Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring industry
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fitfrnd.com
Is AngelList Jobs unknown (never mind a secret!) amongst start up founders (who generally have AngelList profile for both themselves and their companies)?
Is this job board "disrupting" the hiring industry which is composed of other job boards and recruiters that post to other job boards?
If you're familiar with how recruiters work or the general quality and response on job boards, it's hard to characterize it as anything short of disruptive.
I remember when Craigslist was the place to hire people who were ahead of their peers, when it was mostly unknown and considered too sketchy to be associated with any corporation concerned about their image that did have someone in the loop enough to have heard of it.
Stackoverflow was never like that, but it was more like that at the beginning than it is now.
The best examples are all sites that I've completely forgotten the names of because they pivoted or went out of business a long time ago. But they were cool for a time among subcultures that have good programmers so that's where you went to look. Plus by both being part of the same little unknown thing there was more trust at the beginning as well and it made the whole process easier.
A lot of IRC channels and mailing lists and forums are still like that and manage to stay like that because they are so anti-corporate/anti-recruiter. AngelList is the opposite, no one trying to make money tries to keep the majority of potential customers out like communities do. Doing so is a failure. And it makes a lot of sense to have both fundraising and recruitment on AngelList, so it will get popular and therefore worse at being a small community with a talent bias.
One reason we got so many applicants is maybe because our compensation feels fair.
Unless you're a startup with celebrity status, you might just have to pay up.
Great companies are not built this way. And sorry to hear you went through this - though you are probably better off not working there.
If you're saying that AngelList doesn't have those kind of companies, then ok, that's logically consistent. But don't make the mistake of eyeballing ranges based on absolute equity percentages alone.
Almost more important: in the 9 of 10 chance that the company fails, what is being done to maximize the marketability of the staff? YC adds a lot of brand value to "failed" projects. Just one example of how the whole picture needs to be taken into account. If you lose $15K a year taking a haircut, but your next job search sees $30K in extra value from your past experience, how does that add up?
As a general thought, you should only value [as part of your employment] cases of equity when [either, (a)] the company is [potentialy worth] $100MM + up in exit mode; or [b] your have more than <fractional> percentages [ie, granted stakes >1%].
In other words, unless you expect the stake to be worth a substantial six-figure sum. In order for this to be true, the equity stake needs to be in the upper six figure under some reasonable probability. So, a 600k stake with a 1/3 chance of you "winning" it is only worth $200K. Once you spread this out over the time to get it, it boils down to a number closer to say 50k/year for 4 years.
Now, that is a nice bump in salary. But in order to get this in a realistic sense with a 0.6% stake, you need a 1 in 3 chance of exiting out of a $100 million dollar company.
Since a 1/3 chance of a 100 million exit is unrealistic for an average portfolio company, you need to correct the math a bit more. Since a 1/10 chance is a more likly number, lets divide our $50k/ye by 3, and we get something in the $15 to $20K range per year.
In other words, we get a number which is about a 10-12% boost on a $150K base salary. This is nice, but not worth taking larger paycut/mispricing for. So using this back of the envelope framework, small fraction percentages of ownership don't as a rule compensate for salary mispricing, when that mis-pricing is order of magnitude 10% or greater. Which just brings us back to the initial point but hopefully with more clarity.
So long as it focuses on the creme, then it'll disrupt that 'market' but it cannot disrupt the 'hiring industry' because at that point, it would become diluted and another 'disruptor' would cater to the 'cream'.
Of course the return rate won't be the same with 1 million people. But if you are grameen bank (http://www.grameen-info.org/), you institute mechanisms so keep the return rates high. That doesn't mean that there are no defaulters at grameen bank. It just means they were able to work creatively on a problem and actually meet their metrics (maybe sligtly relaxed) at very high scales.
It's non-trivial, but not impossible.
I think a measure of low quality is: do users/participants actually stop using it because of bad quality? It's a point of debate, but for me HN's quality is as good (probably better) that it was several years ago. Just my opinion.
Seen another way, let's say the top talent is 10,000 individuals. There are way more positions and candidates than that out there. So if they became the Reddit of job boards, they'd have tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of applicants in search of tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of jobs. Neither the applicants nor jobs are going to become "great" just because they are on the Angellist board.
And the whole site is based on people actually spending tens of minutes crafting reviews. Who'd have thought it'd work out as well as it does?
Salaries are always negotiable, but seeing them up-front gives you a good idea of what the company is looking at paying.
"I emailed everyone I knew, posted the job on LinkedIn, got it posted to the jobs list at several universities, and also posted on some paid sites. End result: nothing very good to show for all the effort."
Exactly how much effort was 'all the effort'? Did it take you all of 2 hours to post the job on several sites?
I checked Chrome, too; it's clearly less awful but not good.