Comment by sp527 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sp527 | Hacker News Reader

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It’s odd (read: motivated by self-interest) that he didn’t make any attempt to establish the failure rate of these startups and the distribution of outcomes for employees.

Further, he didn’t even argue for a referendum on equity comp. He’s blatantly peddling the same broken model of “sell them your fugazzi so they can’t tell their talent is being plundered for (founder/investor) economic gain”. It’s downright insulting. I’d like to read Altman’s thoughts on making the cap table transparent to startup employees. I’m sure it’d be a riot.

So why is Altman saying any of this? Because he relies on the portfolio model. He doesn’t care if 99 companies fail and the employees within them end up with squat as long as the 100th is an earth-shattering home run. And he needs the world to start taking more massive risks on YC’s behalf, so they can keep making piles of bank. This is the incentive structure dictating EVERY single VC’s calculus. No one should ever listen to them without understanding this. Incentives. Incentives. Incentives.

The “mission” doesn’t matter to a rational person, for a very simple reason: the opportunity cost is the significant amount of wealth (reliably made somewhere like Google) that will afford you the cushion to do whatever you want later in life.

These guys need to get real. The highest EV play is to first get wealthy and THEN do what you want. And it doesn’t even have to take that long (most competent engineers could be there by age 35-40).

Don’t fall for their “mission” nonsense. It’s a monstrous lie designed to keep funneling tremendous amounts of money to the people at the top.

It's shocking how few people understand this, and how good YC is at painting the narrative that this isn't the case.

My roommate, after reading all of pg's essays and learning the YC mantra, came to the conclusion that they don't care about making money, and just want to do good for the world. That is the picture they paint to get smart people to work on problems that are most likely going to fail. YC knows what they are doing.

Is it really so crazy that people might care about more things than money when considering what to work on?

If I were given the opportunity to go back in time and work at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, I would probably do so even if paid no money at all. This seems rational to me, both in terms of how much knowledge I could accumulate and just the self-actualization of working on such interesting problems. I imagine the calculation for early employees at start-ups is similar.

A mission and a reasonable distribution of equity with fair terms do not need to be mutually exclusive, that's how I read the original comment.

If the C-levels are still getting massive chunks of equity with tiny strike prices while you get 0.01% and a 90-day post-termination exercise window and a massive AMT bill, then this talk of a "mission" is vacuous and likely a diversion from the fact that you as the employee are being under-compensated.

Saying that a VC-funded startup can provide the same experience as Bell Labs or Xerox Parc is a tremendous false equivalency. Some exceptions might resemble those R&D behemoths. Most will not because VC - with its attendant growth expectations - is antithetical to “tinkering” (a great word another commenter here used).

And good luck picking the exceptions as a potential employee when every such startup has a reality distortion field. I can assure you you’re more likely to end up somewhere run by an Elizabeth Holmes type, who can sell you a compelling narrative that will ultimately flatline. Employees have no window into the reality of a startup from the outside. Very often they don’t get to see that much more on the inside either.

Where do former Bell labs people like Yossi Matias, Sean Quinlan, Sean Dorward, Rob Pike or Ken Thompson work now? Hint: It's not a no-name startup.

This gives you a list of the subset tracked by Wikidata:

https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Fhuman%20%3Femployers...

A bit of processing gives stats on how often each employer appears: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/est31/d299c473c694700144b...

> Don’t fall for their “mission” nonsense. It’s a monstrous lie designed to keep funneling tremendous amounts of money to the people at the top.

100% For some reason, it is so easy to believe in it but the fun part will eventually come in a form of VC asking where is the money. "When someone says "I am not doing it for the money" he (she) is doing it only for the money." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

My opinion is that it is some form of common sense going around in societies that contains binary statements like money = root of evil or save humanity = a good deed. Reality is full of nuances though.

From history, the best businesses always have a good business model first and "mission" always was only a nice side effect.

> "When someone says "I am not doing it for the money" he (she) is doing it only for the money." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

This is silly. Artists and creatives aren't doing it for the money. Social workers aren't doing it for the money. Teachers aren't doing it for th money ... etc. Passion => irrationality. Or different goals, like sense of purpose vs. money.

I havent seen the first social worker proclaiming to everybody that she is not in for the money.

Game developers say this all the time, and they're right.

> Don’t fall for their “mission” nonsense. It’s a monstrous lie designed to keep funneling tremendous amounts of money to the people at the top.

100%. I've recently run into this with companies peddling that they're "mission-driven", as if that's somehow a replacement for compensating their employees appropriately. If it's a for-profit company then this "mission-driven" term is absolutely nonsense because the cap tables prove the people at the top with the large chunks of equity aren't foregoing any compensation to achieve this "mission".

I'm a little curious to see if this distinction might provide a competitive advantage to public benefit corporations. Objectively, I believe there's some literature to back up that a person's belief and interest in the work they're doing plays a role in their likelihood to work at an organization [1] (tangentially, I imagine that this has played a role in the success of Elon Musk's companies).

If we axiomatically say that talent plays a significant role in a company's success, and that top talent cares about the mission of the company that they work for, it follows that a company that puts it money where its mouth is (so to speak) wrt to a corporate governance structure that seems to place that mission at least in the neighborhood of parity with profit motive, they might be able to leverage that as a competitive advantage. Of course, whether that initial assumption is correct is up for debate, as is whether a PBC structure affords enough to move the needle on perceived mission-alignment.

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/11/9-out-of-10-people-are-willing-to-ea...

I think people downvote you because you attack their dream that they are "special" (snowflake syndrome, geek version) and will somehow succeed even if on average startups DO crash and burn.

You don't seem to be mean, just maybe a little blunt, but it changes nothing: In my experience on HN as in anywhere in the world, people hate to be told then reminded of their failures ("I told you so!"). Because truth hurt.

You are trying to give them the truth in one simple post, while YC and co are selling a dream in an expansive application process (in terms of time, effort, equity lost etc)

Sorry, but you just can't compete.

> The highest EV play is to first get wealthy and THEN do what you want

Exactly. Shut up and work for a while, then when you take risks, do it on your own schedule and bankroll. If you are as good as you think you are, certainly profits will come raining! And you will be the only one collecting with a very large bucket. If it's just a "small" acquisition (say 6 digits, something that a fund would find a sad outcome), you will be extremely happy and be ready to try again with your new fuel and hopes- thanks again to your large bucket.

Still, there is a place for things like YC: when your idea blows out of proportion and you know that it will die if it can't grow fast enough. But it's an exception, not a rule.

Than again, why I am bothering, you can't tell anything to people who don't want to listen.

About the "mission"? I disagree with you. Maybe that's what getting you downvoted. We all have one! Mine is to maximize my lifetime wealth while doing things that I enjoy because they match my morality. I think most people have a variant of this one - and, no lie, it is designed to keep funneling money to oneself!

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