Ask HN: Comparison between two startup offers
I'm in the middle of choosing between my current company, and another company. I'd like to give a description of both companies, and poll you all for thoughts and opinions. Cash is identical, and my stock options at my current company are currently underwater due to a ~35%ish drop in valuation compared to before the tech market went south.
My current company is a series C ML/AI company with about 100 people. There are many people with deep expertise in ML systems and distributed systems -- the engineers are very strong, and the founders are reknowned and well-regarded, and also experts in ML systems. But the business is struggling; there was recently a round of layoffs of 15% of the company. There's a very strong pivot into direct competition with the other company, and the current product will likely be deprecated; I'm assuming I'll be safe in terms of layoffs, since my experience aligns very closely with the new product direction and is hard to hire for. About half of the engineers are devoted to a research project closely associated with the founders, but which hasn't been able to yield business results yet. The company doesn't have a presence in open-source.
The other company, the one I received an offer from, recently raised a strong series A, and has lots of market traction. Its bench isn't nearly as deep in terms of hard-to-hire ML/AI expertise or very strong distributed systems engineers, and the founders are not nearly as widely known or connected. The people seem both very nice, fun, and (importantly) interesting. The company has a reasonably popular open source tool, and is not involved in ML/AI research.
I'm finding it difficult to weigh these options, and I'm looking for thoughts, opinions, and intuition on things I may not be considering. I know a large part of this depends on various personal preferences and values, which I will ultimately depend on to decide, but I want to hear from others on how these two options strike them.
Thank you.