Working for startups sucks, you'll be happier working for The Man
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I worked for a company matching that description precisely, and can attest to the fact that it really sucked, a lot. The strange thing for me was that it was a subtle shift from "wow, this is so exciting" to "I can't believe how much this sucks". I can't even pinpoint exactly when it happened.
In the beginning it was exciting. Lot's of money floating around, everyone assuming things would be wildly successful and we'd all be rich. Reality was a hard pill to swallow (I was the fifth employee of a company that grew to just over 100 then contracted to around 25). That said, I'm not really tempted to go to the corporate world. I can't just unplug my ambition and accept being a small cog in a giant machine. I would much rather take all the lessons I've learned on "what not to do" and channel that into a new (and hopefully better) startup.
Now I'm working for a company in the middle. It was a hip startup in 1998 but has now grown up to be profitable. The older guys are still here, but there is fresh energy too. The company expanded way beyond its original purpose (remember when Amazon only sold books? We're like that), and each vertical feels like a small startup sharing space with other startups. I think it's a good fit for me, but I can't help but think that if I create a startup now, in 10 years I could be the one running a place like this.
Since the company started out in an incubator (Idealab), I think they (subconsciously or consciously) kept that incubator feel. For example, when my team is working on a site and we have a vBulletin question, we can walk to the other side of the floor and talk to the people who wrote vBulletin.
There are shitty, corrupt, nepotistic, lying corporations and there are also sterling start-ups. The world's not black and white.
Also, while there are shitty bigco's out there, you can switch bigco's with less career friction than you can switch startups. You have lots of choices, and a lot more information about company culture with bigco's; the founders of a startup probably can't reliably tell you what the culture's going to be like next year.
The pay can be lower in return for 'options', but whether or not those options are ever going to be worth anything depends on how the company is run and how ethical the management will be when vesting and/or buyout time comes around.
It's not rare for small time shareholders to be totally screwed in that case.
A good way to protect against such trouble is to make sure that a mid sized shareholder and your interests are suitably aligned.
That way you're not the only one fighting, and the other party has a lot more clout to make their point than you do. So if you're going to be in that position make sure your type of stock and conditions match that of a larger shareholder.
That said, the author of the post works only in the LA area, so I think all his experience has been with media-oriented startups. I have a feeling there's a higher degree of frat boy douchiness in that world. San Francisco startups tend to have a more placid, nerdy, bike-rack-in-the-lobby atmosphere, although they can ultimately be just as cruel.
Private company shares are very risky.
Also beware offers of significant amounts of stock in exchange for sticking around for an acquisition. The investors likely know the company won't reach its liquidation preference and thus whatever shares they give you are actually worthless.
When someone at a big company is conveniently let go before their green card is approved or that big bonus is paid out, it isn't a "firing," but a "layoff" as the company "right-sizes." Bad bosses abuse underlings when they think the job market lets them get away with it and will not hesitate to punish those who step out of line.
Come to think of it, I've seen everything you describe at some of the many Fortune 500 companies I've consulted at. Sadly, human nature defies corporate size, and bad behavior can even creep into very big companies.
Whether those checks function well or not, there's usually nothing you can do about an irrational or abusive CEO or VP/Eng at a startup.
That goes only for the USA. Sorry to touch that topic, but it's true.
Hmm, Oddly enough, I think that laws on sexism, racism and reasonable behavior by employers actually influences their behavior. There may still be sexist attitudes, say, at a large company but the norm is to make a serious effort prevent them. Believe it or not but laws actually matter... Laws don't prevent bad behavior but they certainly mitigate it. Also, I suspect that one sees bad behavior most often the very top of the large corporations, since those with the most power are naturally mostly likely see themselves as above anyone's else's laws. But the top of a large company is a small area compared to the vast middle.
You can't do that with a tiny startup because there's not enough to sue for.
In the USA you'd be right, in Europe or Asia much less so.
Sure, there is no guarantee this won't change, but there is no reason to believe you can't vet for founder or team quality at least initially.
And if/when the dynamic changes, quit. It is true that as an employee in a startup you don't usually have much control over how much you make from your options. But you do always have a choice - whether to continue working there or quit.
I've seen really nice people turn into absolute jerks as the success of their company went to their heads.
Yeah, shit happens. But what you want to vet for is what this guy experienced. Ethics, loyalty, temper, commitment, smarts, cooperation, etc. That doesn't guarantee that you won't have a bad experience, but it helps a lot.
If you go into ANY job knowing nothing about your employer/manager/leader other than what you read on their web site and heard about in the interview, you're doing yourself a disservice. Going into a startup like that is like a professional equivalent of a mail order bride.
It's not right for everyone.
The best people we hired into our startup were often refugees from the cubicle world looking for a little adventure and ok with making less money. In the interview we would try to paint a picture of daily life in a startup, the true odds of success, or even survival, and how different a work experience this was going to be for them.
And what an adventure we gave them. Some stayed, others ran back to cubicle farms. Some had been at such bad places that in our worst moment they still said "this isn't that bad.. I've been in worse jobs!".
I've been taking a 'break' from the startup world at a large gaming company and I totally understand the appeal of an established company.
There are times in your life when you don't want work to be an adventure.
It's actually worse to hire someone who is awesome and a deal-breaker culture mismatch than it is to hire someone incompetent. The incompetent you can send on their way. With a real talent, there's hard feelings and reputation hit.
Nor is the problem limited to groups of 2 founders. You can have groups of 2 that work together well and groups of 3 that bicker. I'm guessing the author just had a limited sample size.
There's an endless variety of human experience and we only get to live one fragment of it ourselves. That's the point of swapping stories.
The post in question is a good example. It's much more valuable when combined with the comments on HN, many of them by people with first-hand experience of startups, than it would have been as an isolated article in the print media.
Merely enabling us to collect and collate information we already "knew" is surprisingly valuable. The clearest example may be open source software, but I think we will see similar gains in almost all fields.
I have experienced working for startups and large businesses. In my experience I have preferred working for large businesses. For me, I actually find a lot of the "perks" of startups to overall be worse for the environment. Sure, I can show up whenever I want and dress how I like, but overall is this really a good thing? Or does it just trend toward laziness and lack of personal responsibility? What's so bad about a little structure -- I grew up in a structured educational environment and learned to thrive in it.
Beyond this though, what I really like about larger companies is the expertise at my fingertips. I think I'm a pretty good programmer, but I can't do everything, and I don't have the experience to be good at everything.
At Corporation A, adding a new feature requires the following process: marketing identifies a need, project manager creates a plan, software architect decides how it should be implemented, programmer implements the feature, designer spruces it up, QA ensures that it is correct, and sales creates a pitch. Money rolls in.
At Startup B, it works like this: Investor X identifies a need, Investor Y disagrees on implementation, 95% of time is spent discussing exact wording instead of the usefulness of said feature. Programmer implements it, no one remembers what it was for, it gets dropped at the next redesign.
People say they don't want to just be a "cog in a wheel", but I see nothing wrong with being a cog in well-oiled, efficient machine. I find it very satisfying to be a small but significant part of something larger than I could ever create on my own.
I'm going to have to disagree on the point of expertise too. At my corporate job, I tried bringing up functional programming at a happy hour and got a lot of blank stares. Anything programming related that was not directly related to the job, my coworkers didn't seem to care about. At the start up, people learn different languages for fun and try to stay up with new technology.
I know that all I've done is provide more anecdotal evidence, but my experience has been so 180 degree opposite from yours, Markus, that I felt compelled to comment. I guess the big difference I see is that of passion: corporate programmers are rarely super excited about what they work on, and start up programmers almost have to be. I'm not saying passion means a better product or success, but I'd choose working with passionate people any day of the week.
I'm going with "yes". I fail to see how it's an improvement to have to wear less comfortable clothes than you'd like, and have to be there when your body really doesn't want to be. My company went back to a minimal dress code after a year of "business casual", yet somehow we still do our jobs and as a result I'm much more inclined to stay longer when it's needed. And we've always had flexible hours; if I had to be in at 9 I'd be useless for the morning and would be gone before my most productive time in the evening.
At Startup B, it works like this: Investor X identifies a need, Investor Y disagrees on implementation, 95% of time is spent discussing exact wording instead of the usefulness of said feature. Programmer implements it, no one remembers what it was for, it gets dropped at the next redesign.
Look into Bugzilla or FogBugz. You don't need 6 layers of bureaucracy to handle new features.
I think it comes down to where your interests lie. I love wearing multiple hats, and working on a million different things, and the excitement of that type of environment.
At some point though you need to seperate the emotional from the rational. And building up career qualifications in challenging startups stops meaning that much when you lose sight of any ways to deploy those qualifications down the road.
[1] Important qualifier.
I think the point here is he's talking about being an employee, not a founder or a partner. The great benefit of running a startup is doing things your way. Unless employees believe in and are able to contribute to the startups direction, they're just as powerless as they'd be at BigCo with none of the upside that stablity brings.
My only "sucks" advice other than that: when looking at startups avoid family run businesses where there is even a hint of nepotism like the plague.
This is both because the culture will change very fast (except in rare cases) and almost always the type of people who enjoy working for startups find it very hard to enjoy working for BigCos.
Because to me, it just looks like luck of the draw.
Unpaid, un-comped overtime? Leave. Political bullshit? Leave. Illegal activities? Leave.
The other mistake I see commonly made is employees assuming their options will be worth something. Unless there's a market where the stock's value is known (and the stock can be sold), it's a gamble with crappy odds.
Not all startups suck, but only fools stay at the ones that do. This guy (girl?) left, and it was the right call. In fact, being willing to leave means this person was exactly right for a startup.
In the kind of startup he describes, a large amount of outside money is injected into the company. Predictably, this makes all kinds of things go wrong. You'll notice that one of the nice things he says about the big corporation is essentially that there's some sanity there. Again, when compared to a bubble company, that's very true in some ways.
There exist great start-ups, great big companies, lousy start-ups and lousy big companies. And within great companies, big or small, there exist lousy situations. Your immediate boss and your colleagues have more to do with your happiness than almost anything else.
Things were great until after the second round of funding: The board basically took over: - They forced us to increase to about 20 employees (within a few months). - We hired former "big time" CEO/Presidents/Vice Presidents as our EVP's to help us grow fast. - We were basically working 12 - 16 hours a day. I slept many times at work during data migration (which took for ever) - We were taking more customers than we could handle which resulted in lawsuits because we could not deliver on time (even after postponement).
Finally (after 2 years) the board fired the founder, brought in a new CEO from "big time" company. Needless to say employee moral died and I and the original employees were forced to resign (I was personally already on my way out). Two months later at the collapse of the financial system, unable to get more funding, they filled for chapter 11 . Everybody got fired and also lost their shares, health insurance etc.
I now run my personal consulting firm and I am loving it. I actually get to see my son everyday.
You will make more money plugging away diligently at a career in the Fortune 500 than you will spending the same 30 years in startups. I use the word "will" here in the same same sense as you "will" win with KK facing 72 unsuited. Anybody here capable of starting a company is equally capable of walking in the door at six figures in a big company.
The reason this "upside" notion is so pernicious is that it's fed by powerful biases. We read about the successes. Even the failures we hear about, we're reading about them by and large because they were "successful". The overwhelming majority of startups won't get fundng, won't get significant customer traction, won't feed their founders 2 years out, and won't get enough press attention for us ever to hear about. Their stories are also boring.
As for what you accomplish with your life, remember this: over 10-20 years at a big company, you will build things that people will use. Over the same years at a startup, you're inevitably going to pour your heart and soul into code that nobody will ever see. If you're unfortunate enough to "score" any funding, even after the company dies, you're probably not going to get to do anything with that code.
You can do everything right at a startup and still fail. In fact, even if you do everything right, you're probably still going to fail. You have many more opportunities to correct in a bigco career.
There is much more stuff being thrown out or made totally useless in a year at big companies than all failed start-ups have ever produced!
I've done my time at Acme Corp, and it doesn't interest me. I built really great, really fast software that did [insert generic thing here], for people who didn't even want to be doing that, but did it because they were paid $9.25 an hour to operate the software I wrote to do [generic thing].
In addition, I had very little agency of my own -- I did what I was told to do, and I did it quite well, and was rewarded for doing so.
But human beings are bright sparks in a simmering universe of dust -- I feel like in some existential sense, we as humans not /meant/ to toil at arbitrary tasks. We're meant to live, to experience, and to make connections. To be in love, to witness beauty. Maybe to create some beauty of our own.
What it boils down to for me that the independent way of operating, as opposed to the structure of a corporation, gets me that much closer to my dream of existing as a "real human being." You can't really buy that.
I can understand how the whole "dress like you want to and show up when you can" thing can make people automatically think of laziness, but I really disagree. I show up when I'm ready to get some shit done. When I was working at the more "standard" business, I had to show up at 8, whether or not I was actually capable of doing any sort of real work. I'm far more productive being able to set my own hours, and so are my two co-workers. We do in a week what used to take my previous employer over a month to do (with a significantly smaller workforce).
You hit the nail on the head. I know 4 very talented engineers who have been in silicon valley for 12+ years each. I have tried to recruit all of them at various times, but they have always been swimming in great offers, in good times and bad, so they are good. Between them, they have worked in at least 10 start-ups. While none of them are starving, no one got rich either. They have lived frugally, so they have a decent pile saved up, but that was done the old fashioned way, not through hitting the lottery.
The two reasons to do it are (1) some people love the opportunity for responsibility/growth or environment and/or (2) the poor risk/reward is actually an investment in themselves, so that they can gain the skills to become a founder.
For founders, I don't believe it's relevant that the median startup doesn't make money: the more you found, the better you become; a diligent and intelligent founder is bound to ultimately make quite a bit of money, but it may be a good number of tough years and failed startups before that happens.
Yes, founders and employees share similar levels of risk in a startup that has reached the point where it can hire FT employees.
But before the startup hit that point, it endured a period of drastically higher risk, which the employees never saw, and which the founders are being compensated for.
That the risk was higher for the founders prior to the FTE is certainly true, but irrelevant, because we are not comparing whether an FTE has a good risk/reward tradeoff relative to an opportunity to join earlier in the startup under the same terms, but rather relative to a corporate job.
Announcement - everybody in cubicles 1000-1999 are fired. We just merged with a competitor or had a management consultant report/market survey that said this business unit is no longer a core competency. So you're all out, doesn't matter how good you are - the shareholders have decided.
* It is far more likely that your pre-cash-flow-positive startup is going to die, abruptly, with no severence, than it is that NYSE Euronext or Coca Cola is going to cut 1000 IT jobs.
* If you can hack it in a startup, you are worth enough that finding another job isn't going to be hard. If you're doing it right, you're always going to have another job in your back pocket.
A point that this "debate" often misses: just because you're doing a bigco career doesn't mean you get to be lazy. You have to actively manage your career either way. The debate between startup life and parking your ass in the same cube for 15 years is a straw man argument.
When you go for the next job interview do you want to say.
I was developing Rails apps to link facebook to Xbox for iPhone users. Or
I was a level 3.2 group manager responsible for coordinating all inputs from level 3.3 staff and collating them for level 3.1s ! And I have technical experience writing macros in XYZ running in our custom ABC billing system.
So, let me respond. What looks better on a resume:
"I was developing Rails apps to link Facebook to Xbox for iPhone users", or
"I designed, implemented, and successfully deployed the first 3 revisions of Instant Bloomberg for Bloomberg, which provided IM capabilities to everyone with a BB terminal".
Because Bloomberg is notorious for crappy 3.2-group-manager-of-GS-integration-backend-foo-XYZ development jobs, but I have a couple friends who got to do Instant Bloomberg.
Talking about strawman, crappy startups and startups aren't synonymous either.
When you also consider that the same large company took one look at my skillset and responsibilities and promptly doubled my salary post acquisition, it's not nearly as clear what the downside is.
I think it is irrelevant here - everybody is free to start a startup, this is not a sign of any conspiracy or discrimination.
Even then, The Man may have been a startup, but money and power can transform people in surprising ways, or they might have been The Man from the beginning.
I think that generally you don't really want to be working for the man whether it's in the context of a startup or a large company.
I've worked with several venture funded startups, all entirely satisfying experiences, and twice for large corporations. The big places were both good for the first six months, and then you ask yourself repeatedly 'what kind of fucken life is this?'
edit: important to note, the caliber of the founders is key. if they have done this before, or if they've held senior positions at large organizations before, then it's a good bet.
Woz and Paul Allen were pretty visionary themselves. I think working at the same company after they've made it doesn't appeal to everyone and Allen actually got sick and left. Microsoft was well on it's way to being massive so I wouldn't chaulk it up to Bill Gates alone.
There is one guy who is more invested in it than the others right?
You should get someone to help, but I don't think it would be good to have two founders who have visions for the company. Their respective visions would eventually diverge and then conflict would arise.
You can't have two people trying to dominate. Unless both founders have perfectly matching visions, their joint command will be as bad as design by committee. Someone is bound to leave or become somewhat subordinate to the other. In the end one person will come out as the main visionary guy for a specific company.
The past few days I've been counting the number of articles on the front page that are "meta." That is, to do with HN itself, or meatless 'questions' such as "What are the true traits of an entrepreneur?" (Not an actual news item, but it captures the idea nicely.)
It hovers around 30%.
Everybody here is getting high on their own supply.
The value of HN to me has dropped dramatically over the past 9 mos. The critical thinking has all but disappeared, and the boosterism (Yay startups! I have the traits of a true entrepreneur!) has gone way up.
This author makes very many excellent points, but sure, go ahead, dismiss them out of hand as jealousy or aversion to "risk" rather than a well-formed critique.