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Comment by byosko | Hacker News Reader

The intention isn't to get detailed financials necessarily. "Profitable" is a pretty good indicator of some level of success. The issue is more with pre-revenue or pre-profit startups that are "burning cash" and have X amount of time to live. That's important data for an employee.

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Sure. I think what I'm getting at is that the questions seem to implicitly assume anyone applying to a start-up is looking at a company that is (a) externally funded, and (b) not yet profitable. There's a lot of hero worship around here about getting early stage funding and Ramen profitability, but in the real world there are plenty of other possibilities.

Yes, the questions are targeted to a specific type of startup, although not necessarily one with huge funding.

But the questions don't change drastically in other types of startup either. Maybe some of the financials do, but questions about founders, business fundamentals, metrics that are focused on, how employees are assessed, etc. remain true regardless of whether it's a funded startup, bootstrapped, revenue generating, profitable or otherwise.

Most of the things you mentioned remain true for any prospective employer, though, whether it's any form of start-up or already established. Only the financial questions from the original set were particularly start-up specific, and those are the ones where I see a bias in the article, because a different approach would be appropriate depending on the nature of the start-up.

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