Startcraps
brainshave.com
brainshave.com
-> Work on AI; "These guys are peddling vaporware".
-> Work on connecting people your own age (something you might have domain expertise in); "What a vapid, crappy startup. Work on real problems!".
-> Work in Finance, at Google or Facebook; "I saw the brightest minds of my generation moving money and selling ads".
I truly hope no one is discouraged by articles like this one. (Also, where are all the much-alluded-to apps for sharing pictures of cats? They're so often referenced as evidence of crappy startups that I'd assume they'd be more present.)
It may not be a popular thing to say on HN, but in my experience it seems to fit the data.
Thankfully, I think that segment is starting to dwindle as they realize they aren't getting rich quick.
No, seriously. The defining characteristic of a startup is that it's designed to grew its revenues many orders of magnitude faster than its expenses in anticipation of a very large exit. That is, quite literally, "get rich quick."
FWIW, one of my friends did create a small startup that focuses on sharing cat photos. The app is called "Cat Snaps". It wasn't a waste at all: he spent a few weeks learning the tools, and made a little bit of money from doing so.
(I speak as one who has tremendous respect for the good that cat pictures have done for the world.)
You just hear the point of the original article.
There was one developing a robot spoon with stabilizing anti-vibrations for people with Parkinson's. I remember the look on the faces of elderly people in the video, as they could finally again bring peas to their mouths without spilling everything. That was genuine, they didn't need that "I appear in all the startup videos" guy or hire actors.
There's a bunch of startups working to bring encryption and other privacy-enhancing tools to the masses.
These guys providing mobile laundromat service for the homeless. Though I dunno if they were making any profits with that.
I think people overestimate the number of useful project ideas floating around which don't require unusual expertise. Some "starter projects" might benefit mankind, but certainly they can't be expected to do so.
Actually, I think Color had an interesting idea or two, and might have worked (eventually) on some interesting problems.
But the whole thing was a high-profile disaster and so it indirectly became the poster boy for bad startups.
Ha ha ha.
Maybe he meant "After you have looked around, interviewed a few places, done your due diligence, are sure working for X is a better option, and have an offer in hand".
To do otherwise is grossly unwise; at best you're cutting your earnings and weakening your bargaining position for the next job, and any additional time taken to look for something you especially are interested further weakens it ("I see here you worked with Y until two months ago. What have you been doing since?" "Job hunting" - not a good position to be in). A worse case, you end up feeling the pinch of a lack of paycheck and jumping into the first thing that seems tolerable, rather than something that seems ideal. And a worst case is not being able to find anything -at all-. Unlikely in our industry, at this time, admittedly, but I've seen it happen to those in other technical industries.
In short, by all means, leave a bad startup. But not just for anything; find something that seems more promising, else you're just making things worse for yourself.
As for "What have you been doing since?" this is all about how good you are at "modifying reality", Job Hunting is clearly a bad answer but "I took some time to work on some personal project and focus on reordering some stuff in my life, now I have sorted it and I am looking forward to my next challenge." Might be better.
When you are in full-time employment, Stockholm Syndrome sets in very fast, and alternatives start to appear less appealing as your mind and body adjust themselves to your current position and lifestyle. I am experiencing this and it is insidious. I think if I stay too long I will be stuck forever. People underestimate the impact their environment and schedule have on their thinking.
Change the environment to change the person. If you're stuck somewhere you don't want to be but you aren't sure where to go, just go anywhere else, and as your cognitive patterns alter, you may find a place for yourself.
Now, it's probably not such a great idea to up and quit if you are the sole income for your family but if you are in your late 20's going through the "awakening" phase of technology work it's not such a bad idea, and I speak from experience.
I'd say in your hypothetical scenario an answer of "Job hunting" is probably the worst response, and ideally you'd come up with something better like traveling, building up a simulation framework for hobby X, presenting at conferences on topic Y, etc.
Except, as a job hunter on the market, you're not going to be dealing with "MBAs." You're going to be dealing with recruiters, HR employees, and their various filters. Gaps in your resume don't agree with these filters. At the very least, they need to be explained -- and the first two or three times anyone at any company looks at your resume, you won't be there to explain it.
It's never a great idea to quit a job without another one lined up. I realize the job market for developers right now is white hot, and sure, you can always land another job without too much difficulty. But landing a good job is another matter altogether.
(At this point, someone usually chimes in with a comment to this effect: "Any company worth working for / any job that's truly good / doesn't have some crappy HR filter and process guarding the way!" That's naive. Wishful thinking. Engage with the world as it actually is, not as you'd like it to be.)
That's like... your opinion man.
But really lets take it easy on saying never. I hope my post didn't come across as saying you should always quit your job with nothing lined up, but I hope we can see that the attitude of never quitting unless you have a job lined up is... unhealthy.
I suppose "MBAs" was a confusing catch all I was using to capture such departments as recruiting and HR, however my point stands, that is a narrative pushed by our keepers that doesn't bear out.
And I'm not sure why landing a good job is another matter altogether. Typically the best places to work have a respect for sabbaticals, leaving toxic work environments, focusing on personal growth etc and that certainly has been the case in my experience, and I'm nobody special.
I appreciate a good Lebowski quote, so props on that one. :)
Is my use of "never" a bit much? Ok, fine. Let's dial that back to "rarely." It's rarely a good idea to quit a job without another one lined up. That is true for precisely the reasons you articulate here:
"a narrative pushed by our keepers that doesn't bear out."
So you admit the presence of "keepers," i.e., HR folks and their processes. These keepers exercise a lot of power in the job market, and they stand guard over many (most?) jobs out there. Bad ones and good ones. Most job-seekers will have to deal with their processes when looking for jobs.
"Typically the best places to work have a respect for sabbaticals, leaving toxic work environments, focusing on personal growth etc and that certainly has been the case in my experience, and I'm nobody special."
Sure, but getting into those companies in the first place often involves a resume screen by an HR type. Companies can be amazing, progressive, intellectually stimulating places to work, and still be guarded by a gatekeeper who either isn't equipped for, doesn't care to, or doesn't have the time to mentally process any abnormalities on a resume.
My point isn't so much that gaps on a resume are absolutely and necessarily career-killing. Far from it. Rather, my point is that it's generally a good idea to minimize them. Such as lining up something else before leaving one's current job. Again, this is because the world works a certain way. It's not a "narrative" being "pushed" by anyone. It's the unfortunate reality of the job market. (The effect is magnified at least tenfold for non-developers, too. But that's a different story.)
I realize there are exceptions here. Developers are in incredible demand right now, and can thus afford to do things (such as quitting without a gig lined up) that non-developers usually can't. And then there are the folks who are connected enough to land a job whenever, wherever. I would advise anyone at a job he hates, thinking about quitting, to consider where he falls on these dimensions. Are you the kind of job-seeker who draws a lot of water in this town? If so, great. If not, stay sharp. Look before you leap; that's all I'm saying.
Not as unhealthy as an extended bout of unemployment.
> And I'm not sure why landing a good job is another matter altogether. Typically the best places to work have a respect for sabbaticals, leaving toxic work environments, focusing on personal growth etc and that certainly has been the case in my experience, and I'm nobody special.
For software engineers who are not in a particular subset (Subset here is defined by skillset and personality type.) and in particular geographical areas, these places are unicorns. I have yet to encounter one from Dallas. Note that I said "from", not "in"; my experience is that many companies that are probably in the "great places to work" category are painfully myopic with regards to talent pools.
I always quit as soon as I want to and on reflection I'm always glad that I did.
If you're in a job that's not right, and you're a flexible and skilled worker, it's self-evident that there's something better.
If you can't imagine anything you could fill your time with for 2 months out of work, your current job might just be giving you a paper-thin facade of employability, and you should be worried.
A flexible and skilled worker? You mean a dev in a tech hub, or at least one who is willing to move. Once you start looking at people who aren't developers, who don't live in an area filled to the brim with jobs for their industry, and who don't want to move, this advice is -terrible-.
In general, even if you're certain you can line up something better quickly...will another couple weeks where you are kill you? As even if you're right, that means you still have a safety net, aren't going to be pressured to take something that isn't right for you, and are going to still be making money, with no gaps in employment history. And if you're wrong, you won't find yourself unemployed.
Not really, no. On at least one occasion, I've been desperate and taken terrible jobs to cover my rent. I learned a lot more from the experience than I would have staying in my dead-end job that was over for me.
>A flexible and skilled worker? You mean a dev in a tech hub
Not really, no.
>"will another couple weeks where you are kill you?"
Not really, no.
But if you can't quit for the sake of this couple of weeks, why will you be able to quit for the following couple of weeks, and the couple of weeks after that?
It has to be a personal decision but I observe that people are happier when they ignore risk-averse advice that only permits already-powerful employers to behave very badly, and try the contrary.
I would probably be much more willing to leave a startup at the drop of a hat over a safer and more stable corporate job like the one I'm at now. A corporate job has a history and a set culture that's predictable and not quite as subject to the whims and emotions of those at the top. A startup can get real hellish real quickly.
I quit my job last week, with nothing in particular to go to (luckily I have a little runaway).
I guess time will tell if it was the right decision, but it is a personal one. Startups can be a nightmare, burn you out and cause serious personal issues. Sometimes staying just to have a job is not the right decision.
It doesn't make sense for anyone to give forceful advice on this I guess.
With a few notable exceptions these big investments don't exist for "startups" and really never have, they have largely relied on government funding in some form or fashion for the big breakthroughs - PARC and the beginnings of SV all come immediately to mind.
Unless investors start looking long term as the standard, rather than the exception, this isn't going to change. That or government needs to get back into the game, but that seems like it's gone as a viable option.
Big science/engineering is very expensive, very long term and very risky. No one wants to foot the bill. Not corporations, not investors, and recently not even governments (NIH/NSF funding cuts, etc.).
I discuss this further here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337837
Let's bleed those fuckers dry.
EDIT:
Sorry for the harsh language, but it's kind of earned.
I'm upset because I see a bunch of good medical startups--who actually help people, developing devices, ignoring billing, doing other good stuff--and energy startups and whatnot trying to solve hard problems and getting completely ignored and shafted by the market.
The investors by and large don't give a shit about helping consumers--their goal is ROI, however that happens. Consumers continue to act as helpless as possible and self-optimize for glitzy kitsch. Even if we wanted to, it is damn near not economically viable to work on a startup outside of what the author here rails against.
This is where the distinction between startups and lifestyle businesses comes in.
Startups operate at a loss and aim to make themselves tasty enough for bigger companies to swallow them (allowing the founders to cash out and the company that buys them to use their team or technology, or at least make sure the competitors can't do the same). They bleed ridiculous amounts of money, but grow ridiculously fast and are intentionally short-lived.
Lifestyle businesses aim to be profitable as soon as possible. Their growth rate is unimpressive but they can usually get by with nearly zero investment -- not that their prospect would be of any interest to investors in the first place. They may "get lucky" and cash out at some point or just wither and die if they become unprofitable and can't pivot.
There are some companies that fall in-between and the semantics are fuzzy as always. A startup may actually grow so big it becomes a direct competitor to the companies that might otherwise be interested in swallowing it or it might be so good at funding itself that its income stabilizes (with or without additional investors).
But at the end of the day, most investors want ROI. They don't fund startups because they're nice people, they fund startups because they have money and want to have more money later. The nicer ones may actually have some interest in the company and help the startup grow (and thus make them more money when they cash out), but it's unreasonable to expect them to be motivated by altruistic ideals.
This won't change. Why should it? Sure, it could all blow up like every bubble does eventually, but at the end of the day you will always have people with a big disposable income looking for ways to make more money (whether it's because they actually want more money or just because they see it as a sport and ROI is a good metric to measure how good they are at it).
Because too many 'investors' are losing too much money on stupid non-projects. And the ROI you claim is the motivation is clearly not there.
But wait! Maybe losing money is the point.
Maybe, anthropologically speaking, being able to waste money on startups is some kind of potlach-style social signalling game which 'investors' use to reinforce their own status.
Think this is far fetched? If so, explain to me why the ROI across the VC scene as a whole is so wretchedly bad compared to other investment opportunities, but it keeps getting money thrown at it regardless - even when this means starving viable but unsexy bootstrapped businesses that don't have Startup Appeal [tm], but are more likely to be both useful and profitable in the medium to long term.
There's not much of a point in investing in unsexy bootstrapped businesses because they're stable. Stability is boring. If you can turn a funded startup that is bleeding money left and right into a profit, that's a much bigger thrill to the investor.
But it's not only VCs. "Serial entrepreneurs" pretty much admit they're in it as a sport.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of stock market investors weren't in it as a sport either. The amount you win or loose isn't as important as the thrill of winning or loosing.
The author is criticising 23 years olds that they are not curing cancer, fixing water pollution in 3rd world countries and the like. How are they supposed to do that? They can't start companies like that. This is the job of entrepreneurs who have built a company before and who could accumulate the wealth to take on these challenges by working for several years.
However, these young kids can start by building an app for $1,000 that they would like to see in the world that their 23 year old mind finds interesting. Sometimes, these apps are fruity, some are crazy, but this stimulates creativity. Then, once they have sold their company they can take on the problems that take millions of dollars before they can even be started.
I don't like about this post is critizing really young founders who haven't even finished college. It should rather look at the second time entrepreneurs who are still building fruity apps.
If you have an awesome CRM application, you might make someone's life significantly easier and for them it really does make a difference, but does it "change the world?" There is a measurement problem here. Even people in the military services hardly feel like they are "changing the world."
I'm running a small startup in an unsexy space. I definitely don't think it's a "startcrap." We have traction, revenue, and it's a great intersection of hardware, software, and customer service.
I need to build the team. My goal for the next few months is to do exactly that, and raise funding as well to pay the team.
How do you find folks willing to work on something that isn't immediately fun or sexy? How do you convince them not to go work for Google/Facebook/Apple/Twitter, or some "fun" startup?
I have some ideas about how to do this, but I'm interested in hearing the opinions of others.
Be up-front: "We sell widgets. They're not exciting, but they're pretty solid widgets, and we're always trying to make our customers happy and look for smart ways to get better at widget-selling."
Offer ownership: Both in the sense of literal equity, and in the sense of autonomy and control over technical decisions and (where appropriate) product direction. If you want to hire people with expertise, you have to respect them to use their judgement.
Offer work-life balance: Not everyone wants to spent 60 hours a week at work. Maybe Google offers free dinners at the office, but you offer the chance to leave the office and have dinner with their significant other.
I like your points about ownership, and how you distinguish the different forms of it. Both are definitely important.
Pick a state, and determine the best public school system in it. Within that area, find an "unsexy" office building with vacant space. Stick a pin in your map there. Now open up a real estate site and search for 4 bedroom/3 bathroom homes within X miles of that spot, both purchases and rentals. The rentals are easy. Multiply those numbers by 4, and that is what you want your developers' take home pay to be. For purchases, assume a 10% down payment and 4% interest rate on an online mortgage payment calculator, then multiply whatever you get by 5. Work backwards through benefits (assuming employee+spouse+kids options) and taxes to get the median gross pay.
For this sort of thing, you can assume that your employee will be the majority or sole earner of a household, you will provide better benefits than the spouse's job, and you can skip all the stupid perks like foosball tables and catered lunches.
Compare your bar-napkin math with current Silicon Valley prices.
What you will be offering with those numbers is a low-stress job that supports an upper middle class lifestyle. All you need to do then is to make sure that your candidates can actually do the job.
My previous gig was at Instagram, so I was in an environment where at 28 years old, I was amongst the oldest.
My target market is an area where the experience of older engineers will be extremely beneficial. I'm the first to admit that I am not clear on: a) Where to find these people. b) How to create a culture that is inclusive of everyone and is not ageist (or any other 'ist' ideally).
Is it really as easy as ignoring it, and addressing them as I would anyone else?
xpatel at pulsecode [ca]
If calgaryeng = living in Calgary, e-mail me, I might have work for you in the near future.
If looking for programmers: write a hard, challenging (but not unnecessarily complicated) coding test - you don't want to waste their time, but to excite them (and, at the same time, filter them). Like Matasano does.
Instead, I'd just avoid "real-world" problems that your company has actually worked on unless it's clearly stated as such and you're compensating the candidate for his time.
I'd also avoid challenges that are actually "solve this math problem, and express your solution in the form of a program." You see these all over in places like codility. Perhaps it's just because I have extensive education in research and mathematics already, but I consider these things to be "numerical parlor tricks" more than they are a guage of whether a person can reason out a programmatic solution to an actual problem. They almost always seem to put the candidate in the mindset of "I have to solve a math problem" rather than, "I have to write a program." Contrary to what some mistakenly believe, the two aren't the same, and for all but the most research oriented CS work the latter skill can be entirely independent of mathematical reasoning ability.
Or recruit a foreign programmer to come live in your (presumably) western country, where they will be happy to live in a new exciting place.
Good points on the perks/benefits/environment. Definitely on my list of things to point out to candidates.
A suggestion: if you go to a destination area like Tahoe, there are a small group of people that really really want to live there. Not every engineer does, but a few do. And that's all you need! Tahoe is also conveniently drivable from sf, in case you need to visit, and it is well under half the cost of living compared to the bay area.
Offer private or semi-private offices. I'm way more productive.
No ping pong tables and no pool tables. The loud cracking sounds made playing those games is distracting beyond belief. They're fine in a game room, but in the open they suck.
Emphasize adult lives. Set an example by coming in to work, working hard while you're there, then leaving. I've worked at a startup that regularly had people in the office for 12+ hours with, my guess, perhaps 5 hours of actual work getting done.
We've built a real-time API for monitoring building systems in commercial high-rise "smart" properties. These systems are all IP-connected, and we aggregate the data and controls into a single API. We've built a web-based dashboard for property managers to use on a daily basis to keep tabs on the building. It lets them see how the HVAC, building automation, security, lighting, even the network itself, is operating, so they can see issues as they arise. We're deployed in 1 building in the downtown Toronto core, with 2 more being added at the year's end, and 5 more next year.
The API provides us a lot of capabilities, and one area we're going to leverage that is building tools and services for the property manager to make their job easier, allowing them to focus on providing better service to their tenants. We aim to actually make the building "smart" by allowing the property managers to offload many aspects of management to us. In essence, we aim to be the YourMechanic of smart buildings. We've signed up our current customer for this.
This space is dominated by big players like Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls, etc. However, they focus on delivering large equipment and installs to properties. While they do make an appreciable amount of revenue from services, software isn't typically a large part of this equation. Our aim is to utilize our software expertise to provide better service in areas not touched by their systems (i.e. they focus on HVAC, whereas we can do it all).
Suffice it to say, there are plenty of "seasoned" engineers in this space. Enticing them to work for our company instead of their current ones is something I'm struggling with.
Many of the other commenters have provided great pointers, some of which I plan to incorporate. But before I can attempt to recruit these people, I need to get to them first.
How?
My biggest reservation about working for a company that's struggling to get established would be the risk of having the company fail in a couple of years and then having to look for a new job as a middle-aged developer. I'd guess that a lot of older developers have this kind of inertia.
Homeless people get absolutely shafted when they go to cash their SSDI and GA benefits checks. Most of them don't have the requisite documentation to get a regular bank account, so most end up going to payday lenders, where they pay crazy fees to get a lump sum of cash that is at severe risk of getting lost or stolen.
Moreover, because of the feast and famine problem of getting a significant amount of money every month, but not enough to actually pay for stable housing, a lot of that money gets totally wasted well before the next check comes.
If somebody could come up with a way for homeless people to deposit benefits checks without getting huge fees taken out, and then create some kind of software to help them manage the money coming in, that person would be a hero to tens of thousands of poor people.
And it sure beats the hell out of calling the SF DPW complaint line and having homeless people forcibly removed from the sidewalk in front of your office.
While it might be possible to circumvent those laws, by creating a business that holds money in trust, working solely in cash (if you attempt to offer debit cards you likely are going to be treated as a bank by the feds), you have to not only get the poor to trust you (and they have no reason to, especially once there starts being -any- sort of consumer complaint, regardless of its being your fault or not), but you also have an insurance nightmare; you're working in cash, without FDIC protection.
And the margins would be thin; you'd be providing a service greater than those payday lenders you're trying to replace, while charging less, and from the poorest, most transient of clientele. Seems like a lot of risk, both as a business and from the government, for very little chance of reward. It's a good idea, but your best shot at success would be to try and run it as a charity so as to at least have a chance at getting lawmaker support.
The usual suspects (republicans) are of course against it because it cuts into the most lucrative customers for banks: people they can charge tons of fees.
http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2014...
the last thing these people need is another person looking to take a cut out of them; half the point of the postal service doing it is to provide services at cost
To run on what device?
[1] http://apo.org.au/research/homeless-and-connected-mobile-pho...
The thing is not everyone feels ABLE to solve those problems - we need to stop mocking people who make photo sharing apps and start encouraging people who want to tackle bigger problems. Demeaning "smaller" problems does nothing and showing people what you CAN do will do a lot.
Back in high school I went to PFEW (Pennsylvania Free Enterprise Week), it was a 1-week business camp essentially. You learned about ROA, competition, and making business decisions. I loved it and recommended it to everyone I knew but hardly anyone took my advice and participated in PFEW. Business was boring.
Fast forward ~10 years later, now it's the coolest thing to be in a startup. All of a sudden business is cool?
Reminds me of the recent South Park, 'go fund yourself'; where Stan tells his Dad "we don't want to do anything, that's why we are making a startup".
There are, for example, a lot of 40-60 year old VLSI designers who could be doing amazing things with hardware. They aren't.
Why? No funding and no exit. VLSI requires $5-$10 million and 3 years MINIMUM. $50 million and 5 years is more typical.
Why do that when you can throw $100K at software and a half-dozen of 20-somethings and flog them like slaves? If one of them turns out to look like a socioviroblogo threat, Yahooglezonsoft will pay $50 million+ for one of them.
Low monetary outlay. Short time horizon. Much lower risk.
Only a fool would do something that requires actual hardware.
It's okay. The boomers are dying. Suddenly they are becoming much more interested in actual medical advances that, funny enough, require hardware.
Actually, instead of cat picture sharing, imagine cat sharing, UberCats? CatBNB? ZipCat?
And, Cat Cafes already exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_caf%C3%A9
I was thinking more in home cat sharing. I can see the t-shirts now: Home cat sharing is killing the cat cafe industry.
No one really gives a shit about important projects. Look at Musk almost go bankrupt twice between SpaceX and Tesla. Solving real problems requires spectacular amounts of capital, however with $1500 in gear you can make cat sharing apps, which beats stacking boxes. (My previous career). Solving an important problem is generally dismissed as a science project.
Just look at the ratings difference between CSPAN and TMZ, that's all you really need to know about what society wants.
However, the cure is a bit more complex. IMO either follow lean startup "Steve Blank style" or do do bold ambitious "Peter Thiel style" startup. Saying don't work on made-up problem is harder too follow, a lot of good ideas looks like bad one (e.g. AirBnB).
If you really want to be cynical about it, most of workers of the world are ultimately working to make some rich dude(s) just a little bit richer.
Founders, CEOs and startups are recyclable commodities.