If you raised money but eventually your startup failed, would you as founder of a SaaS company have more trouble getting hired as a senior engineer than if you had never founded a company?
I find this hard to believe but I could be totally wrong.
A close friend of mine had to emigrate to another country after successfully exiting his startup with tens of millions in the bank. Top recruiting firms in the US didn’t know what to do with him and considered him not “specialized enough” for the US market.
Other markets such as Europe hire very differently. There, employers aren’t necessarily looking to fill narrow roles with “bandaid employees”, but want people to have breadth and grow within the business across future roles.
In fact, this is precisely the feedback I also got from a top headhunting firm where I worked with the head of US tech recruiting and the EU counterparts.
Put differently, the “founder penalty” isn’t as much of an issue overseas.
I’m still baffled by it…
Sales and marketing are hard, and most startups grossly underestimate how hard it is to sell their idea/product/company. The tech side is usually pretty easy by comparison.
So unless you wrote your backend with Access, you should be OK. And even then Access might have been the Right Choice at the Time.
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/startup-founders-are-...
I ended up in jobs building things from scratch after that. Consulting for pre-investment companies. Consulting billion dollar companies who wanted a full rewrite of their flagship product. Building experimental products for startups.
But in the past, the demand for engineers is extremely high and it's not hard to find a job anyway.
One client was a VC. Another did PR for corporations who did startupish events (hackathons, incubators, go to market events). 80% of startup projects came from there.
Billion dollar company was a client of a friend. He delivered a major project for them, got first notice for the new one, and assembled people for it.
Networking isn't just going around meeting people. You have to put in the work and deliver over expectations every time before they'll recommend you to bigger people.
But the vast majority of experienced people in the industry understand that a very large percentage of startups don't survive more than a year or two and if you were able to execute technically, that's what matters.
My 2 cents: nope, not for most companies. Of course the tech skills have to be there, but being a founder shows a level of commitment and care for the user that I'd love to see in every senior engineer.
That being said, I’ve worked with, and hired folks who had startups that fizzled out and they didn’t seem to feel that they were at a disadvantage. As a hiring manager now, I’d certainly view any founder experience positively (although I’m admittedly biased).