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Comment by Perados | Hacker News Reader

My boss is a very experienced guy, he founded many companies and he is basically wanting to "test" me. At least that is what he says, but I definitely think he has what it takes to steer the ship correctly. We are currently being incubated, and all our mentors are very successful entrepreneurs and just by asking them the same question I posted here, I already learnt a lot.

How would I survive? A loan maybe? I can survive with less than 1000 $us a month. So far I've been surviving with a part-time job, but as a CTO I would need to work full time, so that would not be an option anymore. Savings? None. Backup plan? Well, getting a normal software engineering job, and an average life I guess.

Yes, I would probably have to help building the product as well. I am up to the challenge, it is just a little bit scary.

Thank you very much for your answer.

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No problem.

It'll be good to get an understanding of "if you're not being compensated by salary then what are you compensated with?"

It sounds like you're literally taking the same amount of risk as your boss and for that reason, you should have some share in whatever rewards that come out of the risk taking.

Money to survive has to come from somewhere (i.e. loan, parents, savings, etc.) but it definitely doesn't appear out of nowhere.

Also, evaluate the product. How long do you think they can reach the point where it's revenue generating? In the absence of revenue and cash runs out, will they start to fund raise again? Will all the other expenses be comfortably covered by the current cash pool?

It also comes down to a lot of luck as well. There's really no right or wrong answer here and no one can say for sure if it'll be a success or not. But that's the fun part of life. And trust me, even if you have a normal software engineering job, the success is also always down to you. And the benefits are that you manage to build relationships with other talented software developers and you'd be bringing in money that you can save to start your own venture in the future. Many people have also been very successful starting companies later down in life.

Nothing is ever a dead end. Every path has a pros and cons. It's ultimately up to us to open our minds to see it and leverage it.

There are lots of successful entrepreneurs in the world. Very few of them have success building startups in the sense that Silicon Valley uses the word. Much of what passes for a startup these days is a new small business and successful small business entrepreneurs often bring successful small business practices such as not paying employees for hours worked to their mentoring advice.

Would you take out a loan to work at a hotel or dry cleaners or construction company? That this is even on the table shows how disinterested people in a form of mutual success that includes you.

My experience is that before people screw me, they display tells. An unwillingness to pay is the most obvious. Take the CTO position without salary and it will be easy for people to rationalize not paying you based on your already having accepted not being paid. If your internship was also unpaid, that's probably the reason that the unpaid CTO position is being floated.

It's not any better if your internship was paid. An upaid CTO position then signals a willingness to take a pay cut and call it a promotion.

> My boss is a very experienced guy, he founded many companies

Forgive me for possibly appearing to attack your boss here as it's not my intention, but do you know what happened to those companies? Without that information for all you know they went bankrupt as he kept making interns the CxO

As for surviving without income all I can say is don't take debt lightly. While in my case I can only blame myself I was in debt for the majority of the past 10 years due to supplementing low income. Eventually the loans/overdrafts/cards stop coming and you're dead in the water without a paddle.

If this company does not succeed before that point (where success is defined as the company not only being funded but much more importantly - you actually get paid) you will have gotten into debt for no reason. It's a very risky move, one which I would never advise someone do for another person's company unless they had a really good reason to disagree with me

>> My boss is a very experienced guy, he founded many companies

He is experienced in what? In ripping of the interns? He as a "very experienced guy" is not able to get a loan of 6k and to pay you 1k monthly in cash until the company gets founded or dies? He wants to test you? Yeah, he wants to see whether you are ready to work for free!

Come on, that must be a joke!

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