Engineer #2 at Mint.com on when to join a startup | Hacker News Reader

Engineer #2 at Mint.com on when to join a startup

femgineer.com

94 pointsaditya19 comments

I'd only recommend doing that once, however. After that you're better off being a founder if you like the risk, or a later employee if you don't.

Being a very early employee means you get paid in knowledge and seniority, instead of equity or salary. You hit diminishing returns when you do it again.

Signed, a guy who has been employee #1 at three startups. ymmv, etc.

Well, as one who has been sub employee #10 at two startups that managed to make it to 500 employees, (One of which sold for $1.6B, fingers crossed on #2 going out for north of $1B), I'd suggest that there is a certain class of employee who can act in a supporting role, but isn't necessarily going to create the product.

Salary/Equity are usually pretty good in VC funded startups (As opposed to Self Funded/Angel Funded - where I agree, be the founder or come in later on)

Of course, I totally agree, ymmv - You apparently have seen the low end of the return, whereas I've seen the alternate.

If you can pick startups that well, I suggest a career in venture capital as an alternative to (presumably) engineering. :)

And you get the credential of being "employee #X at foo" if foo does well.

For example, it might add credibility to a blog post (see title) or new startup ( http://bizeebee.com/ )

ymmv = your mileage may vary

first time i've seen that one.

It's ancient. Maybe by now it's retro and making a comeback.

I think the most important part is - "but the bigger benefit is you know how the entire system is architected and the code you’ve written impacts millions of people".

Seriously, you feel empowered when you know why the system is architected this way and not that way. Its immense satisfaction when you can see through how the entire flow works, how a new feature fits into the bigger product vision, how to debug complex issues by traversing through bunch of different code hierarchies/directories, etc.

You get this kind of wisdom only when you're in the those first few.

On the side note, it would be great to hear first-hand stories from her about how she got hired, how much salary + equity (in approx. range) she received, how was the performance rewards system for an early engineer.

Best part of the article is in the comments:

“'I quit my Masters at Stanford because I knew I’d learn a ton more working on the ground floor of a startup than I would sitting in a classroom.'

I don’t recall a lot of sitting in class on your part."

Heh, the commenter was her old Stanford professor, and the link he provided to his website goes to a PDF of his CS249 final exam. Harsh :P

wow, and he's not just a random dude, either ... he has a long and illustrious history with silicon valley start-ups:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cheriton

EDIT: notable line from wikipedia article: "Cheriton is also credited for connecting Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page with venture capitalists at Kleiner Perkins, thus becoming one of the early investors that helped get Google off the ground."

Going off topic now, but nice to see that someone who doesn't have to, still teaches.

From wikipedia: "University of Waterloo announced that Cheriton had donated $25 million to support graduate studies and research", "Cheriton donated $2 million to the University of British Columbia".

Sergey Brin's dad is still a teacher :-)

That was funny.

I wonder if she's right about what you learn at a Stanford master's program. I don't feel like I got a great undergraduate education and sometimes daydream that I could learn it all properly if I got into a good master's program like Stanford. I've been doing web startups since undergrad. The stuff you learn at a startup is wildly different from what you learn in school. A lot of the stuff I've learned on the job, I wish I could forget. If only there was a pill I could take that would allow me to regain all the neural pathways now taken up by UNIX arcana.

I've been at 3 startups and if you want to _learn_, you better get a job at an established tech company with a solid R&D. Startups are too focused on "ship early&often" which doesn't leave any room for R&D. An average startup will teach the fastest possible assembly of open-sourced blocks together for yet another "big" sales call or a VC presentation. If only I had a dollar for every time I've heard "how many weeks do we need to build this?" There is a limited set of things you can build in 2-3 weeks which is worth learning.

Yeah, I've been employee < 10 at 3 startups, too. I know exactly what you learn at startups. :)

Great description of what life is like as a "ground floor engineer". It's true, you work constantly and have to be a generalist. In exchange, you get an incredibly rewarding job where you get to watch the company grow up around you.

'...365 days at the very least for the first year.' I guess the second year must be a leap year :-)

Seriously though, this is a great article and I admire anyone who is able to provide this level of commitment and passion.

I understand the very first engineer at mint actually shared Aaron Patzer's apartment. Maybe you can join a little too early too :-) Seriously, I think it all worked out ok.

RTF4HWKWK

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