20yrs_no_equity

If these really are top grads, they should be able to do math. And if they do the math, they will find that the cost of living and tax situation is such that they will net less money living in California than they would in, say, Austin Texas.

I did the math. I got offers from some prominent bay area startups. They are constantly recruiting me, but none of them can offer a competitive deal on salary (and don't get me started on their "stock options" packages.)

You seem to be projecting your aspirations/desires or preferences and assuming that is the case for everyone else. I do understand that for your first job working for someone like Amazon seems glamorous, but once you've put in a couple years there (and Amazon is a particularly abusive hellhole for engineers) that wears off.

The top talent is not swayed by "name brands" but by places where they can really be innovative.

I can imagine the top MBAs from Midwest universities DO want to go work for these "name brands" because it pads you their resumes nicely.

But hackers? Hackers want to hack. They want to be on the cutting edge.

And that's no longer silicon valley. Hasn't been for awhile. It's just nobody told the people who live in silicon valley, apparently.

Shh! There is no innovation outside silicon valley! You have to be in California to create a unicorn! We have always been at war with eurasia!

This topic has been coming up on this site for the past decade. Every time it does there are a lot of people who say Silicon Valley will never be beaten. I call this way of thinking "California exceptionalism".

Put another way:

"Nobody will ever need more than 640k."

Since the days of Fairchild, the bay area has had an advantage in finance, and of course VCs who didn't want to invest in anyone more than a bike ride away. The level of attitude is really kinda astounding.

California was the golden state... but that was 50 years ago when it had a pro-business government and was disrupting the US industrial base, and attracting high tech talent and companies in the process. Now it is eating itself, drowning in debt and getting ever more desperate due to decades of bad government.

In our industry things have changed. The need for VCs is dramatically less. You don't need to build servers and software from scratch, you can rent servers in the cloud and build on open source foundations.

There are always going to be more smart people outside of SV than there are in it. And TBH, I don't think the SV startups have been really innovative for the past couple decades. It's like after the dotcom boom everything became an "app" (instead of a "dot com" eg website).

For example you aren't building Intels and Apples anymore. you're building Googles (Which might become an Apple, if one of its moonshots turns into a product, but it isn't yet, it hasn't weaned itself from search and search's days are numbered.) You're building facebooks and ubers and airbnbs. It may not look like if if you've not been thru a couple bubbles but those companies are more flash in the pan than solid. Facebook could be more properly called a fad.

The difference is they aren't really technology companies. Google invented page rank, but almost nothing fundamental since. Facebook hasn't invented anything really. It's just a popular content site. Uber and AirBnB are business models, not technology inventions. Of course they all require and depend on technology investment, but they are not based on technological innovations like Intel and Apple are. (And don't even get me started on Amazon which is really a combo of Walmart and U-haul-for-computers. They actively oppose innovation.)

And for some high tech industries, Silicon Valley is not the center. The disdain upon which californians look at bitcoin is a good example. It's kinda a "not invented here" syndrome.

It's like we're the internet, you're AOL at its peak. You rule the roost right now, but you don't get it.

I travelled around the world for 6 years and the number one impediment to staying in any country was the visa situation. If you are staying there longer than a tourist visa, and especially if you want any kind of employment (or are in a situation where you are visibly employed) the red tape in the vast majority of countries is very tough.

The only exceptions I know about are Chile (which gives one year visas that are relatively easy to renew) and Panama (which will give you residency if you start a business there, it can be a small one.)

This is all about the ratio of travel days to productive or fun days I talk about a bit in my longer comment below. And sure, do the math- if you would be happier in a hotel anyway- and a lot of people would be- then it makes sense to get hotel rooms.

But if you're parking the truck on BLM land for a week at a time, then that's happier and cheaper.

Hell, you could go with a Miata and a camping tent, and just control the ratio of BLM land time vs hotel time.

I think one viable strategy is 5off 2on. EG: Stay in a Hotel on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (lower cost than weekends) and then camp on BLM land (or other cheap places) the other 5 days.

State parks are 12-$25, while Motel 6 is $40-$60.

I've spent 11 of the past 20 years "homeless" by choice following various practices from living on a boat, to living in a truck camper, to traveling the world living in AirBnBs, to occasionally renting apartments but never really living there. But I'll come back to that.

I want to address several peoples concerns about this guys lifestyle and the presumed limitations:

0. First off Loved that he was using Soylent. That solves a big problem of needing dried food but not liking freeze dried food. If I were to go back to vehicle living I would use a combo of Soylent and Sous Vide. Sous Vide cookers like the Anova are very small, and you can do it just with boiled water, zip lock bags and a thermometer if you want. The results are really fantasic. 30 seconds searing steaks on the grill then 40 minutes in the bath and you have better steaks than you can get at any restaurant for less than $50-- and you can do that on top of am mountain if you wanted! So the food situation is much better than the days of crates of raman.

1. Sex. Sex is totally possible, and it's not creepy at all. When you get on the road and you're traveling you will run into people who are going the same route multiple times. In this way there's a virtual community. This varies regionally of course, travel by train in europe or in alaska for the summer and it becomes pretty tight nit. The women and men you meet there are not exactly going to turn their nose up at your van because that's how they are traveling to. There's a whole vagabond subculture in the USA that ranges from kids hoping trains to techies in vans like this guy to Oldsters in RVs. And there's nothing sexier than a guy who will break with convention and go do interesting things. FTR, my partner and I picked up a woman in the UK who then travelled with us and lived with us for a couple years in poly triad. IT only lasted three years but I don't think the definition of a successful relationship should only be ones that end in death!

2. Cost- you really can save a lot of money. IT's amazing that you can live around the world traveling full time for less than the cost of living in a major west coast city. If you're doing a startup, that's really nice- be in berlin, then go to london, etc. We ran a three person startup (the triad above) going form england to Romania to Chile. While we didn't live as cheaply as we should have or could have (it's a skill) we didn't live more expensively than we would have if we stayed in Seattle (and we never would have met the woman in the UK). When it costs less or doesn't cost more but you have a better experience, isn't that a much better value?

3. The major factor is movement. When you're still- say at a campground or an AirBnB, or anchored at a dock, you save your movement energy, and thus cost, and you spend time working and enjoying. When you're underway- sailing requires attention as does driving, taking trains and planes costs money, boats and cars take gas. The ideal situation is one where you can stay places for a period of time (we used to stay in a country 90 days- the visa limit) to maximize your productivity on the road. This is a lifestyle, not a vacation from life. You earn money when you go, but you earn less money on tavel days.

4. Settling in- another part of the cost of travel is the settling in time. I need to have a good work chair and in each country we would spend the first week or so getting our spot set up to be productive on our startup.

5. The best thing about traveling is meeting the locals- especially outside the USA. This is the reason for the 90 day visa too. You can build real relationships. 4 countries in a year is much better than 9 countries in 4 days! And it's cheaper per-day, because you can be working during the day, and thus it's sustainable.

6. There are many ways to do it. I like the boat the best- it was only 30 feet but it was center cockpit and huge. If I had the balls of a blue water sailor I never would have left and would be traveling around the world in it. But it takes a rare breed to cross an ocean in a 30 foot cruiser!

This van is very much like my experience in the Truck Camper. The truck camper cost me $5,500 all in- an old Toyota Pickup and a $3,500 SKAMPER. You have to crank it to raise the roof. I travelled all the way to Prudhoe Bay in that truck- spending a couple weeks north of the arctic circle.

You can never forget an experience like that!

7. Eventually I vowed to never stop. I decided this was a philosophy and whatever methodology it doesn't really matter. Am I still traveling full time? I'm on a lease, so many of you would say no, but I think I am. You could be too.

What's the difference in lifestyle between crashing in a French student's flat in Romania for 3 months and being on a lease in the USA for 6? In romania 90 days is the max visa and maximizing productive time was ideal. a 6 month lease in the USA isn't that different from the 6 months we lived in the UK (they have a longer visa for US residents).

I now think in terms of the GPWR - Gross Personal Weight Rating. That is the total weight of me and all my possessions. When I was on the boat it was around 13,000 pounds - most of it boat. For the truck it was about 7,000 pounds, most of it truck.

When we were backpacking it was all in the pack- about 60 pounds. Now I am staying in apartments but restrict myself to only what can fit in my car (so I can move across country at a moments notice if I want.) I don't live in the car so it's a tradeoff, I have to rent a sleeping space.

But I'm still mobile. I don't have a bed frame, for instance, I bought a bunch of Akro Mils plastic crates. Turn them upside down and they make a really damn solid bed frame (best one I've ever had, actually) The mattress fits in the back of my car with the seats folded down. I have a mid sized SUV and camping is easy- just put the mattress in the car. Better than a tent (stays warmer). But when I need to move, I can turn the crates right side up and all my possessions go into them.

So, where should I live next? Once my lease is up, I'm going. (and knowing that also puts the kibosh on silly buying.)

Start thinking of every possession as weight added to your GPWR. Do you want to live in backpack? Pare down. Do you want to live in a van? You don't have to be as careful but you should think about how many TVs you buy.

Fundamentals are hard to argue against, but predictions of timing are hard to get right. The fundamentals may indicate one thing, and predictions based on them are reasonable, until the fundamentals change. Timing of predictions is a very different thing because despite the fundamentals there are external factors you simply cannot predict.

Predicing there would be a housing bubble in 2001 was merely a case of seeing the changes in the law under Clinton, the change in financial settings at the federal reserve under Bush due to the dotcom crash and 9/11, and looking at the way the incentives were set up with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Many people said you can't predict such a thing and in 2006 it was common to see on TV the claim that there was no housing bubble, and that the economy was fundamentally sound and I heard this a great deal from people in day to day life who were buying houses and thought I was insane to think houses were overpriced. I'm not a genius, I just read the right article in 2001 from a "economic doomsayer" and between 2001 and 2008 as far as everyone was concerned, I was crazy, and then after 2008 instantaneously "it was obvious" there was a housing bubble and thus my insight was pointless.

The lesson here is to look at the fundamentals, but don't bet on the timing. I invested against the housing market in 2002-2007. I wish I had known about the existence of CDOs. I got out in 2007. I was a year early. You can't predict the timing.

But you can take fundamentals to the bank.

Fortunately, someday sooner, iPhones will become effectively useless to thieves.

As a victim of an iPhone theft - it was literally ripped out of my hand on a very public boulevard - I was grateful to be able to remotely wipe it within hours. I am even more grateful now that it will require a passcode within 12 hours if it doesn't get a touchID, and I really look forward to the day that "wipe and make unable to be re-authorized except by taking it to an Apple store, and also mark this phone as stolen" will be built in to "find my iPhone".

Since the phone hardware will only run software signed by Apple's private key, Apple can make a stolen phone effectively unusable. You need to have a key to put it in recovery mode, and even with signed software the hardware ID won't change, so the only signed code could be code that will check the hardware during the authorization process (I think this is already happening for anti-counterfeiting purposes.)

No, don't fake it. The reality is, investors know you are starting out. It's not a problem to write checks. All you need is a business account. Yes, make the pay stubs but they can be made on a typewriter.

Just don't fake it. Don't fake anything. Don't sell products that don't exist. Don't lie to your employees about your financial state (I see this happen a lot because people are ashamed to admit that the company is having troubles... this is a bad strategy). Don't lie about the state of the product (something that happens when people are naive enough to not realize how much testing is needed.)

I've seen HR at a major abuser massage Glassdoor rankings by disputing/threatening them with legal action for negative reviews and shilling/creating fake accounts to put in positive reviews. I believe Glassdoors policy is that they are not interested in lawsuits, so all it takes is a letter from a lawyer. Maybe even less than that.

This is good advice, but I think everyone is best suited to doing number 2 before number 1. Most people are not ready to be a founder right out of the gate, and that's where a lot of the douchebag founder horror stories come from. Not because they want to be douchebags, just because they are so arrogant.

One should spend five years building stuff before becoming a CEO.

Never have I seen this laid out before like this, and so I thank you for that! I think it's a real tragedy that we can't just have a rational Visa system- you get an offer from a company, then you should be able to get a work visa. Work visas continue for as long as you are employed plus one year. That gives you a year to get a new job.

This is how you attract the best and the brightest and this is what america needs.

Violating someone's privacy by publishing them having sex is not protected by the first amendment.

Maybe you think it should be. I personally think it is protected if the people being photographed consent to the publication, and a violation of privacy if they don't. (Privacy and free speech are both human rights, they don't conflict.)

We can have that conversation, though, if you think that privacy isn't a human right.

But the people who are upset about this don't seem to be talking about that. They don't talk in terms of human rights, they paint Theil as a bad guy and try to paint him as being opposed to freedom of speech.

But can you cite a single quote from Theil that has him on the record as opposing freedom of speech?

We should not accept this kind of smear as if it were legitimate argument. It doesn't appeal to reason or argument it is characterization.

And it is eating all discourse. For every time I see an actual argument against a policy of Trumps (notice how they dragged him into it?) I see at least 150 claims that he is a racist. Not quoting him saying something racist, just a smear. And that ratio is probably higher, because to be honest I haven't seen any coverage of Trump in the last 6 months that makes a good reasoned argument against one of his positions.

It's not like it's hard.

Here's one of Trumps positions I disagree with: We should have open borders.

Closed borders is really saying that a company can't hire who they want to hire- that you can't hire the best and the brightest in the world and bring them to america, one of the things that made america great in the past. We shouldn't nationalize talent we should have a free market in it and let anyone who has a job offer (at least, there are legitimate arguments for an even lower bar) come to the country.

There. That's an actual argument against a Trump position.

A similar argument could be made against Theil. They almost make one against Zuckerberg (but in the end they resort to characterization of Facebook as a "walled garden", which by that definition means The Guardian is a walled garden because the editors control what is published on their site.)

Discourse is dying. Don't let it.

Kubernetes seems very unwieldy and hard to wrap my head around. Swarm seems straightforward and easy to figure out how to configure.

Let's give it a try and see if I can find a good tutorial for kubernetes to do what I want. (I haven't tried this experiment in a couple months, since before nomad and swarm got my interest.)

-----

Ok, I'm back. I went to kubernetes.io. there' "give it a try" has me creating a google account and getting set up on google container engine. Due to standard issue google account hassles, I quickly got mired in quicksand having nothing to do with kubernetes.

I have no interest in google container engine. Let me set it up using vagrant, or my own VPSes, or as a demo locally, whatever, I'll set up virtual boxes.

They lost me there.

Network partitions really do happen! They are often short, but if you can't recover from them, then you shouldn't call yourself a distributed system.

I am shocked at how fragile etcd is in this way. I was hoping docker swarm was better, but I'm not surprised (alas) to find out that it has the same problem.

I'm about ready to build my own solution, because I know a way to do it that will be really robust in the face of partitions (and it doesn't use RAFT, you probably should not be using RAFT, I've seen lots of complaints about zookeeper too. I've done this before in other contexts so I know how to make it work, but so have others so why are people who don't know how to make it work reinventing the wheel all the time?)

How to protect yourself in future jobs: - See if they have devops people or ops people. Pure ops is actually ideal. - Ask them about their process, both the design/development (eg: who makes issues, how is the product designed) and the backend - who supports the customers, how are customer issues fed into the development workflow.

If it's engineers supporting customers and on the spot to fix bugs, that will be a red flag.

I could have set the bar at $150M with the same result. For a currency market cap, $1B is super tiny.

I don't think its preferable to find a cofounder in an area that complements you. I think that this can be great, but what's most preferable is the right co-founder relationship. If the right co-founder is also an engineer, then that's fine. One of you should be CEO anyway, you can always hire business guys.

I think the classic mistake startups make is the duo where ones "business" and ones "technical" and the engineer ends up spending all this time building the product and the business while the business guy takes the CEO spot and controls something he doesn't understand. (assuming it's a technical business, if it's a non-technical business like a sport drink then a business guy for CEO makes sense, as sales are step key operational effort)

There are absolutely political reasons for it. Both the dividing founders reason you mentioned, plus the fact that single founders are more likely to be technical while when two people found one of them is likely to be a business founder. VCs feel they can control the business founder (or replace him if needed) much easier than the engineer, because VCs are not engineers. (and they are not entrepreneurs in my experience either, though they seem to think they are and are happy to trot out the "exits" they were vaguely involved in, usually via friends and family equity.)

I agree with your priority- a pair of fully dedicated good founders is ideal.

That's my point. You should invest your life in something where the value is higher. VCs would rather take a much lower chance at a higher payoff because they spread their risk around more, you cannot do so.

My numbers are hypothetical, but they are not tautological. That's my point- the VCs will take the lower expected payout, whether this is because they are bad at estimating risk or not I cannot say. I can say this is how they operate, because I've seen it, in every single startup that took VC investment.

Personally, I think the buck has to stop somewhere, and it's more important to be united in a vision than to be right, or to be struggling for what's right. At the same time, it doesn't work when the person with whome the buck stops is authoritarian. I respect someone who is wrong who at least has a reason for being wrong based on their perspective of the situation. But I can't abide someone who is wrong and who forces the startup to do the wrong thing because they have the authority of position. I find those people are not going to be predictable in the mistakes they make, and more importantly the will not recover from them.

I asked the questions because I think you might be onto something, a way to split things up and have genuine founders without the "everyone gets 1/n of the equity" equality that leads to strife.

Him putting in the seed round and other contributions necessary to give him the weight that makes it a valuable deal for everyone also seems to be a key element in your situation.

Thanks for sharing!

Yeah, this is a puff piece written by someone who clearly doesn't understand how this technology works.

Proof of Stake, AFAIK has never been tried in a cryptocurrency of any significant value (over $1B). Closest is ethereum which is still on Proof of Work.

No it's still a startup. It can be a very high growth startup, shooting to a $100M valuation.

It's just not the wannabe unicorn that VCs want.

There's a HUGE gap between what VC wants and a "lifestyle business" (I hate that term, thanks for not using it.)

Redefining startup to be this very, very narrow set of "businesses that will be over $1B in valuation within 5 years" is wrong, it's silly, and it's getting worse.

9 years ago on Hacker News the difference between "lifestyle" and "startup" was "businesses that will reach over $100M valuation in 10 years."

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Reply to @danieltillett because HN won't let me submit 4 posts in an hour!

Put another way, I would take a %10 chance of having a $100M business over a %0.1 chance of having a $1B business. (assume in both cases you end owning %5 of the stock at exit, though realistically without VC money you'd likely own more equity percentage at $100M than at $1B)

VCs generally want you to take the second bet, even though the statistical value is 1/10th as much for you!

Worse, you can only found one business at a time, while the VCs can invest in dozens at the same time. So your risk is much higher (not even mentioning that they are investing OPM)

VCs interests are not aligned with founders.

Even if your cofounder has absolutely the best intentions, not everyone is cut out for it. It's very easy to be "Saying the right things" and not even aware they they aren't being honest.

In fact, I'd argue that %50 of the "co-founders" of YC startups are not actually ready to be founders, and I suspect that the number who are still with the startup 3 years after are very small. (and that a large number of the YC companies that don't exist after 3 years don't exist because of a bad choice in co-founder.)

You admit you have a main founder. Does this main founder have sorta ultimate authority? Or does he hold the singular original vision from which everyone else's vision/mission/purpose comes from?

What's the equity split like among the 6 of you?

What created that base of trust you describe? Was it everyone agreeing to follow the "main founders" vision, and him being respectful and not ego driven (so that the vision became shared?)

> "I will bring on talented people in executive roles who can complement me and make up for my own weaknesses, but I won't cofound again. I'd rather keep the smart, business-oriented people I know in masterminds where we can compare ideas and bounce thoughts off each other, than wade into business situations where our differences turn us into enemies and destroy the company."

Absolutely. I cannot agree with this more.

I don't think the issue is about visionaries vs behind-the-scenes guys. The problem is people making decisions outside their domain expertise. If you have a cofounder (eg a recent example from a company I've worked with) with no software experience his instincts are not going to serve the company well. I've seen this happen constantly, including recently with a guy who is humble, very nice, perfectly well intentioned, but has the wrong instincts and has undermined delivery of a product, probably adding 3 weeks to the development time.

The people with the expertise should have authority in those domains. If your CEO/solo founder is an engineer, then the marketing and sales guys should have authority over their areas-- and be held accountable to metrics, not micro-managed. And vice versa.

When you have three co-foundres you have three visions, even if they aren't visionary, and three people empowered to operate according to their vision, and it's a lot easier to just not fight over every little thing... until it blows up or you aren't executing well because you're executing at cross purposes.

With a single founder you have a single authority and a single vision. And thus you can be consistent in your execution.

After decades as an employee and cofounder, and seeing many startups fail first hand (so smaller data set, but much richer information) I agree that the stigma against single founders is in error.

The number one and two causes of startup failure in my experience are fights between the founders and VCs forcing the startup to do the wrong thing (which often causes fights between the founders with one saying "we know the market better than those guys" and the other saying "but think of the signal if we don't pivot into widgets for baby monkeys and they decline to pro-rata our B round???!")

But the bottom line is, if you don't know someone you can cofound with, you shouldn't jeopardize the future of the company by just picking one. I don't think you can pick a good co-founder with less than a year of experience with them. Founding a company strains previously good relationships by greatly raising the stakes for every decision and disagreement, compared to your previous relationship with each other. PG forcing Dropbox's founder to get a cofounder seems shockingly dangerous (unless that cofounder was really always going to be number 2 in authority).

If you know someone you've worked with for 4-6 years and they work their butts off, then that's a great potential co-founder. I had one of those, but we got divorced. :-) Still on good terms, but I am not going to start a company with him.

But if you don't have anyone like that- you're ADDING relationship risk to your Startup Risk. And you're unlikely to be reducing your startup risk by the same amount. That co-founder could be hired with a significant opportunity to earn equity, at about the same time, and be just as successful at reducing startup risk without adding the relationship risk by being an "employee". The difference is in control.

So, my plan is to be the Founder, and then get a set of co-founders who get founder stock[1] but don't have the authority to overrule me, even if they all gang up (eg not an equal equity split). Hopefully this will be acceptable to TechStars. This will show others are willing to work on my idea at least- which is the claimed reason for a cofounder cause it's early social proof (also a really silly signal).

[1] I don't believe in multiple classes of stock. A dollar put in by an employee from under market salary is just as valuable as a dollar put in by a VC firm, and the employee is taking more risk- they can only "invest" in one job at a time.

Except that Pegatron has many customers. Including the name Apple at all is pure clickbait.

This plus stack-ranking means 60 hour workweeks. I worked at Amazon for several years, their culture may pretend to support this, but, like almost everything you read about Amazon, it's PR fluff. Never going to happen.

Simply only showing up in the office 30 hours a week would be enough to put your team on the bottom end of the stack.

Amazon is organized such that the politics are vicious and anything that can be used to put another team down (And thus elevate your team in the stack) will be used.

Managers like Bezos are proud of creating this toxic cult like culture because they rationalize it and are not interested in hearing about how they are screwing up.

A real example of this is Bezos claiming after the NYT article that if anyone saw abuse they should email him directly... and now the ex-amazon alumni group has grown by several people who did exactly that and were fired.

My boss was committing felonies on the PacMed grounds on a regular basis, drove %80 of his team to leave, and he still got promoted.

Because he was good at politics and BS (and terrible at actually getting product done, easily wasting %25 of our time with nonsense because he didn't understand how the system worked but wanted to "manage" (which really meant micro-manage.))

Felonies, I'm not kidding.

They are cheating you, they want to keep you poor.

The correct answers are: "We don't give you options, we give you RSUs and they start vesting after 90 days. Here's the cap table"

Anything else is screwing you. Unless, course the RSUs are for preferred shares, that's real what it should be, but common seems a reasonable compromise given that investors think a dollar from them is worth more than a dollar from an employee and should be preferred.