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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

Two things struck me, one kind of minor - a Pentium 66? In 1997 my desktop machine at my new startup job was a Pentium Pro 200. It replaced the SGI Indy R4400 200 from my previous startup job. No offices with doors, though, of course.

The other thing was, and I don't mean these questions in a derogatory way, how do you start working for Microsoft in 1997, of all years. And how do you stay there for 12 years running? What kind of startup employee will you be when the only professional environment you have known is Microsoft? I'm not suggesting that there aren't perfectly excellent, sensible answers to all of these, and obviously his new employer thinks so. I just can't personally conceive what they are.

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What kind of startup employee will you be when the only professional environment you have known is Microsoft?

Good thing he's not going to a startup, he's going to Facebook.

Facebook, behemoth that it is, is still a startup. We get a little carried away calling every little personal website project a startup and perhaps that's just right for the forum. But don't get tunnel vision. Facebook is a startup.

Then how do we categorize a startup if not by age (Facebook is already 5 years old) and size (hundreds of employees, billions in stock)?

If you have more money privately invested than money earned, you're probably a startup. If you're searching for a repeatable, scalable business model, you're probably a startup.

Or, your business might be a failure, yet past the point of being a startup. Clearly Facebook does not qualify as a failure, but they are not a startup in my estimation. They're an established business.

It is pretty arbitrary and Facebook is a late-stage startup but hundreds of employees, sky-high valuation and five years of age are not unheard of and still within 'startup' range, to me. Mushy factors include things like culture, innovation, risk. I'd say 'run by founder' also adds startup points.

I would suggest stock value more than 50x peak profit probably works. A 5 year old billion dollar company that is never made more than 1 million a year is probably still a startup. A 3 year old 10 million dollar company that made 500k last year is probably not.

So, the business is a 'startup' until it makes it?

Only if it's valued more than past revenues would suggest. IMO, Tesla Motors is still a startup Google is not. What separates them has more to do with the stability that comes from profit than it does an IPO or company culture.

By growth rate. Even a large company could be a startup if it doubles in size in a year.

>hundreds of employees Thousands, even. 1400+, according to Wikipedia.

Surely 1400+ is only one thousand and so not "thousands"; whilst it is 14 hundreds and so is "hundreds".

I have trouble with classifying the most visited site in the world as a startup. I don't find that accurate.

The most visited website is still google.com and anyway why would it be important at all how many visitors you have ?

"What kind of startup employee will you be when the only professional environment you have known is Microsoft?"

What do you think they do at MS and what do you think they do at startup companies? Ex-MS people have done places like Zillow, Valve, Fog Creek. And thousands have joined relatively large companies in their early phases, such as Google and Facebook.

Do you honestly believe that devs at Microsoft sit around saying, "Hmm... how can we do nothing today?"

Do you honestly believe that devs at Microsoft sit around saying, "Hmm... how can we do nothing today?"

What on earth gave you the idea I believed anything of the sort?

From the line I quoted from you. Clearly you seemed to be implying that working at a company like Microsoft meant that you would be a poor employee at a startup company. Of course you didn't elaborate as to why, so I did it for you.

It was a question. I didn't imply anything, I said straight out it was not meant to be disparaging. And it has nothing to do with sitting around twiddling thumbs at Microsoft, it has to do with cultural fit - the guy has not worked anywhere else, at all. So easy with the 'doing things for me', much as the thought is appreciated.

My first "multimedia" computer was a Pentium 120mhz bought in 1995...Maybe he meant a 166mhz or 266mhz. I think the 266mhz was first released in 1997.

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