Avoiding Zombie Startups
salon.thefamily.co
salon.thefamily.co
That said, when the first company was bought, there was a product that the buying company didn't want to continue to support. Some friends of mine made an agreement to take over that product, and started a company to do so. They never grew the customer base that much - it was a niche product. However, they were able to continue to work together as friends, have decent paychecks with 100% company-paid insurance, and after about 15 years, sold out to a company for enough to allow for comfortable (not rich) retirements. This was all on purpose and was discussed frequently by them - "Do we want to grow, or do we want to enjoy what we're doing, have some free time, less stress, and remain friends?"
I've always thought that was a FINE model for a company, if you can pull it off. I always wanted to work there (did some consulting for them), but they could never grow quite enough to hire me. Ah, well. :)
I grew up in a lower-middle-class house where both my parents worked for the postal service. Both parents worked strange and/or long hours and they performed very physically demanding work. I can remember several cases of them being out of work because of injuries. We were never poor but we never had extra. Meaning we always had food and cable television but rarely went out to eat or went on vacations.
I took a major liking to computer programming and pursued that as a career since high school. I find it unbelievable that I make a good living off of doing a job that I find really enjoyable and plus I make great money doing it.
My first job out of college I started working for a major manufacturer of PC's and printers and I started off with a higher salary than what my dad was making at the time, $65,000. I thought I was rich and set for life.
Working in the software industry makes me feel like I'm on another planet, I'm just excited to keep getting a paycheck every two weeks and then I read discussions about people chasing lotteries or trying to pull in 250k with bonuses.
I don't think it's bad to maximize your earning potential but the figures and mentality around feel so foreign to me. All that to say it's just a weird experience going from rural Oregon to the software industry and see the massive difference in lifestyle and the relationship people have with work.
I'll say though, the SF Bay Area has a way to make you feel poor. It's not even keeping up with the joneses type stuff with your software engineer peers. It's just normal living expenses. Six figures salaries don't feel rich unless you enter the "2"+ territory. $1xxk doesn't feel much more than the $60k first job outside of the bay I had in the mid-00s, even high $1xxk, especially with a family to raise. After years of living like that, it makes more sense that people want to maximize their earning potential.
$2,000,000 for a pretty small house and lot. There's a reason a lot of folks here are chasing money - it's the only way to have a quality of life and lifestyle similar to those outside the bay area.
My first job was for $75k - 80% more than my father was making at the time. Now I make more money than my entire family at their maximum earnings even adjusted for inflation. This doesn't impress me, give me any comfort or a sense of success.
The drive, for me, for a "fuck-you money" payout is this simple desire: "I don't want anyone to tell me what to do with my time."
Maybe the capitalists took a huge risk of investing (employing) you and you feel grateful to leave more money to them. Maybe the capitalists do a lot of work for themselves too and are rewarded appropriately in equity.
But it's not uncommon that labour is just exploited.
This trope is total BS. It makes workers out to be idiots who are too naive to understand the situation. Of course people are making a profit off me. That's the entire point of employment, I give you labor, you give me a steady paycheck. If I don't like it, I can figure out how to give other's work and a steady paycheck then take the profit.
Thinking that somehow if all workers striked, formed unions or formed co-ops, suddenly the world would be "fair" is naive.
Humans are greedy.
It's in our brains to try to grab as many resources as possible. Socialism is far more opaque than capitalism because greed is chided and has to be hidden (!)
I'd much rather have people building new things, trying to grab as much wealth as possible than be stuck in a system where creativity and drive aren't rewarded. It's total game theory: If Joe doesn't care, he will do the least amount of work. If I can never make more than Joe, then I will do less work than Joe. It's all about minimizing cost (effort) and maximizing profit (money). Once you disconnect effort from money, the system sucks, which can be an argument for why workers deserve pay raises.
The top of the pyramid in socialism always gets more therefore humans are greedy.
Also, it would make sense in my mind, from an evolutionary standpoint of why being greedy is actually a good trait. I'm not advocating that unchecked greed is great. I am advocating that understanding our brains is better, then we can check ourselves from that.
Okay, so I am being a little satirical. But honestly, if it was so easy to pick winners, VCs would invest in far fewer companies. As an individual trying to pick the winner, you have close to zero probability of being right.
During interviews and preliminary hiring-talks they may sell the pitch as if everything were wonderful, but potentially, the unfortunate reality could be that things are not that nice.
However, I would argue that depending on one's need and situation, time is gold, and jumping from one zombie startup to another continuously may not be feasible.
Disclaimer being that in each instance I joined in good faith, worked hard and added value to the company quickly (at least in the companies eyes), did my best to pragmatically resolve any major issue that happen to arise, and left once those resolutions reached a roadblock and that I felt I had made all reasonable attempts to fix things. On reflection it was always just a case of losing faith in the leadership of the company.
My advice to anyone starting out would be to do your best due diligence (read about it) before joining, but knowing that you'll only get the real workings of place from actually working in it, and especially if you are inexperienced you will have likely overlooked some subsequently obvious warning signs (I sure know I did in the past!). Throw yourself into it 100%, get established, then assess the situation. Always do your best to give everything the benefit of the doubt, and be open to being wrong, until you really just have to admit that you're right (or in reality you _think_ you're right), then move on if you have to in the most considerate way possible.
Future founders/leadership that I would want work with would (hopefully) understand my decision-making at those times, and would be confident enough that they could instil the motivation in me to continue to follow them long term.
Of course every VC, CEO, and founder will say otherwise, since they're incentivized to get people excited about their investment. VCs also place more bets in a single year than the number of startups anyone could hope to work at in a lifetime.
Very first sentence:
> People tend to underestimate the financial opportunity that startups represent for early employees.
um, no, absolutely, emphatically not. This article is written by a person whose job is headhunting for startups. So off the bat, the bias is off the charts.
It's exactly the opposite. People (employee candidates) tend to overestimate the financial opportunity, both in value and likelihood.
> But being good at picking which startup to join as an employee means, in part, being as diligent as an investor.
Diligent sure, but nowhere does the article explain such diligence, and anyway investor diligence is not anything like employee diligence.
All the points have flaws, but one general theme stood out, that they are pushing equity vs salary.
1. This article is referring to VC backed startups, which generally speaking 9 of 10 die. Are you going to statistically better at picking a winner than a VC (consider also that you aren't diversifying your investment as you only work at 1 startup at a time).
2. While transparency is indeed key, there are levels. It's unlikely any company is going to be so radically transparent as to tell you the details you'd need to actually determine their financial fitness going forward.
Consider that Telltale Games last week managed to both hire a new developer, move them across the country and then call them into a meeting to let them know that they'd be let go along with most of the rest of the company in a massive layoff. That's a lack of transparency as to what is happening _within_ the company.
3. VC backed startups are just inherently volatile. I worked for a YC company that raised between $75-$100 mil (keeping it vague) and they were more or less insane: just weird unforced errors and oddness and Steve Jobs complex. They recently closed as their round failed due to a combination of IP theft, "Trump trade issues" and inability to execute in the face of more advanced competitors. It's often not just one thing that pushes a startup from "rocket ship" to "zombie", it's everything.
4. Being an early stage employee (non-founder) is a rough spot. Typically you're taking less on salary because of "generous" equity. However, you're also expected to work founder hours. As liquidity events have diminished, so have opportunities to actually cash out.
All that being said, I'd still encourage people to work for a startup, but to do it on their own terms: to learn, to get a new experience, to try and set yourself up to do your own creation. Please just don't rely on picking a rocketship.
Does that mean there are no companies that do better than that, though?
If the company is private, negotiate for a salary that’s competitive with the market.
“Competitive” doesn’t mean that everyone is going to move to SV and work for a FAANG.
1. You like the people, and they like you.
2. You like what the company is doing.
3. You need a job.
Of course, what "tomorrow" is, is highly dependent on your personal situation.
At year two or three the company will also likely top up the equity if they want you to stay... just negotiate a 10 year exercise window, so you're not writing a check on your way out the door.
For whatever reason, why individual contributor equity grants fall off a cliff after Seed or Series A, the VPs remain relatively constant even as the value of the company goes up 20-50x while risk plummets.
> “People tend to underestimate the financial opportunity that startups represent for early employees.”
I would laugh if it wasn’t so sad.
Identifying it is when they say things are going to happen but they either don't get done or some shadow of that thing gets halfway done 6 months too late.
Also you may be in because it's a hot idea. If you see other companies pop up with the same idea and they are actually moving and yours isn't, then leave.
First to market is irrelevant if the first people are bozos who can't scale. Everyone will steal their idea and the original innovator will trip over their shoelaces.
This is it! You just saved me from writing the blog post. I haven't been part of any rocketship startups, but have been part of successful bootstrapped ones, and unsuccessful zombie ones. The difference was the ability to:
* state a goal
* execute to achieve said goal
My guess is that the chosen goals are the difference between mildly and wildly successful startups, but if you can't state a goal and execute, you're in a zombie startup. It may pretend to be alive, but it's not.
Focusing on how someone can buy shares at low price and sell high kind of only selects for one kind of company -- the VC funded company whose entire goal is either an IPO or an acquisition.
What about the startup that has no plans for acquisitions nor IPO's, and is not in the business of giving out shares to employees, yet can pay their employees great competitive wages with benefits?
Most startups fail. Opting for equity that might be worth more tomorrow at the expense of liquid cash today doesn't sound much different than buying a lottery ticket and hoping you picked the right numbers.
Why not look at the offer at face-value instead? Is there decent pay? How much BS will I have to deal with? Is there opportunity for career advancement (if I care about that)? If I have to leave, will I be more competitive in the marketplace? Will I have a life outside of work?
I'm currently considering an offer from one that basically ticks every checkmark on the list, so I'd love to know what is bad about it
Stressful because the company is already in distress. Maybe the employees aren't aware, and maybe even the founders themselves are too naive to be aware, but the founders will be heavily under the gun to find a path to satisfy the hype they've built up. Or they'll check out if they don't even care to get back on the path.
Waste of time because you won't learn anything in a flailing, failing company.
Doesn't help your career because of the lack of learning and growth opportunities within a distressed company. Nobody will be impressed by the entry on your resume. Will likely hurt because of the opportunity cost, even.
I disagree with the author that being an early employee is a solid path to make you wealthy — that only happens when a company experiences sharp growth after you join and finds liquidity at a much higher price than your option price. That happens but is rare. A better benefit is to jump-start your career and get experience you wouldn't be able to get at a BigCo. For that all you need is upward mobility in a well-performing startup. And you won't get that at a distressed company.
The founders don't give two shits about your career, mental health, or really anything, just meeting the next milestone.
Add to this the one year cliff plus one quarter before any options vest and even then there's a good possibility you will leave them on the table b/c you don't have the money to buy them when you leave.
If they’ve been going for X years and they don’t have a lot to show for it then that’s a major red flag for me.
* The only thing the cafeteria serves is BRAAAAAAINS.
* Your noncompete agreement is still valid even after you die.
Aside from that, it's pretty similar to working at Google.
Most of the time, in reality, I've had to pick from one or two while my savings are quickly dwindling.
>"Business angels investing with strong tax incentives, universities or companies filling up their marketing brochures and public actors who aren’t betting their own money at all are a couple examples. So don’t settle for “We’ve raised a Series A”: Ask with whom and look them up.
If you see that the money raised just comes from public actors, ..."
Could someone say what is a "public actor"? I am not familiar with this term.
I would also argue that corporate investing arms tick this box. It's "other people's money" twice removed.
In fact, the degree to which you're betting other people's money is probably the rubric here. Angels are investing their money (usually -- crowd funding has made this murkier). VC's are betting an LP's money, and if they fail to return value they will have a hard time raising another fund and will eventually "die". (VCs are the real zombies in the startup ecosystem!) Other entities are further away from the money and the consequences they will feel if the investment doesn't pay off.
I'd also look at motivation. This is another area where governments and corporate investing often fail. Governments are usually motivated in ways that aren't aligned with the startup world, and invest money in ways that seem irrational (at least to a startup) as a result. Corporate investing arms are often treating their investments as an extension of corporate development as well as a way to get an option on ideas that either formally spin out of the company or that people leave the company to start. All of these are subject to distortions that pull them away from focusing solely on chance of success.
These are not bad things. As was mentioned in a few threads over the past few weeks, nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they had done more work and spent less time with friends and family.
While VC-driven startups can give you a large exit, so can playing the lottery. Don't fool yourself into thinking this is a guaranteed get rich plan. By all means, try it if you have the time and energy and enjoy the work. But if you don't have the passion and energy for VC-funded startups, then admit that to yourself and do something else.
Working at a bootstrapped company is not going to earn you an exit worth more than a Ford Focus unless you have a non-trivial equity stake.
I'd much rather be told that six-figures is a sure thing for basically eternity than know one day I could lose my job without warning, but hey maybe we'll (read: the founders) will become billionaires / millionaires.
Playing the startup lottery is a dumb prospect for short-sighted 20-year olds. Absolutely nothing wrong with joining a startup (I love them and plan on working at them for the foreseeable future), but you have to go in with the hedge that it might go to zero unless they plan on avoiding unsustainable VC-funded growth by finding sustainable profit
High and stable income put into investments and savings then leaving and founding your own bootstrapped company is the way to go. I'd much rather know I can sustainably increase my income over time than knowing I'll have to hit it big to not be in debt or lose someone's money.
VC is a fool's game. You have to be crazy enough to think you'll win, which is great for those huge wins but not so great for the losers who will have dumped 5 years and their sweat and tears to make $0 or have lost money.
I've interviewed at large places and they either blew me off because no one cares (why would they) or they had pointless interview questions (cough google)
If either job comes with a lottery ticket, I guess that's sort of nice?
Smaller company doesn't have to mean less bullshit. It's just a different kind of bullshit.
They can take the form of your manager, or colleague, or anybody in the company and the option is to either deal with it or bail on the company. In a larger company with many teams, you can usually route around such people by switching to a different org. Plus their power is often more constrained because there is just more people in the company.
I think this is the most profound thing I've learned in my career. But an even more important lesson is that you have to find a place where the B.S. is tolerable to you. For some people the politics of a bigco may be impossible to deal with, for others the "another month, another pivot" shiny objects syndrome of a small startup may be the issue.
Every place has B.S. That's why they call it "work" and not "fun". Find a place where the B.S. is tolerable (or, better yet, minimal).
No, it isn't. The "work" is the fact that I am applying my skillset to satisfy my employer's desire whether I feel like it or not; often, that means polishing and grinding at rather boring but rather necessary tasks.
None of that requires bullshit, and calling bullshit "work" normalizes toxic behavior.
I would also like to distinguish between toxic and abusive behavior (which I don't think anyone should tolerate) and a certain amount of B.S. The latter can vary across a spectrum, but is tedious, or frustrating, or annoying, not psychologically harmful.
I prefer to think of it is a finding a bullshit compatible place. All companies have bullshit, but the trick is to find a place whose particular variant of bullshit is compatible with your particular tolerance of said bullshit.
Bullshit compatibility is an important thing!
401k match is nice, but it's part of total comp. I don't want to be promoted into a job where I'm responsible for others, thanks -- it's more work, I'm not good at it, I feel bad about fucking up the careers of my subordinates, and it doesn't give me the same fulfillment of doing my normal stuff.
In exchange for a chance of promotion, I get to deal with a purchasing process that makes it nearly impossible to pay a recurring vendor; I get to do performance review cycles twice a year (no wait, there are actually two hidden mid cycle reviews, so 4x a year), and deal with co-workers who don't give a shit about actually getting things done, they just give a shit about appearing to have 'impact'. I get to deal with 'up or out' policies. I get to deal with pass the buck bullshit trying to get my state income tax changed to reflect where I work and where my desk is. Oh and so many meetings, because nobody is willing to be responsible for making decisions.
I'm willing to put up with this shit because of equity from an acquisition, but I was much happier with the typical bs at the startup, which was mostly that I ended up owning a lot of stuff I'd rather have offloaded onto IT because we didn't have IT, and because I worked at a rinky-dink ISP in the 90s so I knew how internet email worked.
But mooreds upthread is right, it's not a matter of finding a place with no BS, it's a matter of finding the BS that is most tolerable. I clearly have a preference.
You can lose your job anywhere without much warning. The trick is don’t depend on your job for your long term livelihood. Instead, depend on a marketable set of skills and a network that can help you land another job quickly.
1. Going in to work and doing the best job I can.
2. Making sure my skillset is marketable and keeping my resume continuously updated
3. Keeping in touch with my local network of recruiters.
In 20+ years, it’s never taken me more than a month to get a job and once, I left a contract (long story) with nothing lined up, met a recruiter for lunch on Monday and had a job offer with a what was then a Fortune 10 company by Thursday[1].
If I worked for myself, I would be constantly hustling for clients, collecting payments etc. Working for a company means money shows up in my account twice a month for exactly the same amount. If the company goes bust, I can find another job. If I want to take a vacation or get sick, other people take up the slack and I still get paid.
I’m no special snowflake, anyone in my metro area that has kept their skills up can easily find a job.
[1] Yes that was dumb luck, the department that I was hired into was a recently acquired startup and their HR hadn’t been fully integrated into the large slow moving bureaucracy.
Btw I think health insurance is the biggest problem here, in the US.
Anyway I didn't mean in any way that being employed by a company was some kind of bad choice, not at all!
As long as the ACA exists, health insurance is available. It's just a cost of being self employed.
On the other hand, it's even easier if you have a spouse that works a stable job. I know a few people (including me) that have spouses that work a low paying government job just for the insurance so they can be more aggressive about their career or start a business. Since I've been married, I've jumped back and forth between working salaried and contracting with abandon.
When you go into it demanding what you're worth and knowing the risks, on the other hand, it's not a fools game. It's a calculated high risk, high reward ride.
I've worked in many VC funded startups, and I've made money on all of them. Mostly not much above a normal job, but I've only ever put in "free" work or underpaid work for short periods, and then compensated with higher income later.
It's about not getting taken in by the sales pitch to the extent that you stop negotiating, and about not overestimating the value of the equity on the table. I typically won't take an offer that I wouldn't have taken in a non-startup without the equity.
When you consider company equity to be a nest egg but don't actually have any control over whether it'll be a success or not you're making a bet. I don't blame anyone who isn't interested in that game.
With hundreds of thousands of candidates vying for them, and more qualified than there are slots available.
> More importantly though, I would argue that the skill level required in its employees for a startup to not go out of business is at least as high as that at these top companies.
I disagree with this one. First off, the skills required to help a small, rapidly-growing company be successful are very different than the skills required to help make a similarly-sized project within a large company successful. Second, I think most startups overestimate the quality of the people they need to successfully execute, partly due to the first point, partly due to not understanding the actual business risks, and partly due to overestimating the difficulty due to an inflated sense of self-importance WRT the company.
There are between 3-4 million developers in the US. Assuming 30,000 of these $300k jobs (not likely), that's 1%.
> I would argue that the skill level required in its employees for a startup to not go out of business is at least as high as that at these top companies.
Most startup jobs are just another React or Rails or Node job. You're not going to get a $300k job doing that kind of work.
By politics I mean that they have worked within the company to attain that salary, taken the right management positions, kissed the right butts, or maybe just got in early enough and at the right time.
Very few open positions are going to be filled with a starting salary of $300k.
1) Are willing and able to work in SF/Seattle/NYC.
2) Have a degree from a decent university (preferably in CS) and about 3-6 plus years of experience.
3) You spend a lot of time prepping for coding interviews (i.e reading https://careercup.com, etc)
See:
Those numbers and levels are pretty accurate albeit a little low based on my experience living in the Bay Area.
The problem is that 300k actually doesn't go that far when you factor in rent/mortgage and the concept of starting a family in those cities.
Cost of living isn't ideal, but $350k is far more than me and my family (wife and two kids) need to live on. I've been donating 50% for several years, and we still are fine.
(Cost of living details: https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2018 The big things are ~$50k on taxes, ~$33k on housing, and ~$20k on childcare.)
4) Manage to not be a semi-random false negative
There's still the issue mentioned in your GP that there are not that many of those jobs out there to begin with. Also, there are more people who want them then there are slots.
Note that I agree about not needing to get political to get these roles. I just disagree about how easy it is to obtain them.
Just getting a visa to work in the USA like I had to do is hard and disqualifies most of the planet (~7.7 billion) people.
Getting into a decent, internationally recognized university is also difficult and likely filters out a huge number of people.
I know several people with 5+yrs of exp making $300k+ per year easily at several companies (not just at FANG).
Caveat: all these people are good at what they do, come from good schools, and have good backgrounds.
This is the real reason startups can't compete in the talent market today. The companies operating at scale can afford to pay high liquid comps for the best talent.
EDIT: downvote if you want :) you all have unrealistic expectations thanks to HN.
He couldn’t retire young, but I’m pretty sure he owned his house and could send his kids to whatever school he wanted.
This is just one too of mind data point.
It is a valid point, though. Working for a low wage at any company is a fundamentally different story than an above average wage at a bootstrapped success that can afford to pay good salaries.
Don't get me wrong, I feel for these companies. They are in a bind. There is no way they can pay salaries competitive with big corporations, and they've made a (wise, IMO) decision to avoid funding and grow organically, which precludes them from compensating through a seat at the exit table. Personally I think the solution for companies like this is employee ownership and dividends. This seems to align incentives properly. I don't see this being done much (at all?) though, which makes me wonder whether there are ugly pitfalls I'm unfamiliar with.
They don't return huge amounts of money, but they are not going to disappear overnight as they have the market cornered on one or two very small niches (eg: the entire worldwide demand for the product they offer is $0.5-5mil). In my experience, a lifestyle businesses has found a problem that a dozen or two midsized companies have and precisely solves it or produces a low volume customizable product.
Basically the goal of the company is to keep the owners comfortable rather than play the unicorn lottery.
Why are those the only two options? What happened to "grow organically into a megacorp over 20-30 years"?
It is possible to start lifestyle then transition to regular or be a blend (eg: currently lifestyle, but keeping a eye out to grow). Sparkfun is a example of this where the founder hired someone to be CEO so they can actually have time to do the stuff they love.
Poor? Really? We make a great living, none of us are poor. We are very well off and you don't need a winning lotto ticket to grow your wealth outside of your salary.
Rich is where your money makes you enough money to a point where you need not work to maintain your lifestyle (but can choose to).
> Lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society.
Said no one ever. That's almost insulting to people who have actual financial problems.
Assuming "we" are all engineers. There's no reference to role in the article or comment you're replying to, so I don't think that can be assumed. There are plenty of low wage jobs at startups.
If the frame of reference is "anyone" then I still don't get the argument. What percentage of jobs out there are lottery tickets? A tiny, tiny fraction. So what's the advice from the GP; everyone should try to work in some unicorn startup in hopes of getting rich?
If you are underpaid, yes. But that may not always be the case.
We need to move beyond this old fashioned idea of shareholder primacy, there are more important things to consider than just clawing at an equity stake and optimizing to increase the value of that stake at the expense of everything else.
I mean, that can be debatable imo. It's an oversimplification.
To think of it simply; Does spending less time with your family now, mean more time in 2 years? Are the now years more valuable than the 2+ years? Is there a risk of 2 years becoming 10? More time now is great, but what if you're worrying about money constantly? etc
There's a ton of decisions that go into big life decisions. Time with family, even if family is everything in your view, is not the only input. Time is meaningless without context.
But one thing is certain. Your children will grow old and move out, you parents and grandparents will pass on. Life is short and death and taxes are your only guarantees.
As you grow older, your ability to be productive decreases to the point where 'doing work' is impossible. It's no surprise, then, that most people who sit on their deathbed value friends/family over work. However, this doesn't mean 'doing more work' and 'being productive' isn't a respectable and equally fulfilling value to friends/family when you are young.
Yet, this generic piece of wisdom is often used to diminish ppl who value productivity over all else. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but aren't we getting a slightly biased perspective when we mimic values after old people? Values morph over your life, and the values that are best suited for old age aren't necessarily best suited for young age.
Some of us have to work to afford time with family and friends, or even to afford family and friends at all.
I'm continually surprised that this needs to be repeated, almost biweekly here on HN.
As someone advanced in my career, I enjoy startup life for the startup life. As a noob out of college, I very, very highly recommend startup life as you will never be so risk tolerant again in your life, and you can't get the experience any other way. You can afford to fail and then move on to a bigco if you want stability. Also, you will form bonds and make friends that won't happen at a bigco.
Someone should put together a spreadsheet showing the value of a 1% equity stake at seed and series A for YC companies that have had an exit. (It's not hard.) I guess airbnb hasn't had an exit yet, but we can just use $40bn as a reasonable number.
All the online dilution calculators are targeted to founders, so they can model and make raise decisions at each round. For us, it's a very easy depreciation calculation. Anyway 1% post-A results in .52% post-E using a calculator I found easily that has reasonable defaults for each round. That $200MM of airbnb, really astounding. Do consider it took 13 years to get there. OTOH your 1% would have been good after only 4 years.
Let's say you limit your startup job search to just YC companies. Now you just need to factor in the number of YC companies, the number of employees at Series A and earlier, your likelihood to get 1% (unlikely to impossible), and your likelihood of landing in a successful startup.
YC could make this type of calculator online for anyone but that would discourage employment. Someone here can easily produce it.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking you can pick the winner and therefore your likelihood of success is multiplied. You can't. Even YC (and all other incubators) can't, that's why they spray the money around.
If you want money, go to big companies, your reward is likely to be much more bigger and stable.
I heard this about university, and here it is again about startups.
Counter-anecdote from me: I never made any long-lasting connections at college, and I never made any long-lasting connections at a startup, either. (And I've worked at ~10 of them.)
Instead, my only real adult friendships have come from either working at bigcos, or from extra-curriculars (e.g. social hobbies, sharing creative works and then meeting people who liked them, etc.)
Edit: www works, https://thefamily.co doesn't...but the link in the post points to the second one.
I joined a zombie startup. I wasn't there for the quick money or the get rich quick scheme or anything like that. Yes, the potential of a payday was part of the equation, but I joined because I hadn't been at a startup in 15 years and I was in a place in life where I had alignment on motivation, financial stability, ability, and desire to contribute. I went in wanting to work hard, do great things and have a lot of fun in the process. If there were great financial rewards that would've been great.
So, it's not all about the money. I lost a year of my career working at this dump that turned out to be a zombie. And it's a facepalm now, but all the warning signs were there: great coverage in the press, awards, prizes and so forth, a continuous source of funding through VCs and private investors, lots of customers, etc. I didn't see the warts until it was too late.
It wasn't until a few months in that I realized that it was operating like a comfortable place to just put in 8 hours a day for most people. The bureaucracy was worse at this 200 person company than it was at the large company I'd left.