Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company
viniciusvacanti.com
viniciusvacanti.com
Finally had enough of the startup scene; I'm going to go to work for a very large semiconductor company getting paid 2.5x what I was making at the startup. Feels like I'm getting a real adult job again.
tl;dr: I learned that not every statup idea is worthwhile.
True. Didn't mean to imply that. This particular one was misdirected and low-paying.
> You miss out of the potential upside of startup equity
How many startups actually make it to the point where the equity is worth something? I'm guessing it's under 5% of them (even in good times). So at some point you need to make the calculation as to whether the equity that you're trading pay for is going to be worth anything. In my case I determined that it would never be worth anything.
Care to share some dirty details?
But in a couple of years... that mockumentary idea would be comedy gold.
...and in fact it's what they were trying to monetize that was really funny.
The problem was the founder wasn't being honest with himself or us. He should have said, we didn't know what we were doing and we were just exploring, throwing anything on the wall to see what stuck, rather saying we were on a sure path and we were building software for real. We were really building demoware or PPT, not real software.
The cost and effort in building demoware is vastly different from building real software. It became incredibly frustrating to have misaligned goals.
It's a pity that these tremendous acts of courage are often overlooked because its _easier_ to walk away from a lot of money.
Yes. If he was being paid $250K/yr, that means he did a great job while he was there. It would not be that difficult for him to return to finance. I've quit my job a couple times to travel and when I returned to the workforce my new position paid more than I made previously...
A. On the one end, one optimizes for overall expected yield. There's no finite target, the goal is "as much as possible". With this objective, walking away from a lot of low-risk money for much less and high-risk is much harder. Similarly, the lower the starting point, the more open you are to take up risk because you don't have much to lose anyway.
B. On the other end, one has specific targets. Once these targets are met, money ceases to be a decision criterion. With this frame, it is actually easier to walk away from a lot of money after you have achieved X, Y and Z.
These are simplified extremes of course, in reality it's a mix of both and shifts over time, but it goes to show that there's no single "correct" answer.
That he would be willing to risk everything on a startup is indeed courageous.
Comments like this offer no value. Maybe it doesn't deserve a downvote, but it certainly shouldn't be #1.
EDIT - Just realized this post may technically not have the most votes, but since I can't see the score I have no way of knowing. I still stand by everything I said otherwise.
And seriously, i can't believe that this (probably) is the most upvoted comment in this article.
Buffet did an interview on CNBC some years ago where the question where he was asked about success and his reply was something to effect of "Success doing what you love and doing it well".
This rings true to me.
A little anecdote told by my father in law, who was Buffett's pilot for a time, tells of Buffett being welcomed home to Omaha by a hostess. On remarking that he'd lived in the same house for 50 years it's claimed she said "Gee! You must have a lot of equity in that house Mr. Buffett."
Whether this speaks to the unpretentiousness of Warren Buffett or the unworldliness of the hostess is an exercise for the reader.
1) As an aside, he says his job was Private Equity Investor. Does that mean we worked for a hedge fund?
2) How does one get hired as a PEI right out of college? I'm just curious what skill set is required. What do they do exactly?
2) It's pretty hard... typically you go to banking for 2 years and then get to Private Equity via a headhunter (there are plenty that specialize in this exact thing)
A lot of MBA students in top business schools dream of getting into PE firms after MBA. But only those who have some finance background (Investment Banking, for example) have a realistic shot of getting in.
The only way to know how good you might be at something is to fail trying it.
So you start a company and you're not supposed to care about money nor buzz? So how do you measure success?
The answer for a for-profit company must ultimately be money.
The success of a company, IMHO (and in the not so humble opinion of M. Ford) has three components : the bottom line, the reputation and the employees. So yes, buzz and money are on the top 3.
More people on HN, in my opinion, would quit today if they had enough money in a war chest to survive for year or more.