Hopelessly perfect: Why it’s smart to work at a no-shot startup | Hacker News Reader

Hopelessly perfect: Why it’s smart to work at a no-shot startup

thestartupfoundry.com

119 pointsg0atbutt33 comments

Ugh. This article confuses being a founder of a poorly run startup with being an employee. At least as a founder, you probably learn something of use. Aspiring to be a employee at a company where no one knows what they're doing is soul-killing career suicide.

> Make a mistake at the bottom of the spectrum, and there’s so many people making so many mistakes that it’s unlikely your mistakes will give you a bad reputation. On the other hand, screw up a company with $41mm in funding, and those mistakes are likely to follow you.

No. Totally wrong. Work for a startup that no one has heard of, and they will never care about your successes any more than your failures. Work for an startup with a great team and you'll build relationships that help down the line regardless of how badly the company does. Barring gross incompetence, hardly anyone holds business failure against founders, much less employees.

True in Silicon Valley, but I've witnessed people (in publishing specifically) who were spectacular screw-ups at publishing /startups/ and they screwed themselves over professionally.

In Silicon Valley, screwups don't follow you. In other industries, I think they can / do.

I'd also emphasize that I know my share of YC founders, and I have a pool of people who want to work in startups but don't have a ton of skills, nor any real resume from which to speak from... and for people who aren't willing to pack up and move to SF for some reason (family, money, etc.) joining a crap no-shot startup is at least something, compared to the nothing they're going to get by working at a gas station.

Is that rational? I can see why, for example, airlines don't get a second chance. If you even give off a whiff of cluelessness in aviation, nobody will want to touch you again - there's too much at stake.

Other industries are less risky, but a lack of professionalism can still be expensive - people are relying on you to help carry their project.

On the other hand, there's plenty of cases where management is just too thick to deal with risk.

In either case (risk is bad, or management can't handle it), screwing up can be a career limiting move.

With publishing at least there can be a high opportunity cost in partnering with a startup. Content providers might be losing access to exclusive publishing channels that bring a lower risk. If you get exclusive rights to my content for 18 months and don't make me any money with it then you might just have burned a bridge.

The article focussing on startups that "don’t have a shot at VCs [or] the top engineers in the world." -- which makes it likely that the company had very little ability to offer much of a salary, if any. Sounds to me like they were finding cofounders more than they were hiring employees.

The author mentions this advantage: "I was able to literally try anything, as long as I could somehow justify it to my coworking brethren." -- This is probably a lot less likely to be the case at a brand-name startup. It's a lot less risky to screw up when no one's really watching.

Even at tech giants like Google or Facebook, you can usually try anything as long as you can justify it. (Google also gives you 20% of your time to try things you can't justify.)

I can't help but get the sense that the author has never worked anywhere except places that are terribly managed. The reason lots of employees don't have the freedom to try things out usually isn't because they're working on important problems or have brand-name cofounders. It's because their boss is an idiot.

Of course, looking for companies without a prayer of success is one good way to select for bosses that are idiots.

Actually, I think the main point - and the most important take away from the entire article is that working at a startup as an employee - whether its a small struggling one, or a superstart that was born with 100k in seed funding, is a better idea than being a minion at a large corporation - if what you want to do in the longer run is be an entrepreneur.

Also regarding failure - the "its okay if you screw up" attitude is not universal, maybe in Silicon Valley, maybe even in the United States in gneneral - but in most of the rest of the world, people unfortunately tend to not let go of failure very easily!

If you work at a company with less than 10 people and you just consider yourself to be an employee, you're doing it wrong.

Really depends how the boss acts. If you work at a company with less than 10 people and the founder says "No, you can't do that" and insists on doing it himself, what else are you gonna do?

Of course, you could argue that you're still "doing it wrong" by continuing to work for a company where the boss won't actually let you do your work to the best of your ability. This is a fairly large percentage of small companies, though. It is harder to manage people effectively than it is to found a company.

"If you’ve already identified that your goal is not to work for soulless companies, you need to start working for startups."

This is a false choice. It assumes that most established companies have no "soul", but that most startups do. This is simply not true.

"Crucially, the biggest advantage of working lower down the spectrum is that mistakes don’t stick with you. In general, mistakes don’t typically stick with you, but the further up the spectrum you go, the tighter knit the community. Make a mistake at the bottom of the spectrum, and there’s enough people making mistakes that it’s unlikely your mistakes will give you a bad reputation. On the other hand, screw up a company with $41mm in funding, and those mistakes are more likely to follow you."

Obviously, there are good mistakes and bad mistakes, but in general, making career decisions based on where your mistakes will go unnoticed is a path to mediocrity, or worse.

Anyone interested in progressing as a professional should think twice about working at a company where major mistakes are of no consequence. It's hard to improve yourself if you're surrounded by incompetence, and if mistakes made out of ineptitude or negligence have no impact on your reputation, chances are you're not working on anything that matters.

There's a lot of nuance in that choice that's unlikely to come across in a comment.

You want to be in a company where you are accountable for your mistakes. You do not want a company where those mistakes follow you. It's a very subtle difference between them, but basically you need to be in a culture where each mistake is a learning experience, not a shaming experience. Don't make it again, but also don't worry about having made it.

There's no such thing as a big name startup.

Like my friend says, if you have an HR department, you are no longer a startup. You have started. You are up.

I up voted because you have a point, but companies could have a big name, an hr department but very little or no revenue or repeatable business model. Unless it's bootstrapped and tiny, owing investors a return on their investment either through additional financing rounds or net revenue sounds like it's still starting/growing to me. I generally agree that once you are doing it, you are doing it.

Once you have a department that dictates you get 4 days bereavement leave when a parent, spouse, or child dies, 3 days off for a sibling, 2 days off for the death of a step- relation and 1 day off for a cousin you are no longer a startup.

I turned down a job at a company that wanted me to agree to those terms.

edit, Bonus Requirement From the Handbook:

Employees of [Redacted Inc.] are not to correspond with anybody who is not a current customer or current employee of this company, without express written permission from the CEO or the President.

Your 3 months was my 3 years. Our biggest problem was that we were funded by our founder to the tune of several million dollars. It took us 2 years to launch our product. The mix of having cash but no outside investors to report to (we did in the end but by then it was too late to matter) meant there was no urgency. We were insanely inefficient and slow moving. We lived in a bubble for 2 years drinking our own koolaid. The founders were first time entrepreneurs and all the staff were too young to know better. Though I learned a ton (mostly about what not to do), it's a difficult to explain black mark on my resume. Beware first time founders with inside $$.

Where did the founder get millions to fund you for two years?

Very successful career as a corporate exec

Yeap: that kind of money are dangerous for a start up.

How is it a black mark?

Well as a real hacker you get that experience at the age of 12 when you join a "team" to make a P2P MMORPG. After that you kind of learn to recognize people+idea combinations which work and which don't work.

I don't get why this is downvoted because it's pretty much true. I definitely learned to identify the kind of unproductive enthusiast teams without the talent required to get anything done the blog post lays out from all the "let's make this awesome game" forum endeavors of my youth.

It was probably downvoted because of the inference that this is the only path for "real" hackers and that if you haven't had this experience by age 12, it's over for you. There are many ways to gain product / building-things / startup experience.

There seems to be this perception that the startups who never get past seed-stage (or end up raising any money at all) are automatically labeled as "no-shot". I digress.

Nonetheless I find the post to be an interesting and insightful read and continue to find myself awestruck at just how much the startup ecosystem has grown and matured over the past few years.

I took this out of the article... I should put it back in. No-shot is "deck is stacked against you." Not "you will fail."

Did this for about a year. It was easily the best experience of my life. Once you get to actually "feel" the ramifications of everything you do at work only then can you really understand how a business operates.

This was for a 2-person founded start-up btw.

This reminds me of "Build one to throw away; you're going to do it anyway."

Frankly speaking, I think the most important would be to acquire those skills usually needed in start ups. After that, you can work as a professional and not a mere employee.

The issue then is: how do I acquire those skills (given that University will not give you those)? And just there is not post on HN about this.

Heh. If you want to work at a no-shot startup PM me. You'd be full co-founder along with myself and learn a crapload, as you'd be taking lead CTO role. I can't say it's better than working for a big-name startup but I do think you'd learn more because we can make mistakes as we go.

It's unlikely that you'll find people this way... you should go meet people in your area and see if there's anyone interested.

What's your startup? Why aren't you the technical guy?

Hey Randall, that's good advice. i've just started meeting people in my area. (Boston).

I'm not the technical guy because it's simply not my strength. I could probably code the thing in a year but someone else could do it in a few months with much better code. IN any case I'm building the prototype as solo founder right now.

If you're a first time founder, just code it yourself. Spend some time learning how to code so you'll know how to sort through good and bad tech folks in the future.

I agree with one point-- working at any start-up, even a no-shot one, makes corporate rules chafe all the more if you ever go back to that world.

Its somewhat a fallacy..

Simple Logic..if the no-shot start-up is an option that best option is your own-formed start-up. Do not buy BS from BS-artists or share-croppers if you intend to be neither..

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