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Comment by eldenring | Hacker News Reader

Huh? pretty much every one of the recently successful AI startup employees (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) have had stints at Google Brain.

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OpenAI is roughly 375 people, I don't know how big Anthropic is but I assume similar.

I think the person you're replying to is wondering why the other 25 million of us aren't doing the same.

The money at FAANG is really hard to beat on a risk adjusted basis (though that risk factor is increasing with the layoff spree).

From a financial perspective it is much more probable to become a millionaire through a FAANG than a startup right now.

Right now is also a harder time to start a startup because of the interest rate hikes reducing available capital. It already impacted SVB's deposits (and caused the ensuing bank run)

That, and why would a FAANG employee have more "founder attitude" than, say, an IBM suit? They've been the career choice of the "my car is bigger than yours" salary-seekers for more years than they had ever been recognizably "startup". One of the "A" hasn't been anything remotely related to startup since long before they ousted Steve Jobs!

That is the lesson number one in YC Startup School.

It is also much more probable to become a multimillionaire through a startup than a FAANG

It remains to be seen if this is true when interest rates aren’t at nearly 0%.

It's hard to blame interest rates for all the wealth in tech when you look at all the new products and innovations that have happened over the last 10 years.

Can you list some? I see the last ten years as a great failure in tech following the decade of real innovation and paradigm change that came before it.

GPT-1…4, Falcon 9 reusability (+ Starlink being possible), most modern VR headsets (Oculus public demo was just over ten years ago), 3D printing is a lot better on many axes, commercially viable consumer OLED, displacement of CFL with LED, vegan "cheese" alternatives suck much less than a decade ago, DNA tests so cheap multiple different companies spam advertising for them at me, vat-grown meat is slowly transitioning from sci-fi to panicking Italian farmers into calling for bans, electric cars have gone from expensive Tesla Roadsters to the ~ 20-fold cheaper Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, about 90% of all PV happened in the last decade (and following a roughly exponential growth rate).

Citation needed. Depends on how big of a multi you are talking about. I know way more people with $1-10M who did it via corporate ladder climbing through FAANG than I do people who struck it big with a startup. At a certain point the balance is in favor of start ups but I suspect the number is somewhere in the 8 figure range which is correspondingly rare.

It definitely is not. The 99.999% case for startups is you walk away with nothing, and that’s true even if you’re good enough to crush it at FAANG.

Crush it at FAANG for a few years and don’t spend like crazy and you’ll be a multimillionaire.

The definition of multimillionaire is a bit vague here, but I would assume the OP was referring to being in deca-millionaire territory. That is much more rare to accomplish at a FAANG company.

The average SWE at FAANG can become a deca-millionaire over the course of 20-25 working years.

Starting from $0, this requires saving $125k a year for 21 years to reach $10.06M at an 11.88% interest rate, which is the S&P500 average. Well within the capability of any senior SWE @ FAANG, and it only takes 4 years to get to senior.

But then capital gains taxes hit.

Anyways, yes, a startup employee on the other hand can become a deca-millionaire in a year or two.

Also the S&P average is more like 7%. But those SWEs also are issued stock compensation which can accelerate those savings meaningfully

It’s not probable, it’s guaranteed at FAANG.

Seems a bit tough with the hiring freeze

25 million? Where are you pulling this ginormous number from?

By the up-thread quotation "existing companies" leading to googling the global software development workforce.

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