The idea of building something neat is a lot more attractive than running a business that sells the neat thing to customers. The people who want to run businesses are in the lovely position (for them) of having more fresh, good ideas offered to them than they can review, much less use.
Especially if your goal is to land a nice FAANG job anyway. It's gotten to the point where interviewing is so competitive, exhausting, opaque, and ultimately random, that it might actually be easier to do a bootstrapped start-up for a year and get bought by Facebook than it is to grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit. I wish I were joking.
EDIT: Wow, no disrespect to founders, I did not intend to trivialize the work you do. Instead of "easier" I should have said something like "more controllable" or "less random".
If you are not joking you are delusinal, this is not even remotly true.
Personally, I would much rather be running a moderately successful business than studying esoteric programming questions full time. At the least, the relative "easiness" of starting a business vs the normal FAANG interview process is personally subjective.
What tech startup is this? Profitability is a long road & for a good chunk of the time you're relying on funding to get you through to profitability. You might get paid but how much you withdraw impacts your runway.
In hindsight, if I accepted my first acqui-hire request, I would've eventually got hired into Google because the startup that wanted to hire us was eventually folded into google, but honestly it's hard to tell from a distance which companies are going to be acquired by a FAANG.
Helps that building a company gives you real experience as well while prepping for interview just gives you that, preparation for the interview, while the real job is different than the interview.
Even if it was only an order of magnitude difference, the expected value of starting that startup would be so much higher.
They aren’t even in the same ballpark
The same is true of networking and friends and family financing. I might look at scraping together a ~200k seed round as trivial, but that’s not true for everyone. On the other hand if 5 of your collage friends are working a FANG companies that’s also a huge leg up.
All of these are much more difficult to pull off, often requiring years, than simply hitting the books for a few months
Might get you hired at a higher level though, but yeah delusional to think it would be easier.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22608584-marissa-mayer-a...
Or go to a serious CS/Engineering school and just take the Algorithm class.
You're going to learn novel things in an Algorithms class that you can't learn online - but the way it's taught is easier for most people to digest the material. Motivated/driven/talented individuals can absolutely learn the material themselves.
Even now that I work at one of the Big 5 tech companies, I clearly state that my role is not officially development, I still have recruiters reach out to me from FB for development positions.
No I couldn’t pass any DS&A tech screen without a lot of preparation.
The hard part is passing the interviews, but referrals don't help with that, from what I know.
Either way you still have to go through the same loop.
Yes, I “work for a FAANG” like many others do here.
FAANG interviews are not even close.
Source: founder of a company which was acquired by a non-FAANG company, but talked to a few FAANGs as part of the process.
I wouldn't just say getting acquired by a FAANG company. I work for one of the biggest health care companies in the world. Last year they acquired over 200 companies with the goal of exceeding that this year.
They literally are buying companies whose technology they would rather buy then build themselves. If you knew what my company was looking for (machine learning, AI and automation) you literally could start a company with less than ten people, focus your work on one of the three areas and have a better than decent shot of being acquired by the company I work for in a span of less than 5 years.
What would take longer? Building that company with a singular focus on a singular product my company needs or achieving a senior level knowledge of Javascript for a full stack developer role? I would say at that point its a toss up.
Not sure about founders but sometimes you have to interview with the Big Tech Co. as well to keep the job after acquisition.
So it is probably more work than simply studying and rolling the dice over and over.
There are some people who are very well networked and can repeatedly start and sell companies by leveraging those connections as a business model in itself, but this is extremely rare.
Building a business to even be attractive enough for an acquisition is magnitudes harder than any round of interviews will ever be, but I do agree that those interview processes are a joke now compared to the talent they're designed to find.
Thus, it entirely makes sense for a founder want to build great tech and a great product, but NOT want to be in the business of complying with a dizzying array of local and international regulations, in a world where they effectively have to expand globally to "win".
Big companies aren't typically nimble enough to respond to the whims of consumer tastes or catch the latest fads.
So, it's a great symbiotic relationship between "big tech" and startups.
Acquisition, cash out, bolt on regulatory and legal framework, wash, rinse, repeat.
Founders are interested in control and eventual (financial) freedom, and tend to like building an organization in general. An acquisition provides that freedom while allowing them to build something else in the future with even better circumstances.
People make choices. Nothing is deterministic. That said, the number of companies founded, run or exited with a buyout win condition mentality is governed by price economics. FB, Google, etc offered a very high price for Android, Instagram, etc. because those M&As were worth a lot to them. Given this, a lot of M&As are going to happen.
The interesting question, to me, is "why is the price so high?" It's silly to get all huffy about M&As and ignore the consequences of M&As.
As optimism about the pandemic rises, it seems like the innovation that you would expect from this kind of volatility never panned out. I suppose capital was pumped into the public market instead?
Doesnt Amazon bully small players to accept their offer or risk going bankrupt? I think that is what they did to diapers.com