something worked well or didn't work well, and resolved to do the same thing (or not do it) when I started my own company. And then I actually did start my own company, and found that I made nearly every mistake that my old bosses had made, I just made them in new ways, and stopped making them a little quicker. I found there're three main problems with the "learn how to start your own company by working at someone else's company" school of thought: 1.) There are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed. Therefore, if you pick any random strategy out of a random company, and you don't yet know whether the company is failing or succeeding, it's probably a failing strategy. Orson Scott Card once said, "There are a million wrong ways to tell a story, and a thousand right ways." That's probably true of entrepreneurship too, just multiply the numbers by a few orders of magnitude. 2.) If you haven't yet worked at a successful company, you probably don't know how to tell the difference between a successful strategy and a failing one. A lot of the things I respected most about my past employers turned out to be mistakes. For example, one of them was big on code ownership, and seeing how hard coders worked at getting their code running, I thought it was a great way to encourage people to take pride in the code they produce. Another was building a platform for financial apps, and I thought they were geniuses for their strategic insight - after all, they get recurring revenue and their customers can't easily switch away. It was only after I tried building a platform myself that this reached the top of the list for "things startups should never do" - and given the number of YC startups that get funded with their own webapp platforms, I guess lots of other founders haven't yet learned that either. 3.) Many times mistakes don't look like mistakes, because the circumstances that surround them are different. Very occasionally, they aren't mistakes, because the circumstances that surround them are different. For example, while I was building my platform to create casual games, I thought I'd sidestep all the complexity & adoption problems my financial employer had faced, because I was purposely limiting the scope of my platform to games and wasn't trying to have it do everything. I found that no, the platform part really was the problem, and no matter how much I polished it up, that approach just didn't work.

akeefer 17y ago
All very valid points. I might suggest that the longer you're with a company the easier it is to discern success from failure, at least. Something that looks like a good idea in year one might look terrible by year three or four. I have no idea how that applies to your personal experiences, though. I haven't yet left my first startup-employee experience (after more than 7 years), so perhaps it's too early for me to say I've learned that much, since I haven't really had to put that knowledge to the test (except when it comes to correcting problems and making forward-looking decisions). I certainly feel like I've seen a lot of things done well and a lot of things done not so well, and like I've been around long enough to see many of those decisions play out for a fairly long time. I don't think I would be able to say that if I'd only been here for one or two years. On some level, though, you personally often have to make mistakes in order to learn from them; as much as we all want to learn from the mistakes of others, it's hard. So perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and will be doomed to a future of repeating mistakes that I should theoretically know better than to make . . . ask me again in ten years, I guess . . .
smg 17y ago
Do you find working for google better preparation for your next startup?
- nostrademons 17y ago
  Hard to say - I find that I'm a lot more confident technically than I was beforehand. Like many younger founders, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I'd do if I had to scale, if I had to internationalize, how to deploy to multiple servers, what should I log, etc. I knew intellectually how those things worked (and that I shouldn't worry about them), but I'd never had firsthand experience with a product that needed them. And now I have, and it's not really a big deal. Plus I've got a bunch more experience with algorithms and data collection, and the quality standards at Google are higher than at many of the startups I've worked at. I'm also a lot less scared of big companies, having worked in one and having some sense of how they operate. I certainly wouldn't challenge a big company head-on in its core competency, but knowing how hard it is to gain executive attention for little market niches, I wouldn't be scared at all of them as a startup. OTOH, there're some things that if you just naively copy from Google, you'll fail miserably in the startup world. There're different tradeoffs for risk vs. reward, and for quality vs. time to market. And I'm much more comfortable with ambiguity having worked in startups. I feel like I'm a better programmer through having worked at Google, but a better entrepreneur through having worked at startups. Moreover, the time in startups taught me that being a good programmer/marketer/salesman is more important than being a good entrepreneur when you're starting a company. Worry about the product, not the trappings. If you have the chance, I'd really recommend working in both a large, well-functioning company and a couple startups before starting your own. They're both really important perspectives.