Want to found a startup? Work at one first
blog.lawrencejones.dev
blog.lawrencejones.dev
Working in a startup will brand you as a startup person and help you meet VCs which may make it easier to raise. It'll also show you the problems that that particular startup faces and give you n=1 degree of pattern matching. On the flip side, something like YC can give you the same benefit or just shipping a for-profit side project on the side. Additionally, given how poorly run most startups are today, I'd posit that you're actually in more danger of learning the wrong lessons than the right lessons by joining a startup. At the end of the day, the truth is likely to be Peter Thiel's observation that joining the right, highly successful, high growth startup as a very early employee is a great way to learn exactly 1 method of starting a successful company--the way that company did it. But if the startup you join isn't that rocketship, you've only learned how to (or how not to) achieve that particular path of failure or mediocrity.
Not particularly great advice though, because then the challenge becomes identify those startups. And if you could do that reliably, I'd suggest you switch careers into VC instead :)
At least, in terms of this article, a start-up that has growth ambitions and has just raised a round is a great bet. Unlike a potential investor, you didn't need to get in before that round to make the investment worthwhile, and in a sense you don't care as much about the company itself being an outsized success: not if your primary goal is around learning, which I think is legitimate, especially early in your career.
Similarly, I suspect it's not quite right to assume lessons in one start-up don't apply to others. In London at least, there's a strong network of people across the start-up scene who talk a lot. Many of those start-ups have very similar cultures and ways of working, similar enough that they hit the same problems and lessons learned it one often translate to others.
My intention, writing this article, was to encourage people to view joining a start-up with momentum as a valuable learning experience before they start their own thing, possibly more valuable than a big corporation or just jumping into start-ups themselves.
I think finding companies that can provide you with that growth isn't too hard, and I'd be happy to help anyone who wanted to find them, if they wanted it :)
Remember that before succeeding you have to fail and improve in a cycle of n times until you succeed. If you succeed without failing then there is a high probability of luck being involved.
Great place to learn a thing or two, if you have the necessary background and experience.
Some problems are organizational immaturity and can be fixed. Some problems come from leadership and won’t change as long as those leaders are there.
For most employees, the best deal for them financially is to go the FAANG route. But I absolutely recommend working at a startup if you are hoping to one day start your own. It should be said that most startup employees are not going to start their own company (even ones who think they will). So certainly keep that in mind. But I suppose another benefit is working at a startup is probably a good way to gauge if starting a startup is something you could handle. After having worked at one for a while, I have certainly come to more realistic understanding of what kind of startup I would be comfortable founding. I almost certainly would prefer to bootstrap a small project rather than go the VC route, but I think I would feel pretty comfortable taking VC money if the opportunity called for it. But I have also come to realize that the best fit for me in my next role is probably not as a founder, but most likely as a very early employee of another startup. But this time around I will have a much better idea of what to look for in the founding team.
From those I was a lead at I got some valuable experience (including what not to do) & also contacts (some former director/C-level people I'm still in touch with). I still learned the vast majority from actually having to handle it myself in my own startup but I think I would have learned even less (in that particular area) if I was working at amazon or google before instead.
Is more more useful than having a longer runway from big co savings? Doubtful.
Most of the lessons you learn are either going to be
1. General startup lessons (This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...)
2. Lessons specific to the problem you're trying to solve (Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night)
Working at a startup will teach you a little of 1, and none of 2. So I'd easily trade the knowledge gained during two years of working at previous startup for 2 extra months of working on my startup.
Having worked at a startup before, I now know to never risk a substantial amount of my own money on the venture. The risk of failure is too high. I would either a) go the side project->bootstrap route or b) have angel or accelerator money lined up, which should be easy because having worked at a startup before, my network now includes angel investors.
> This information is available in YC Startup School, lean startup, etc...
I have participated in Startup School. It certainly has some value, but it is in no way a substitute for working at a startup. Not even close. Also, your competitors have access to the same resources, so it is not exactly a competitive edge.
> Whats the best way to reach rural RV buyers, what keeps people from renting a room for a night
That is called marketing and market research. Almost every startup in existence does it. And if you work at a startup, you will get a close up look at how it is done, and you will get some valuable lessons on what to do and what not to do. And having worked at a startup, I now also have a list of potential freelancers in case I wanted to contract that work out.
I was a dev, so I never interacted with either of those groups closely. And when I started my own startup our dev doesn't really interact with marketing and has never met our investors.
Maybe another lesson here, is if you are running a startup, consider oversharing with your employees. A fair number of them may be there because they are trying to figure out if the next step for them is founding a company. And oversharing is a good way to keep them engaged. I have been at my current startup for 6-7 years, and would definitely not have stuck around this long had I not felt like I was learning much.
this can be more valuable in many ways, I've literally taken notes about things NOT to do when it comes to things like meetings, processes, etc.
You have to take an intelligent approach though, you can't just go in the opposite direction, e.g. excess meetings can be very damaging to engineers, so let's do 0 meetings.
TL;DR YMMV, but it's much more valuable to learn a selection of "winning moves" you can apply than it is to learn a bunch of "losing moves" not to apply.
If you already know programming, there isn't a lot of value add that couple years of startup experience offers in terms of your programming skills.
The skills that you don't have -- Sales, marketing, hiring -- you will still not have. Working for a startup, as say, a frontend engineer for couple years does not help you get better at Sales. You'll need to hire for them or rely on co-founders anyway. The "wearing multiple hats" trope is extremely over hyped in my experience.
What I really want to know is how to make a buddying startup a high growth startup. And only a tiny amount of companies can give you that, and only if you are working in leadership roles.
It gave me a lot of hope tbh that you can make several mistakes and still have a decent shot.
And I learned tons of what to do correctly. I saw what "rockstar" engineers were actually. I drank from a firehose from a tech standpoint.
Only 1 out of 100 companies, if that, VCs invest in don't go out of business. Even with their ton of experience, their smart people, and all kinds of opportunities that you don't have, it's little more than guesswork on their side.
Trying to look for what is going to be a successful startup is a fool's errand. Pure luck.
You can get a lot better mentorship in those more "boring" traditional jobs at larger companies. You can get that in a startup environment too, but depending on the startup the degree to which that's actually something people prioritize and have capacity for varies wildly. I guess I'd recommend trying smaller startup environments if you happen to already know everything about their tech stack and/or have a decent amount of experience as a SWE already. Both are probably useful but I've personally gotten a lot better ROI growth-wise when working on an established team with stable goals, time to mentor, document, write tests, etc.
Just go to point X directly. Too many people shy away from their dreams and delay, because they want to learn first, practice first, and get ready before the real adventure. You will never deplete "more things to learn". You are only depleting your lifetime. And no matter how close working at a startup is to working on a startup, it will never be as close to it as itself.
If you need to save up some money or take care of any other blockers first for your own safety, fine. If there is a great company working on a great problem that you are excited by, great. But if you want to start a new company, then working at a startup is not a practice for starting a new startup. It is a practice for working at a startup and a practice for wasting another day of your life not living the way you really want to live.
And if you fail, you already worked at a startup (by founding it)
People try all the time to learn calculus with a weak foundation in precalculus, and they really struggle unnecessary. People also try to learn physics with a weak foundation in mathematics, with similar results. I would argue that the same is true for software development. You can develop bad habits (e.g. not using a style guide at all) by not doing initial prep work first first.
I agree that some people put things off indefinitely and end up in "tutorial hell," and for them it's better to err to going right to doing. But it's not always the case, and sometimes educational opportunities (e.g. getting work experience before starting a company) can really increase your skills.
Agreed.
> ...university courses, prerequisites are required and enforced for good reason.
Perhaps, but see also this article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497780
> I would argue that the same is true for software development.
One can learn best practices without having to work at a startup / tech shop / MANGA. Besides, software development isn't the only skill required, there's likely a lot to learn but not enough time. With most upstarts, timing is more crucial than most other learnable factors, because you can never rollback time.
More than one startup talked a big game in hiring about the product, the customers and the culture only to be more of a cult of personality where decisions were made in private between cofounders despite being an "open" company, unequal pay despite "transparent" salaries with bands, a lack of managerial skills or care for personnel management (once told not to bring my feelings to work) and in almost every single instance a technical founder or early engineer that cannot or will not share work by delegating.
The most important things I have learned have absolutely came from being involved with startups and 90% are what NOT to do.
The good thing is I identified what I love:
"Devops" and adding automation and structure to processes very early. Everyone thinks is has to get in the way or will slow them down. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Building people is was more fun than building tech but you have to be on top of your hiring game early on. And you have to be willing to share and trust.
You have to ship. But that doesnt mean you dont invest in yourself. If you have money for 100 days then build for 100 days. If you have money for 2 years then build for 2 years. This means making that investment in your tools and your process.
Lastly, if you are B2B, buy a SOC2-in-a-box and get it over with and use something like auth0 or workos and just be ready with SSO integrations. Dont put off the foundational tablestakes of doing business with other tech companies.
But you are correct, if you do need it, you should do it as early as you can and buy it out of the box as much as you can. I recommend Tugboat Logic for this.
For those that do not know, an audit is going to cost AT LEAST $20k but the total cost could be more than $50k (certainly more if you are paying market rate and you account for the team's time to pull everything together). And the requirements can cause side effect costs (penetration tests, etc).
Gotta hand it to Chris (one of our founders) who came from being Director of Platform at Monzo (a UK neobank) and had spent years battling auditors, and knew exactly how to play it.
Kinda hammers home the point of my article... but about three months into our company life, we were SOC 2 certified, and it didn't feel like much effort at all.
In case anyone is looking for actionable advice, we used Vanta to help us through the process. If you're funded, I think it's well worth the money.
To my knowledge, only 1 ever took the plunge, the rest all moved on to different jobs when they finished up with us. In every case they told me that an advantage of the new place is that they’d learn some more things they need to know for when they start their own thing.
To be clear I don’t judge their choices at all. Just pointing out that this is a pretty common thing people tell themselves.
By contrast the former employees who have gone on to do their own startup expressed no interest in the topic until one day they were suddenly a founder.
The main thing I learned is that I never, ever, EVER, want to start my own company, and actually never want to work in a company with fewer than 30 people again. Maybe seeing the stress and the actual type of work that makes up the work of an early stage founder (or indeed employee) is quite off-putting for people. I don't see that as a bad thing either.
Follow a top CEO/CTO as person 2-10 with a market you like...
... And then:
* Learn how 0->1 , product market fit, and overall process works, which you miss by joining growth-stage
* Grow from working with customers hands-on to becoming an area owner with responsibility around customer journey, revenue, hiring & firing, etc. VP Sales, early CTO/Dir of Engineering, CTO where you are heavy on sales/solutions engineering flow in big enterprises, ... . Working for a VP/director/manager is different from owning a part of the business, especially where you have a teneous & sales-oriented external aspect like revenue or customer success. Likewise, not owning the customer journey hides a lot, which is easy to miss in a growing company as specialization happens fast, esp in engineering.
* Pick carefully on enterprise vs consumer, which market within that, and which internal teams you work with. That's the customer persona you need to live & breathe later.
Not easy!
Also, fwiw, there is a big class of professional startup people who are 'scale up' experts that can take a working product, VC capital raised by other people, and help that grow faster. The OP's advice is more for getting on that track. And from a founders perspective: you can just hire them, everyone wins. Just don't confuse that with a 0->1 skillset, not inherent..
BS. Exceptional people are mostly an illusion - yes, there are (for example) Linus Torvalds and Fabrice Bellard, but there are much less such people than startups, orders of magnitudes less. Exceptionalism comes from the combination of the idea quality, low level of mistakes in execution, some luck in the market, some combination of qualities, like perseverance, which smoothes out some problems - and other qualities like that, engineering level is certainly important but you can have exceptional results with just competent engineering. It's hard to find an example of textbook successful startups where engineering was outstanding. Sorry, won't give examples, just look for yourselves.
Hiring people who have experience in those environments before can help you replicate that success again, though. So worth picking them, if you have a choice.
We're all entitled to our beliefs, but this seems very specific to me. Why doe sit have to be "high-growth"? What if your startup isn't meant to be "high-growth"? Why do you specifically have to work at a startup? I believe getting some work experience is a good idea, mostly just because if you want to put other people's livelihood in your hands, one should probably mature a bit.
Additionally, this advice falls into the classic trap of "I did this, and therefore I think everyone else should". The advice could be true, or it could not, there is no way of knowing, so at the end of the day, the value of such advice is pretty low, IMO.
It means you get several opportunities to learn how to do a specific thing, and see how different attempts yield different results. At a company that grows more slowly you'll need to revisit things less frequently, which reduces your opportunity to learn.
You're right though, I don't have experience doing things other than what I've done. I can only speak to how useful my experience has been when going back to very early stage as a first employee, which has a lot of overlap with founder.
And in that sense, I'm continually thankful I have the experience I do in my current position. I think it means I'm materially more impactful, and I can only imagine performing significantly worse without it.
I think you're missing the critique: you don't know how useful your experience has been just because you experienced it. This is why systematic studies are necessary: to collate a lot of experiences to see what works and what doesn't (and even those are hard).
I think the content is still useful, though. Especially as it gives some examples of the type of challenge that appear routinely when scaling a company, and why experience seeing this before can help you avoid similar mistakes if you ever start your own thing.
I'd personally love to see people write competing posts from other angles, even if they too will be limited by the author's own experience.
It would be great to hear what type of stuff you can learn from working at a large corporation was particularly useful when starting a company. I'd read that in a heartbeat!
1) Working at fairly successful startups gave me excuses to put off starting my own company because I was still "learning so much." In retrospect, I should have started my own company years earlier.
2) Identifying startups that will turn into rocketships is hard. If you are that good at identifying successful startups early on, you should probably consider becoming a VC. :)
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
The difference is that if you have this experience when starting a company, it can help you avoid so many stumbling blocks, and you can skip forward to more mature company stages.
While you can't really compare two companies, I think it's interesting that the company I currently work at (incident.io) has only taken a year to go from me joining as the first employee to 40 people + series A + hundreds of customers now.
There's no way we'd have moved so fast if it wasn't a case of replicating what we already knew worked, tweaked for the environment we found ourselves in.
So yes, it doesn't mean you can't be successful as an inexperienced founder, but I do think it makes a difference in terms of execution.
Which I guess makes sense, as they've been exposed to certain industries from top to bottom, as well as people with enough funds to actually invest.
I was under the impression that starting a company in general and 'starting a startup' are not exactly the same thing, though I surely might be wrong about this.
Actually if you had the chance to work at a company that became a unicorn, you will have better chance to get founding which increase the chance that your company is going to work, so yeah.
Except for that confidence and founding part I'm not sure it is valuable
Also in a startup you're more likely to need to wear multiple hats and deal with uncertainty, which are two things you'd definitely need to deal with even more in your own company.
When we decide to do something, such as make key hires, build new teams or invest in infrastructure, we have way more confidence that we're doing it at the right time. And when we do it, it's 90% what we need, skipping so many of the painful intermediate stages I've seen before.
It makes a huge difference in velocity, which is key for successful start-ups. So while you're right about funding and network, you execute better too.
In this case: the startup success rate of those who worked for startups vs those who worked in some other institutions (or for some, no work at all).
Sure, working at a startup might make you be confident at making decisions, but will that confidence lead to good results when you’re a founder? Working at another place can give you confidence as well, but again, will it help you get the results you want in your startup?
Anyhow, I’m not sure the answers matter much because the author didn’t write much about the uniqueness of the skills learnt in startups. He emphasised more on velocity of learning skills that can be learnt in many places, but high-growth startups can provide the fastest route.
I think that is the best way to find suitable people outside your specialty where you can properly judge people’s integrity, ability, and their match with you (working style, filling the holes in your skills, compatibility, boss vs employee).
I have done this, no I have seen other successful entrepreneurs do it.
Working as an engineer, and kickstarting a business are two very different jobs.
Even in practice successful tech startup founders seems to be 40 yos with a background in management consulting. So I really wonder where do people get the idea that working as an engineer is a path towards entrepreneurship.
EDIT: and it’s rather ironic that the author doesn’t himself run his own startup.
Speaking to the point about not having been a founder myself: you're right, and hope I was clear about that in the article. But I have spent the last year as the first employee working on building out a start-up, where a big challenge is in establishing a team and learning how to build a product that people want to buy.
When you build a start-up as a founder, you need to know how to do that stuff. Otherwise there won't be much point in being good at the founder-specific work like raising money etc, because there's not a business around it.
The main point is to try to minimise the 'firsts' you might have when you start your own company. If the only thing you're doing for the first time is exclusively founder responsibility, then I think you're much more likely to be successful.
Lots of people have these experiences but don’t succeed as founders.
I suspect a key difference is you are currently doing it without real risk, and with someone else’s risk appetite. I’d be wary of trying to apply the exact same approach when it’s your company on the line. So in that sense there will be just as many “firsts” either way.
Why? I think it's a mix of:
- Getting comfortable building from scratch (we're early stage so almost everything we are doing right now is from the start)
- Getting comfortable with new technologies that previously felt inaccessible to me (ML, AI)
- Founders are very transparent with the operational and legal details of our startup, so I learn a bit here and there about the non-technical hard things
- The chase for the first dollars. This is really energizing (and hard) part of where I am at right now. It can be prone to burnout, but I do now want to try and go for my first $100/month
Also, many founders that worked in somewhat larger environments before tend to rush into 'mature' processes long before their benefits outweigh their costs. This almost always grinds progress to a halt, creates a ton of middle management and other non-productive overhead in a startup/scaleup.
As an employee, you need to vhet the startup even more closely than an investor. An investor will spread their money to multiple startups; but you can only have a single full time job at a time.
I've been speaking with friends about starting their own companies recently, and one thing it's made me consider is what experience would best prepare you to become a founder.
Having spent my career in start-ups, the idea of founding my own without first working at one and seeing what works terrifies me. There's so much stuff you only learn from doing it over and over again, at different company sizes, and seeing how it works/doesn't.
I thought it might be useful to share some of that experience, if only to justify why joining an existing start-up can be an amazing education for anyone wanting to start their own. As opposed to, for example, joining an existing big-corp or jumping straight into start-ups without that experience.
There could be qualitative benefits and I think this is why a lot of people go this route. Things like less structure and a bigger feeling of impact.
But your equity is most likely going to be worth exactly $0 and the upside isn't really that high. For every Craig Silverstein there are 100,000 people who got nothing. Look back at any HN thread where people are asked about their exits (as an employee) and it's sobering. $10-20k after 4-5 years is disturbingly common.
A first employee if they have a lot of pull might get what? 0.5%? Maybe 1% if they're a rock star? It gets worse than that because your equity and founder equity (let alone the investor's equity) aren't the same. Theirs will have things like liquidation preferences and participating preferred. Yours may well just disappear on dilution or the kiss of death: a down round.
If your startup gets bought in the sub-$100 million range, the acquirer might avoid paying out employees by giving signing bonuses to the founders to join as VPs and pay out the investors while paying pennies on the dollar to common shareholders. This may have changed but there were rules around acquiring companies for less than ~$60 million that meant it was much better to buy the company for $60m and pay founder signing bonuses for another $40 million rather than acquiring it for $100 million and that $40 million difference is coming out of your pocket.
On top of all that, you, as an employee, will have very limited opportunities to liquidiate your equity prior to an IPO that will probably never happen (you'll get acquired instead and that company may well be public). Founders and investors may sell some of their equity on future rounds. Sometimes employees will have access to this but often they won't.
Now compare this to the FAANG path. It's pretty easy to get to $400k+ total comp for really not that much stress and very little uncertainty. You'll never make $100 million this way (unless you become an SVP+) but let's face it, your startup isn't making you $100 million either.
Honestly, things like this read like VC propaganda just trying to keep the pipeline of warm bodies fed. Outliers are used to sell this well I have some outliers too: Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. None of them worked for a startup first.
The power of anecdotes and survivor bias.
It's just that some people would rather have the stress, freedom and excitment that come with working at a startup, rather than completing their OKR to avoid being put on a PIP at the next PSC. Even if that means earning less money - on average.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_career
As the company: You get highly motivated, amazing talent
As the employee / future founder: You make your intention clear to leave in x months to start your own thing and can openly discuss strategy for your company with the current founders instead of hiding your side projects.
I took this idea from Mighty / Supabase.
Application process is simple, pitch me at mike@luabase.com. Tell me what you want to do to grow Luabase and what you're thinking of doing for your company.
0 - https://luabase.notion.site/Founders-Program-16f8d963328a47d...
We have a few people who are explicitly at incident.io to gain experience of how to build companies. It may be that they won't go to do this, but their time here will put them in a great position to do so, if they ever want to.
I've seen some companies who have a standing offer to angel invest in your start-up too, though I was never sure how I felt about that.
https://github.com/StellateHQ/future-founder-promise
So we are doing exactly this, which is cool! I think the primary value is in leveraging the investor network, as you say, though the angel investment is a nice bonus.
We also offer full benefits in the US if the person needs them. Finding healthcare in the US without it being thru an employer is a huge pain.
Of course, some of these are already a decade old and may employ hundreds or thousands of people already, so YMMV; they might just be like older, boring enterprises, just not as formal or fixed in their ways.
So most of the early stage learnings can no longer happen.
Pick a company with a team you respect, a product you connect with, and has money in the bank (just completed a funding round).
You can't go much wrong if you do that, at least in terms of learning.
I got lucky, in that GoCardless gave me a load of opportunity and I grew a lot with the company, which opened more doors.
Not every company is like this, so that's a significant caveat to this advice. But ideally you'd find companies that are.
As many other have said... You might learn how to run a start up but its just as likely you will be able to see mistakes the company you joined made and hopefully be able to prevent your company from making those same ones.
Unfortunately, my impostor syndrome (along with my inexperience) became quite crippling and I had to leave.
Looking back, I probably should have left sooner or been comfortable with standing up for myself.
Every startup is different. A bootstrapped startup that has to be cashflow positive from day one is different than one built on an initial investment.
Having work experience also means you can better understand if a startup model is actually appropriate for what you're trying to build. Startups in the sense that VCs use the term are high risk high reward and optimize growth for a high ROI exit. This is great if you want to take the gamble for a chance to retire at 35, not so great if you just want a fulfilling work life or can't afford to loose.
The quickest way to tank a startup is to run out of money, yours or your investors'. I guess if you want to optimize for outcomes, the best advice would simply be: Want to found a startup? Be wealthy. But that doesn't make for a good blog post.
> I remember that meeting, where I and two others remained at the table after everyone else had left the boardroom. “Shit” and “well this is fucked” was all we managed to say into the shocked silence, and I began to worry that I’d made a terrible mistake.
This was my experience, too. The company just released its v2 app and was having meetings finalizing an acquisition the first week I was there. Within 5 months, the engineering team I worked on went from 7-8 employees to 3, including the resignation of the CTO. It's going alright now, but it definitely was worrisome.
> As it turned out, everything was pretty much fine. Different for sure, but people step up and companies evolve, and while it was challenging to fill the gap made by those who had left, it happened faster than you might expect.
> Knowing you’ve been there before is what allows you to respond with “I know this will be ok” instead of overreacting, or allowing the situation to impact you too harshly
This is spot on and I can deeply relate. In my startup (150 employees) we had some senior devs departures and the Junior staff was acutely impacted, requiring me to put a lot of effort into managing the situation and reassuring the team we'd overcome it. Fast forward 3 months and we have filled the vacant positions, morale is good again and productivity is mostly restored.
1. Finding ideas can be hard especially when you start from scratch. Most startups (particularly fast scaling ones) can give you ideas if you look for:
* de-prioritized ideas due to "hyper-focus"
* listening to common problems that customers [0] have that aren't necessarily solved by your company.
* product features built that many other companies would find useful (e.g. collaborative editing infra)
* internal tooling that other companies would find useful
2. Fundraising[1]
Many friends got their first checks from investors that were investors of a startup they previously worked at. And the truth is, if you choose a slow-scaling/zombie startup, you will learn a ton still but honestly, the investors of that company aren't going to be stoked to invest in you if you spin out your own thing.
A quick list of common strategies that worked for them:
* Choose founders who don't treat investors as "dumb money"
* Choose companies backed by great investors
* Join startups that are scaling fast
* Join early (< 40) so you can be part of the "success story"
* Ask to meet the investors throughout your tenure (ideally you are upfront with the founders of the company you join)
* Stay there and be a part of the solution through 2+ tough moments (ie. investors can associate you with the success of the company)
[0] Getting to know potential customers and understanding how to acquire them is also super useful.
[1] You can avoid the fundraising focus by going to YC (or equivalent) because you'll get the necessary clout to get investors knocking. If you're going to a startup anyway to get experience and find ideas, you may as well prep for fundraising.
The question about working somewhere else is not "is it better than nothing", but "is it better than starting a startup now". It can be equally true that "founders that worked at other companies before are more likely to succeed" and "the ideal course of action for a person who wishes to start a successful startup is to start it now".
If you've spent time in a growing company and at least seen how things evolve over the years, you have an idea of what does work that you can base your first attempts against.
Trying to come up with novel solutions for everything from hiring to org structure is a recipe for pain, and I'd invest my money with a team of people who've experienced good versions of these things over those with none any day.
But I'm biased, as I started my first startup at 16 and failed, and proceeded to re-try at 18, and succeeded. I'm not doubting that someone with years of experience in high-growth startups would have been a better founder than me at 16, but I do think that starting a startup was a choice that lead me to startup success faster than trying to get a job and then attempting.
> and I'd invest my money with a team of people who've experienced good versions of these things over those with none any day.
This is an absolutely valid (and imo likely correct) assessment, but it's a different question than "What should I, as the potential founder or employee, do?".
In my experience the best options are almost always the middle ground. That is, the startup mentality drives sloppiness and excuses while the big company mentality drives slowness and perfectionism. The best option is somewhere in between. At a startup it can often be extremely valuable to have a "parent in the room" enforce big company thinking and oversight, and at a big company it is almost always useful to at least envision a shorter path than the usual consult with everyone and make a design and see how it goes kind of thing.
The "allows you to respond with “I know this will be ok”" statement as a reaction to major changes and challenges sets off red lights all over my dashboard. The situation will be okay because you made it okay. This is true in companies of all sizes. Fail to take responsibility for the full situation and you are likely doomed.
The "any process you introduce will break by the time you double the headcount" strikes me as classic startup sloppiness. If you really know what the situation is and why you are doing what you are doing then even when changes are necessary it is usually quite explicitly clear what and why. Solid processes and operations often go the other way: even with significant changes the core ideas and methods endure, so be careful what you start with.
Hiring from your personal networks first is another classic sloppy startup error. This tends to end up with clubby teams made of people who aren't actually as good as they might be and that exclude the people you really want to hire. Better to start well outside your personal networks and bring people in as needed. Sorting out the interview process at least at first also works better if it isn't all friends and long time coworkers.
And this business of defining levels is a real mess. All the best organizations I have contributed to have been close to flat.
There are always many paths, but given how treacherous the path to startup success can be it seems worthwhile to air criticism.
But, obviously, not all high-growth startups can provide an environment of rapid learning. It’s not just about high-growth; it’s also about how much output the startup is trying to extract from its people. The more they try to extract, the faster the learning cycle. In that case, a high-growth startup with limited resource seems to be the ideal company to work for.
2. This is a community of people interested in startups. This isn’t a general purpose audience nor is it meant to be.
I still would like money though, lots of money. I need 600k-1 million USD to quit working just to live. With my current income, inflation, etc., I'll likely still be working until I physically can't though. If I magically had that 600k-1 million today to retire, I'd then be content on the money side. I would have the freedom to pursue whatever I wanted to do with my time, from volunteering way more to tinkering with crafts/considerably expanding our growing/YouTube/writing/whatever.
You can want a morally upright life with lots of personal relationships, and still want/dream of a nice little pile of money.
Back in the days I knew people who were just working with startups and didn't know about testing or versioning.
Most startups have zero documentation.
In my experience you're as likely to find good people in startups or in established companies. It's luck, knowing someone who know someone.
Experience in the industry is useful. That said you can learn just as much if not even more just starting and failing.
Just never stop learning and eventually things will be alright
Either way you’re going to be figuring out a lot of stuff on your own, but I think I would have recognised that earlier and would have had a little more practice.
But the choice of company you work for is important, too. Startups are not all the same. You should choose one in the same field as your interest, and one that operates with similar goals as yours.
He recently got handed multiple billions to expand from 500 HC. Secret ingredient: two decades at Mckinsey.
Biggest trend other than experience is TIME. Most businesses take a DECADE to really get going.
I'd imagine McKinsey is a great place to see loads of companies and be exposed to a lot of useful stuff. But it probably won't pack as much relevant experience into as short a time as several years in a start-up 5-10x'ing in size.
Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson – two of the GoCardless founders – both left McKinsey to start GC. I'd imagine that experience was incredibly useful, though you'd have to ask them if they think it's more or less valuable than seeing things at a different start-up beforehand.
Not to say experience is bad but I suspect the latter happens most of the time despite whatever experience there is.
Also founding a startup makes financial sense, working at one usually does not.
Straightforward enough.
Most startups don't know what they are doing, so first-time starter-uppers get the wrong idea. Instead of moving at a steady pace without burnout, the lesson they can take away from it is that startups are all about heroics and working until 2AM while chugging tequila.
There are a lot of clowns out there with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger who run these companies (usually into the ground).
I adore HN obviously, but am concerned about the idea of mentorship as a prerequisite to success. Truthfully, I was far more clever fresh out of college at 21 than I am in midlife after learning how to supposedly do things better. All I needed was any money at all to work on my own projects (something like $24,000 annually in the year 2000) but nothing like that existed. We didn't even have Kickstarter. So I worked a bunch of dead end jobs making rent and all but wasted the most productive years of my life.
But there have been several changes over the last 20 years that removed the artificial barriers to entry that kept me and makers like me on the outside. The main one being the JOBS Act of 2012:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jumpstart-our-business-...
Because of that, non-accredited investors can invest up to 10% of their income:
https://www.startengine.com/ (no affiliation)
If I were starting out now, I would largely ignore what other people are doing, and figure out a way to raise 2+ years of income, or at least $100,000 per person, by checking all of the boxes needed for crowdfunding. Then show the campaign to older people who have some disposable income that want to invest outside usurious and rent-seeking systems like stock markets and real estate.
Then I would use something like a referral program to bootstrap:
https://andrewchen.com/how-to-design-a-referral-program/
Everything else on the technical side is honestly pretty easy to figure out for programmers. There's just not that much to learn, it's mostly about balancing process with pivoting to make steady forward progress each day. Two-person teams have been more productive than entire companies.
And nobody wants to hear it, but, I feel that up to 90% of "best practices" today are about working around fundamental inadequacies in our tools which still haven't been addressed. For example, all databases needed event streams (like Supabase) so that we could have had reactive programming from the beginning. Jira and countless other similar tools have just not kept up with their errata. The level of expertise needed to set up cloud deployments has passed the point of believability. Native mobile development probably shouldn't be a thing, except for certain performance-critical components. And so on.
The big opportunities today are probably NOT in the typical high-effort approaches common to startups mired in scaling issues. We can look down the road a little and bypass those eventualities, assuming that we can scrape up enough funding to work independently and avoid groupthink.
FedEx:
- an ancient dinosaur, using a LOT of ancient tech (I did my job in an AS400 terminal for 15 and a half years).
- A bureaucratic dinosaur, even backfilling positions could take 6 months just to get a posting and even simple office fun activities had to be kicked up the chain to corporate legal for approval
- You were a serial number, mine was 628254
- Everything I did was micromanaged to the second via time stamps
- Reviews were rigid, mechanical, impersonal
TrueNorth:
- Agile, even in the 6 months I've been there things have rapidly changed (and for the better) and that just blows my mind. I know it's normal for a startup but it's truly like magic to me.
- Not a bureaucratic dinosaur, our CEO is hands on in the trenches still. She's there asking questions, looking for feedback, keeping a decent working knowledge of everything that is going on. There aren't a dozen people between her and the lowest rung of the ladder.
- I'm not a serial number, I'm just Ryan. I'm treated like a human being.
- Reviews are typical for modern companies. I can also ask my boss for feedback any time and, unlike at FedEx, know I'm going to get actionable feedback and not have him scrutinizing everything I do for the next few days/weeks wondering what I'm trying to hide/cover up in my work.
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I definitely see a lot at TN that is being done much better than at a dinosaur like FedEx, we have the ability to just try something if we think it's going to work better unlike at FedEx where it would have to be kicked up through multiple rungs of management, then non software engineers would be tasked to investigate it, then maybe 3-4 months later a very limited time study would get approved and done, and then that new process - regardless of if it was better - would get buried. At a startup it's just "sure, give it a try, see what happens" most of the time or a much more immediate feedback "actually, that is going to be an issue because of x, y, and z".
I did join TN when it was north of 50 people though. It had 2 years and change of operating before I joined so I did miss out on the truly chaotic bits but 100% I would say I'm now better equipped for either a brand spankin' new startup or a decades old company due to my time here. I absolutely think differently than when I started 6 months ago and I don't feel stifled by some antiquated system of doing business. If I have an idea I can go explore it, or even try it, I can grab 15 minutes from someone's calendar to ask why they're doing something a certain way and what about it is annoying/is awesome, and I can take that and maybe apply it to my work or even let my brain percolate on how to improve that for them.
If I ever had an idea for a startup, I 100% feel better equipped to take stab at it now that I've worked for one. I definitely know what is working as far as communication, documentation, scoping, etc.