Y Combinator here I come | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator here I come

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128 pointsthatusertwo65 comments

I think it's always good to be traumatized by an experience in a crappy company at the start of your career. It gets it ouf the way, it makes you understand how terrible management can ruin pretty much anything, and it's better to have those realizations at 22 than at 45 :)

Good luck, and keep us posted about your startup adventures!

so true.

Yeah, I'd chalk this up to poor management. Any manager who doesn't listen to "hey, you have a serious problem here" isn't doing their job.

Good managers realize that it's their job to make those people reporting to them happy.

Bad managers believe that it's their job to make the people they report to happy.

There are many more bad managers than good ones.

great analysis. if you can keep them challenged and provide them best possible environment to tackle the challenges, they will be happy. They will excel and so you have excelled - automatically making the people you report to happy...

been in the situation of working for terrible managers in a big company, was 24, working at a top 3 nyc law firm - quit after less than a yr - started working on the startup i'm applying to yc with for summer 2012, trying to innovate in a wide-open, extremely under-served space: Christianity

bravo to this post.

"At about that time I decided to keep my mouth shut, after all that is what they wanted, someone who would keep quiet."

Just came to this realization myself last week. Doesn't matter if they're forcing iOS UX on to Android UX, sometimes they just don't to hear it. Promises of 'We welcome fresh and new perspectives.' or 'We want someone who isn't afraid to make comments and suggestions.' are usually warning signs during the interview. I even ask fellow team members how did some of the less than optimal choices manage to get passed through, they'd just smile and whisper that how things are done – management doesn't want expertise, they just want soldiers.

Poor management team can really kill team morale, but try your best to make the best of it while you're still there. Chat up and learn from people from different departments, especially if you are interest in doing your own startup. There's so much to learn other than just design and coding. So so much!

I wouldn't necessarily say that promises of "We welcome fresh and new perspectives...isn't afraid to make comments..." is a warning sign. As a founder I truly try to listen to our employee's thought and ideas and if they make sense, we implement them. In fact we just started an internship program where the interns pitch us a feature/idea for our site and if we approve they implement that live on our site. In the end it's just like anything in this world, there are alot of talkers, that say the right things but don't mean them, and then there are doers, people that follow through on their words with actions. The difficulty is differentiating between the 2...

I'm guessing you've been thinking about applying to Y Combinator for a while, if it was the first thing you did after you were laid off.

That said, I have to ask....are you sure you want to apply to Y Combinator?

There are startup jobs out there where this sort of mismanagement is not the norm. I was in your exact shoes at one point (although I left due to repeated missed paychecks, not due to layoff) - and I began to doubt if any company would be competent, except one I started myself. (This was compounded with my own minor successes in the startup game, having gotten personal momentum with an idea on the side.) It pains me to admit this so publicly...but it took me a year to realize, that my experience there ate away at my trust in anyone as a potential employer.

I guess all I mean to say is, YC is great - but if part of you still wants to join an early startup and learn while you're young, there are good employers out there. They're few and far between...but please don't give up. They're absolutely worth the search.

I've always wanted to start my own company, and this will be my second time applying to Y-Combinator.

But I am certainly more receptive to the benefits of working at a good company where I can learn a lot.

Sounds good - just wanted to make sure someone asked. Now go out there and kick some ass. :)

Looking forward to meeting you :)

Why was this voted down? This doesn't make sense because the kid wrote the blog post to get noticed by YC and he succeeded. If Paul Buchheit of the YC team says "looking forward to meeting you :)"

Then the crafty bugger succeeded in his goal of raising awareness.

Figured I'd point this out incase the guy doesn't realize he succeeded lol. People on HN have been much more aggressive with the downvote button lately :(

My guess is that some folks are just here for the links, and don’t know who’s on the team. See a comment that doesn’t look like it contributes to the discussion? Downvote away, heedless of the author. And maybe that’s fair. But once a post has been downvoted once, it seems much more likely to be downvoted further, even if the original vote was unwarranted.

wouldn't they think that Paul = Paul Graham

I can understand the confusion and your point. Paul graham is PG and his posts are always rocketed to the top. But, you can always check the profile (which I do often to get a better perspective on people).

Checking someone's profile is great because you can see their post discussions and comments to see if they're genuinely an ass or if they're geniuses you can learn from all of their other comments.

There's nuggets of gold in comments. It took me a year after I started reading HN before I really learned to value the profile and comments function.

Thank you, me too.

You're not the first young person to smell a rat and assume that everything is ok because some senior people say so.

Your lessons here: 1) gut feelings are usually correct, and 2) many startups are run by delusional idiots with impressive backgrounds.

I think "delusion" is somehow needed for anyone to have the balls to start a company. The odds are so much against you. Everyone around you who never became entrepreneurs themselves will never understand what drives you.....you are just simply a different kind of animal.

That may be your definition, but I don't think that's what he meant :)

I agree, I'm just playing with his words to make my point. The fact is it takes a little bit of insanity to leave your secure workplace and spend most of your savings for a less than 10% chance of success.

This is a good point, when I first started I had no idea what to look for, now that I've spent some time at a startup hopefully I have a much better sense of what to look for before taking my next job.

I'm not clear on what you were hired to do and it sounds like you weren't either. Sure, they said they want someone who isn't afraid to give feedback and improve the product. But it seems you took that one statement as an encouragement to run circles around the org-chart.

Were you hired as a programmer or a designer? If the marketing copy or the UI/UX is already clearly specified, as a developer you should be thankful. It makes your job easier when you aren't expected to 'improve' loosely specified things that aren't your specialty.

I'm a programmer in a three-person startup (along with the founder and a designer) and role overlap must be our biggest problem. The founder is the domain expert and the designer is an excellent graphic designer, and none of us can resist offering his/her two cents on the UI/UX - the back and forth is endless. As a programmer I'm lucky to not worry about the rest of the team reading my code and offering constructive criticism or insisting on a refactor.

Still, surely everyone in the company should understand the overall company strategy and business model. If he points out there's a flaw in the business model, someone should be able to tell him why he's wrong or elevate it to the next level all the way to the CEO, who puts it straight once and for all or says holy shiza you're right it's time to pivot.

It was a small enough company that there was room for everyone to contribute to every part.

I had a similar experience at my first job (while I was still going to uni). The funny thing is the CEO would often take me to his office and show me how much money they were making with the work I was doing. He would brag that the last change request made them xyz amounts of money. I was being paid very little for my work. It was a great learning experience for me and pushed me to try my own things.

"At about that time I decided to keep my mouth shut, after all that is what they wanted, someone who would keep quiet."

This is when you KNOW you're in the wrong place. Definitely not the bitterness of someone whose been laid off. Any founders or managers who don't want their team mates to be self driven, are hiring B-players.

Good luck in your YC app!!

You helped them rewrite their mail/newsletter but there are typos all over your blog post. It's worse than a TechCrunch article. This makes me question certain things about your side of the story, the only side available to us.

I personally didn't see any typos. I have this auto correct mechanism in my brain that ignores all the typos (which does have a bad side because I do a lot of them).

I'm not sure what grammar nazis look for in an article. The point the author trying to convey or pointless study of grammar?

I'm a bad speller true, but the improvements to the mail were mostly aesthetic.

You are extremely lucky.

You had excellent opportunity to learn some important lessons when young and after investing only 7 mths of your life. I think this is small price to pay.

I've had similar situation, but I invested 5 years... My friend was cut loose after ~15+ years.

Celebrate and move on!

that seems what most people miss out on

not all startups are created equal...not all of them will have an early Google atmosphere...plenty of them are started by corporate drones

so you get a bad work environment, paired up with a company that still hasn't figured out how to become profitable

Strange startup to hire creative people to do "just what we say" without interest to hear fresh ideas, point of view...

One my friend who launched startups said how important it is to encourage people to express new ideas and support making a great product.

there are a lot more of these than you'd think. especially at startup founded by big-co people from Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft. watch out for that profile.

Thanks for comment. I think this is really not so rare nowadays.

this job sounds like the worst of both worlds. A corporate job (you do what exactly you got hired to do) without the secure business model.

I can relate to a bad-mgmt experience. But 8:30 to 6:00 is nothing to complain about in startupland (or medical, legal, finance, consulting, etc.). In fact, I'd call 8:30 - 6:00 light (even very light).

those are pretty standard hours for even companies like Google.

if you are working more than that and don't have >= 1% of the company, you are getting used. its really as simple as that. startups are a pyramid scheme - seed round employees get Nx series A employees gets Nx as much as series B employees.

that's not necessarily unjustified but a series B employee should not be working the hours of a seed round employee.

Yeah the hours were good, however i became disillusioned about what a startup is.

Great one. Hope, you'll be in. :) In fact starting to work on startup having a hope to have some valueable stock in the future is like starting to work on your own project with some differences. While you work on your own project, you'll always have a chance to make a pivot and to change something you don't like. If you work for someone, you have to be sure that they're reasonable to pivot when it's necessary and that they will listen to your ideas and appreciate your help etc.

the big lesson here is that the problems with their business were forseeable, this is the type of thing i would want to get sorted before and during the interview process.

The company was pretty small and there wasn't much information about them outside of their website. What sorts of questions could be asked at an interview to sort something like this out?

Ive been having a similar experience to you. I work for a big corporation with over 20k employees and the process is suffocating. Its hard to do my job sometimes because there is so much process. The people as well are super secretive with things they are working on to protect their status at the company. Its a completely toxic environment and I also applied to Ycombinator. I hope to see you there!

Too != To

Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's a helpful comment. I know I'd rather be corrected once than continue spelling it incorrectly.

Reading the blog I cringed every time I read 'to' and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It was distracting and hurt the author's credibility when he was telling the story about his attempts to 'improve the company emails'.

To me it's a big red flag when someone hasn't been able to pick up the correct usage of to/too in 20+ years(assuming they were educated in an english speaking country).

And then != than in his post as well. I think it struck me particularly because it was in the same paragraph that he was discussing his unaccepted correction of the corporate copy :/. Proper spelling and grammar are important even in casual writing.

Exactly. It wasn't a typo, it was a misunderstanding of the use of the word.

I'm not the greatest speller.

Too bad you stuck around for 7 months. You sound like a person who knows you should have left after month 2-3.

Best of luck.

> "We have to terminate your employment contract."

Curious if you actually had a contract and were bona fide employee. I hope you got favorable terms upon departure. The whole thing sounds pretty shady. The company did not even provide equipment, right?

want to work with me? :-)

Best of luck to you, if you don't succeed and fancy coming over the pond to the UK give me a shout. I hope I don't hear from you but read about you though.

"It started out intense, they had so many things they wanted me to do, I showed up at 8:30 and didn’t leave till 6, they’d captured my heart and mind… or at least convinced me it was worth my time."

Here's some advice, if you think that schedule is intense, you're not ready for a startup...

Ah right, you have to be at the startup for 18 hours a day to be "intense" or "dedicated."

Its ok if you roll in at 10am, spend an hour horsing around on Hacker News, another hour drinking company beer at 7:30pm, and another hour at lunch running with folks, you are "dedicated" and "intense".

Nevermind that you spent less time working that the OP - you have to have no life outside of the startup to be "intense" and "startup worthy."

For me, I'd rather have the poster - he sounds like a great employee - works hard, contributes outside his area, and seemingly has a life outside of work that probably rests his brain such that he isn't constantly exhausted like you.

If you don't get into Y-Combinator, contact me.

Couldn't agree more. Intense can be due to working on really hard problems (or even the extra time/energy to learn something new). Just as easily, it can be due to poor planning or improper communication within the company. Unfortunately, if one is passionate about doing a good job and enjoying what you are doing, you might not be able to realize when your extra efforts are really the expectation than what should be the norm.

The fact that the OP was able to grasp this particular issue so early on shows a maturity and insight that even senior engineers who go to work at startups might miss.

I know I've had my moments.

I stand by my definition that 9.5 hours in a work day is far from intense. This applies to corporate culture, small business culture, and especially startup culture.

I won't lower myself to respond to personal attacks which fill the rest of your post.

Not really ready for a position of responsibility in many US corporate workplaces, either.

And this is symptomatic of author's lack of experience. Prodigies excepted, a person right out of school probably doesn't have sufficient knowledge to accurately diagnose business processes, marketing communications, and UX design paradigms holistically.

Letters don't always need to be pitch perfect and early versions of solutions sell on problem solving, not interface design.

More importantly, many true startups have a business model that is fundamentally flawed without considering the potential for large infusions of outside capital. That's why most crash and burn.

That's not to say that leaving a place where paychecks bounce is a bad idea. Assuming one is the smartest person in the room, however, probably is.

That's quite a leap of judgement. Of course building a company will be a lot more intense. That's absolutely no indication that he's not ready. Besides, intensity has to do with the rate at which he works and nothing to do with how long he works.

This needs to be said, butt in chair hours =/= work hours. My brain is constantly thinking about problems I'm trying to solve or what I need to do next. At home, at work I often will be thinking of things and walk to my computer to either do them or note stuff down. My best hours aren't all at the office since often there is a lot of other things that interrupt me there.

Peopleware should be required reading in startupland.

I agree. In general, it's a good idea to recognize the diversity in the ways people have learned to be productive.

Also, I've been hearing about Peopleware a lot recently. Thanks for reminding me.

I realize 9.5 hours isn't that long, I meet a guy from another startup who puts in 80 hour weeks.

Why in the comments here are most assuming that

a) his story, one sided, is correct

b) he was fired because they were running out of money (even his "quote" of what was told to him doesn't say that)

c) his advice was really helpful.

And with respect to this:

"Next, I found a letter that was being sent out to customers, it was a huge pile of text that needed paragraph structure. I figured if I got it, I wouldn’t have read it, there were to many words and to much ‘blah’. There wasn’t a clear or simple explanation of what the users needed to do and there were no action words. So I worked on it, cleaning it up, cut the text in half and made it more clear. I submitted it through the appropriate channels as defined earlier."

There is no safe way to navigate that without stepping on toes unless you help the person who is working on this without regard to getting any credit yourself.

His efforts were all good until I noticed poor grammar in that paragraph.

My story certainly is one-side and there would have been lots of opportunities for my own improvements in the work I did.

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