aerosmile

Founders will sometimes say "if I can't build this company with no more than a million dollars, it's not worth building it at all." In isolation, that thinking may not be wrong, since it highlights the importance of frugality and the product market fit. But in connection with the easiest influx of capital you will ever experience in the lifecycle of your company, paired with valuations that are super high on a risk-adjusted basis, it would be insane not to say yes to a war chest of a few million dollars that you put away for the rainy day.

So no, I don't think that YC companies will raise any less, or will be any less concerned about being ready for Demo Day. The one thing that might happen is that the earliest investors will see a hike in valuations. In the past, investors with the strongest value add (reputation/brand/connections/etc) were able to get in a few weeks before Demo Day at a discount. Since Demo Day investments are characterized by a very weak signal-to-noise ratio, knowing that a reputable investor is bullish on a startup tends to increase the demand to such an extend that the resulting higher valuation more than makes up for that initial discount.

Now that this additional $500k is going to be valued against the lowest valuation, it will increase the barrier for giving discounted deals.

I mentioned elsewhere that there are many industries where transparency works, and the public sector is one of them. Your employer wants you to deliver deterministic output, and your pay reflects that.

That's less the case when you're constantly challenged with clean-sheet exercises where every single person will produce a different outcome. It doesn't even have to be a super senior job - think of someone writing newsletters. That channel can easily lead to 5% or more of total revenue, and different people will definitely produce different outcomes (just the subject line alone will have an impact). Why pay different people the same rate if their work leads to vastly different revenue?

> Been a role for 2+ years and want a meaningful comp change? You have to leave, that's how it is.

That's even more likely to be the case when there are strict guidelines around compensation (eg: when salaries are public). When your manager has some wiggle room, you might be able to justify a bigger bump than average because of all the extra hard work you're putting in, even if your experience level doesn't qualify you for a straight up promotion.

> if cutting out Colorado is less painful to profits than disclosing salaries

So you implied that disclosing salaries cuts into profits, which I took to mean that you're seeing an inverse first-order relationship between salaries and profits.

I don't have a political leaning - in the US, everything is either black or white (with very few shades of grey). In most other countries, the governments are formed through coalitions, and you get a much higher diversity of political flavors. I could find something good about most political parties, and would like to cherry pick those ideas into a package that you could no longer attach to any one single party.

As far as collective bargaining goes, I first lived in a communist country, then in a social democracy, and now in the US. I think it could work, but I have never seen it implemented well. My main concern is that China will kick everyone's ass, and the friction that collective bargaining introduces into a system will make it more difficult to defend against that scenario.

That's ridiculous. If you list the salary as too low, you're sending out a negative signal and will get less qualified candidates. You obviously cannot list it any higher than you're willing to pay. So you'll end up listing it in such a way that people will figure out what this position is worth to you, and once that person gets hired, their background and experience will get scrutinized to no end by anyone with a comparable salary.

If you've ever been a part of the performance review process, you will know that people will go very far to justify a raise. Looking at the current job listings on your company's career section will be the very first thing that everyone will do if those salaries were to be made public.

Or perhaps:

"John will ask why Sandy is making more. The truth is that Sandy is more productive, and saying that to John will lead to friction. John will either need to make more money (which will piss off Sandy), or Sandy will need to get promoted to the same level as her manager (which will piss off her manager because what is she going to do now?). So who do we piss off? Wait, why do we need to piss off anyone - let's just keep the salaries private."

Unions and public positions are not the only ones with public salary info. As I stated in an earlier comment:

Airlines pay just like that (as do taxi companies and most other parts of the transportation industry). Guess what you all have in common? Zero agency. So when you take a job where the ideal output of your labor is 100% deterministic, then it makes sense for your pay to reflect that.

> the literal sole goal is to profit.

When trying to build an argument from first principles, it's important not to make a mistake early on. In your case, you use the profit seeking as an argument that this automatically leads to minimizing everyone's salaries.

In reality, profit gets maximized when you have a team full of high achievers and with very low turnover. That's fundamentally not compatible with your original hypothesis.

> You accuse others of rationalizing these collective behaviors and end up sounding like an apologist.

Not true - I am not saying that the market cannot be whipped into shape. What I am saying is it cannot be done by someone who doesn't understand the market.

It sounds you have a background in engineering - would you let a PR person tell you how to do your work? Obviously not. Well, Jessie Danielson is about as close to recruiting as a PR person is to coding (look up her bio and ask yourself what she's done outside of politics). Why trust that she knows how recruiting should work?

Here's the problem with non-deterministic conversations: everyone has an opinion (fair enough), and is willing to state it with the authority of a highly experienced subject matter expert.

In deterministic conversations, a naive opinion stated with a lot of authority would be shut down quite quickly (eg: many areas in programming where you can quickly prove something to be right or wrong). You can't do that in politics, business, and many other areas. As a result, we have about 8 billion politicians and business experts.

The author is making the assumption that listing a salary is connected to being a progressive business. A bunch of other people take this a step further and state how not listing the salary is a part of some conspiracy (in YC's case, apparently this is an attempt to lower the payroll costs of their portfolio companies).

The reality is that even the most transparent companies out there (eg: Gitlab) do not disclose individual salaries. No, it has nothing to do with some secret plan to underpay anyone or certain groups. It's simply a fact that people become incredibly irrational when it comes to compensation, and the minute you lay it out in the open, you open up a huge surface area for conflict. Last year we learned that encouraging political activism at work has a similar dynamic, and many companies have made that a no go zone as well. It's not because they are racist or don't care - it's because it takes a tiny minority of people to get the entire business derailed, and it's hard enough to keep that from happening in the best of times; once you add a catalyst like salaries or politics, it's like adding fuel to the fire.

But rather than ask ourselves why the leaders at Gitlab and millions of others companies have made the decisions they did, it's a lot easier to just make assumptions - "it must be coming from a bad place, so let me brainstorm what some of those bad places could be."

I'll take it a step further - Colorado State Senator Jessie Danielson would make you believe it's more likely that millions of companies are "bad actors" than that she just doesn't have the relevant experience in business to predict which way her bill was going to work out. Now that she's cost so many of her constituents lucrative remote jobs, it's too late to admit Mea Culpa, and instead it's everyone else's fault. If she was held a bit more accountable, the next time someone tries to bridge the gender pay gap they will hopefully spend some time interviewing and learning from people who have the relevant experience in hiring.

Definitely a publicity stunt.

But I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of the exercise, they actually really do end up unearthing some weaknesses that the process feedback mechanism failed to put sufficient spotlight on.

I mean, how else do you actually test the process feedback mechanisms? I realize that nobody does that, but you'll never know if that mechanism truly works unless you let your CxO do all the work end to end and then ask them if they had sufficient awareness about each small point of friction they encountered.

Another more subtle detail: not sure if DoorDash experiences this, but in my experience it can be difficult to get a newly poached manager from a different company to wrap their head around how - and why - this company is different. The more experienced people are, the more they tend to reach for their old playbooks, which can be good and bad.

You do have a point that large parts of the company could have been carved out (eg: the communications team), and the exercise would have still yielded the same insights, which is why in the end this is a publicity stunt.

You would be handing over full political and military control to a group of individuals, with no way of taking it back. If those individuals turn out to perform as well as the current Chinese leaders, you would be ahead. If they turn out to perform more like the past Chinese leaders, you would be behind. Over the past 5,000 years, China got it more wrong than right, which is the only reason that they haven't been the undisputed world leader with the highest GDP, which is where they belong given their vast human and natural resources.

Democracy was never meant to be as efficient as a dictatorship. In fact, inefficiency is baked in by design to hedge against bad leadership (at the cost of good leaders having their potential impact massively reduced). Think of democracy as a political system with an expensive but effective insurance policy.

Airlines pay just like that (as do taxi companies and most other parts of the transportation industry). Guess what you all have in common? Zero agency. So when you take a job where the ideal output of your labor is 100% deterministic, then it makes sense for your pay to reflect that.

I met with some SF city officials a few years ago to discuss a program that our company was going to run for the city. I've never interacted with a less competent group of people, and we withdrew our proposal simply because we were scared of being affiliated with them in any shape or form. Looking back on what happened to the city since then, it all makes sense.

I wonder if the full transparency you're talking about is a part of how the city managed to attract and retain such talent pool. I know that for all of my career I've been worker harder than my peers and have also been compensated accordingly. If someone told me "oh no, [person who I know is less productive] has the same title as you and he never comes late to work, so you can't make more than him," that for sure would have been our last conversation at work.

I don't know why most companies don't want to disclose salaries, but every startup I've led did that in order to pay more, not less. You basically look for the most exceptional talent in the world, and then you pay them every last penny you can afford. Same with retention - you want to promote people based on what the market would pay for them, regardless if your current org structure allows for a title promotion (you can only have one senior leader per department at any given time). If I had to disclose everyone's salary, that would only lead to more constraints with being generous on my end, not less.

It's a cultural thing. In Austria, people build multi-generational houses because it's expected that your kids and grandkids will live in the same house. In fact, Austria only has one city with two million residents - the rest live in mostly tiny towns where everyone knows everyone (and if you're a newbie, that's not a good thing). Anyone who opens up a business, names it after their family. In other words, where you come from is important, and ideally you come from a family that's been in this town forever. So, in a world where your heritage is a disproportionately big part of your standing in the society, geographic mobility is not a universally good thing.

I am sure there are parts of the Midwest that work the same way, but that's by and large not how the majority of the US works. Your heritage is refreshingly irrelevant, and therefore you can move freely from one place to another. Most people realize that big cities offer better career opportunities, and also that big cities suck for retirement. So you essentially see the following migration pattern:

1. [some place where you were born]

2. [your college town]

3. [career-related move to a bigger city]

(this part can repeat itself many times)

4. [retirement somewhere warm and/or affordable]

So if you're going to move somewhere in the range of 5+ times, why would you invest in a multi-generational home?

Finally, as an aside, interesting to note the correlation between the geographic and economic mobility: the American Dream may or may not be alive anymore, but I've seen so many kids from my college come from nothing and make a fortune (and shockingly, kids from good families end up as failures, mostly due to some sort of conflict with their family). I think the society in the US has accepted that there's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to predicting a kid's future.

That stuff simply doesn't happen in Austria on that scale - if you're poor, you'll stay poor, and vice versa. So a good family name leads to a good standing in the society, and the loop repeats itself (this is where your residence can also serve as a signal for your wealth to reinforce that loop). Why risk leaving all that and moving to a new city where you'd be starting from scratch?

An absolute zero on the patriotic scale. And when I say patriotic, I don't mean the "we're the best in the world" type of patriotic meaning, but more like "tiktok is a sign of things to come, let's try to slow down the inevitable ass-kicking of our economy that's upon us."

Having said all that, he never had a choice to begin with. When Google decided to stand up to China, they didn't bet the farm but "only" a lower double digit percentage of their revenue (my hat's off to Google for that). Apple cannot produce their hardware anywhere else in the world at the scale and quality level that they are currently getting from China. I am saying this as someone who has a good amount of insight into how the Chinese production capability compares to other parts of the world.

His fiduciary responsibility was to do what's best for the company. If he stepped down, it would have taken no time to find the next guy who would have happily done what's best for the company (except less well). So really, it's entirely inevitable.

If you buy into the last sentence, you might want to ask yourself what the long-term future of a capitalist society looks like when it's economically attacked by a very capable totalitarian regime that can think strategically rather than being beholden to the capital markets.

Surely, someone did at some point do some work on the roads in your neighborhood outside of the example you're bringing up? Well, that's taxpayer money, and Google is a big taxpayer.

I don't know why anything "humanitarian" should be taken with a grain of salt. You surely are not going to argue that something like the Syrian humanitarian crisis is comparable with a cartoon character?

On the environmental side, I am not surprised to see people raising eyebrows, because the US military's impact there is vastly underreported. A lot of effort went into exempting the US military from the Kyoto Protocol - and that's for a good reason, since the US military alone emits more CO2 than many industrialized nations. So if you don't believe in global warming, there's nothing I can do to reason with you. But if you do, you might realize that the environmental impact alone might be more damaging than some of the other items I mentioned.

Think of it this way - if the US military cleaned up its act, we could remove the emission control devices from all US cars and still come out on top.

See my related response to refurb's comment.

See my related response to refurb's comment.

> The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does.

I would agree with this statement when it comes to defensive campaigns. But in the case of offensive campaigns, the military very much gives the government an idea of what the plan looks like, including the budget, timeline, casualties, chances of success, etc. It's worth noting here that the military very much has a vested interest in saying yes to military action, because that's good for job security. But when it turns out that you cannot get in and out of a country in the forecasted amount of time, and when that country then goes back to its former political landscape despite all of our best efforts, that failure cannot land entirely at the government's feet.

> And the militaries goals are well, war-focused?

They are, apparently, in the US. I learned that when the CEO of Flexport suggested that we use the military to temporarily unblock the supply chain crisis by leveraging our military's logistics capabilities, which resulted in at least one person leaving a dismissive comment here on HN. I realize that this might have been an isolated view, but I doubt it. In other countries, it's very much expected that the military rolls up their sleeves whenever their capabilities can be generally beneficial to their communities, regardless if it's military-related or not. It's a resource we pay for, so why not share the excess capacity if it's not detrimental to our defensive readiness? I would argue that saving a few million jobs in the US is worth not being able to fulfill the two-war doctrine for a few months.

> It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.

This once again sounds like an internal KPI that the US military can without doubt be very proud of. An external observer may ask how much such an effort would cost, and how well we compare on a per soldier basis with someone like China or Russia. Who can do it for less money? Perhaps the US is still ahead, but I genuinely don't know. Does money matter when it comes to readiness? Well, when it comes to defense, probably not. But if we're talking about invading a foreign country, I think the economics very much start to be a part of the overall equation.

A good example to bring up here would be the cost of the F-35 program. Is it an impressive aircraft? You bet. Are the capabilities of that aircraft in line with its cost? My gut tells me no, and I think a lot of people would agree. Do I have any hope that this was an isolated instance, and that the next-gen aircraft program will be done more cost-efficiently? Not really.

For the record, I am not anti-military at all. I just want to point at behaviors that seem a bit out of touch, and which if rectified would position us to have all the military capabilities we need at the least necessary cost.

Singlehandedly? Of course not. But two years ago, they owned more than 50% of the holiday shopping [1]. It's fair to assume that the percentage has grown over time and especially this year given the supply chain issues that have affected their competitors more than Amazon.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-dominates-holiday-shopp...

You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. You never hear the veterans talk about that - it's always about the success metrics that they define for themselves (eg: casualty ratio - "we lost only 2 lives on our end, and they lost XXXXX").

Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer, and contrast that to Google's net impact on our society. First of all, it's not a cost center but a massive revenue center, and it paid for endless road constructions and similar projects across California, New York, and all other states that Google operates in. And while we can argue about the political bias in their search results, I believe Google has made information more accessible, and that's fundamentally a good thing.

I imagine it has to do with how these two organizations approach their communities from the very beginning:

- Google: don't be evil

- Military: we have our own law where your jury can consist of as few as just 3 officers, and only 2 of them need to agree to send you to jail. Oh, and you don't get a lawyer until the investigation is finished, including your own deposition. So... still want to download all those incriminating documents and expose someone in the military?

Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. So they are fundamentally not opposed to how the military works to begin with, and it's therefore not surprising that they are largely happy with their internal success metrics.

Agree that "useless" was a bit harsh. Perhaps "unachievable"?

It's a bit like dieting. You take someone who has been chubby their entire life, put them through a bootcamp, and then look at their weight 5 years later. The stats are not looking good in those cases, and I think they largely reflect our efforts in up-leveling the political landscape in historically corrupt countries.

I am not saying that we shouldn't keep trying. But I think we should internalize that the chances of success are slim, and then make that a part of our upfront decisioning process on budget, casualties, political cost, etc.

That's a very thoughtful take and I am glad to see other people putting a lot of thoughts into this. The only thing I would question is are there really any evergreen open markets. Sure, they might be open today, but will they stay open 5-10 years from now? I mean, just look at home care - could have anyone envisioned back in 2014 that this is going to turn into a VC battlefield? Between Honor and Papa, it will be hard for any independent agency to stay competitive for many more years.

As someone who has seen both sides of the world that you describe, I think I can verbalize a topic that was not explicitly discussed in the video: if you feel forced to raise capital for a company that you personally don't believe in, then perhaps you shouldn't do it assuming you're early enough that you're not putting the livelihood of many other people at risk. Raising that capital will tie up years of your professional career in an underpaid and overworked role that has very little chance of returning your and other people's investment.

I didn't use to think this way until a few years ago when I experienced true product market fit. Prior to that, I always found myself slugging it out and just accepting that paying with blood, sweat and tears for even the tiniest amounts of success is the only way there is. But there truly are opportunities out there to solve other people's problems that are so important to those people that your experience in building that startup will be vastly different. Suddenly the metrics look good without having to put a spin on them, investors are competing to get into your rounds, you start getting inbound resumes from highly qualified candidates, and you're able to pay generous salaries so that you surround yourself with amazing professionals who are better than you in their specific domains and can work autonomously with a minimal amount of interaction. Next thing you know - you're no longer working on weekends, you can take vacations, go on maternity/paternity leave like other normal people, etc. In other words, life starts feeling normal again.

I struggle with sharing this because I don't want to demotivate anyone. A part of me believes that the slugging out portion of my life was the necessary ingredient that taught me many important lessons and that prepared me for the the moment when the stars finally aligned (but it certainly came with a mental and physical cost that took years to iron out again). There's also this idea that a startup might struggle for many years and then suddenly take off like crazy (I believe life360 is one of the many well-known examples). All I would say is don't overdo it - do the grind for as many years as you think is acceptable, and then at some point start getting a bit more picky about the risks you take. If you've got 10 years of grind behind you and your current startup is unlikely to succeed, shut it down, take a job, and try again in two years (or if you're lucky enough that you can afford going straight into your next startup, then by all means do that as well). Whatever you do, make sure that your next startup benefits from the lessons learnt in the previous one, which almost always means make sure that you have the product market fit (PMF).

That's the hard part - how do you know if you have the PMF without quitting your job and raising capital? Product Hunt, Kickstarter, Shown HN and similar feedback mechanisms can be helpful here.

The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part.

We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than criticizing him for not giving away the content for free, it seems the guy should have done more of the opposite (to prevent someone else taking his job who will do all that and then some).

> The point 3 is similar to the relocation scare of a few years ago to India or similar.

> It hasn't happened.

We think it hasn't happened. And yet, the likelihood of talking to a CX rep from a Fortune 500 company who is based in the US is very low. Did that somehow help the US-based CX reps?

Perhaps you're thinking that it will be different with knowledge workers. Consider the well-publicized fact that a lot of Boeing software is written in India. How many other corporations are following suit behind the scenes?

Mate Rimac from Rimac Automobili claims [0] that engineering a car is far more complex than engineering an aircraft, because:

1. the expectations the manufacturer places on the operators are wildly different (eg: car drivers won't deal with checklists, type ratings, etc.)

2. the expectations the operators have from the manufacturers are wildly different (eg: car drivers care about their UX and the perceived value, whereas pilots mostly care about their job security)

[0] In German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PALxDIxRrns