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Comment by TACIXAT | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else unimpressed with the ideas being funded? I look at Work at a Startup and it is just new web frontends on existing industries. I'm sure that makes money but holy hell is it boring.

Some are working on cool things, but the founder who has a PhD in that topic will be doing the interesting work and they are hiring for infra or interface.

One company was a great match for my skill set but the equity was so low for early hires. I get that 1% can be huge for a FB scale exit, but 180k and 1% is generally just a paycut. In this case the founders were undergrad dropouts and not SMEs. It just seems like a really inflexible ecosystem when you can't give 5%-10% to an early hire when they would be the SME and core engineer.

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I could see a proven engineer #1 with a track record of startup success maybe landing in the 5–10% range (but getting an under market salary), but otherwise I don't see how a number like that is possible. YC takes 7%, and if the first few hires each get 5–10%, that only leaves ~70% for the founders and subsequent hires. If there are 2 founders, they would end up with 25–30% each, and if there are 3, only 15–20%? The numbers only get worse if they've already raised a funding round in return for 20% of the company.

These numbers look more typical to me: https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation/sections/typi.... The article mentions that hire #1 typically gets 2–3%, and only more when it comes with a low salary.

If you want to do better than that, you'll likely have to be a cofounder, not an employee. I read PG's essays in the early 00s, prior to the creation of YC, and his whole shtick was that ambitious employees can't hope to capture the value of their work, that sharp and hard-working tech folks should fund startups to truly capitalize on their efforts.

Yea, I agree on all those points and that is what the company pushed back with. They compared the requested stake with what YC got (and it was 3 founders). I was (and still am) at the point where the salary was less important and if I was going to play that game it would be for a big win.

I am not chasing starting or being part of an early stage company so hard now though. After being miserable in my last role (Google) I stepped back and looked at the problems that keep me engaged (R&D). Found a company in that space and am very happy with what I do now (DARPA contracts!). If I ever have a side project that lands then I'd pursue it, but I'm not hunting for ideas like I used to. Just trying to find that happy life groove.

I just looked at the winter class and I agree a lot of them look like duds. It definitely dilutes the brand if your startup is one of ~150 and almost all the others are just X for Y

From your description, wanting to be the SME, early engineer, substantial equity - maybe you would be better off as a founder?

You guys need to understand that people have been saying things like "a lot of them look like duds" and "almost all the others are just X for Y" literally, and continuously, since YC got started.

Famously dropbox was ridiculed on HN

Yes, although I do think the user who posted that comment has gotten a bit of a bum rap over the years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229196

I do not think they are duds, quite the opposite, they look like profitable ideas. Just incredibly boring to work on. In the first two pages of workatastartup it is 90% web. There were two data science roles and one embedded role. I think the domain of profitable ideas is a lot larger than what Typescript/React can represent.

I believe you, but that’s how many of these startups are described even at ycombinator.com/companies when I filtered by W20

>Is anyone else unimpressed with the ideas being funded? look at Work at a Startup and it is just new web frontends on existing industries.

If there's money basically just lying all over the ground, why wouldn't you pick it up?

Sure but that's not addressing his point which is most of the ideas being funded are uninteresting and aren't really moving the ball forward. Instead they're doing some kind of rent seeking.

I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized. There is plenty of opportunity in doing so to democratize access to services that are currently inaccessible to most, which is more or less the opposite of rent seeking.

You can also just not do a shitty job of modernizing an old thing, and end up creating a product like Netflix that front-end devs fawn over, learn from, and emulate. It doesn't have to be uninteresting.

Netflix was started in 1997. This conversation is about companies started a decade ago versus now. The rise post 2010 startups seems much more focused on creative interpretations of laws instead of actual innovation. The whole gig economy is a way to circumvent employment laws.

I am responding to the comment about

>just new web frontends on existing industries

The gig economy is just some subset of that.

In reality, 'just new web frontends on existing industries' describes the majority of the demand for software development right now. It's not good or bad, though some of the actors and some of the businesses will be good or bad. It's not boring or interesting, though some of the applications and implementations will be boring or interesting. It just is.

>I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized

Out of all the VC money raised in 2019 how much was for this and how much was for things like Quibi, We-Work, gig economy, etc. ?

Same reason I don't work at Google anymore. Picking up money off the ground all day is incredibly dull.

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