Good point. Let's say you do have that experience or skill in building a sea-worthy ship. Let's say you are more valuable than your founder given where the company currently is. Maybe the company is in the growth stage, and your skills matter more to the company's survival than the founder. Why, oh why, does the founder make out like a bandit, and you make out like a chump.
True, but you don't have anything a big company doesn't have, or can't have. Therefore, to differentiate yourself from your talent going to FAANG, you need to provide more equity to early employees than what is the status quo. They joined your startup for risk, and your rewards need to match up with that risk. A large company has professional development, a great lifestyle, and mentorship. What they don't have is huge upside if there is a huge exit, and the early employee at a startup needs to capture that.
My issue is that just because something was hard before you came, but you're just as talented, why do they get 10x in compensation ? It's kind of like saying because Steph Curry came to the Warriors 3 years before when they weren't a Championship-contending team, he deserves 10x Durant's salary. Curry was drafted by the Warriors and started the culture and created small-ball, but could you imagine his salary being so high ? That would be absurd, with Curry making $250 million per year.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. The only reason why I'm still advocating more equity for early employees is because founders get so much of it. So if an exit were to happen, which could make the founders very rich, the early employee gets nothing. In your case of the default outcome, both get nothing, and that is OK. But if something were to happen, the early employee still gets nothing.
At the end of the day, when your company gets sold, and your founder worked on the company for 1-2 years before you did, but they walk away with millions and you walk away with the equivalent of a Camry - I question whether equity is not the solution.
In terms of market rate salary, the startup will never match FAANG. Seriously. I'm talking about Sign-on bonus, annual bonus, re-ups, benefits (like a heart-transplant $100k operation for your kids), gym membership, rent subsidies, etc...
So it has to be equity since that's all the startup can offer. It's income inequality 101, what we're living in.
Anyways, at some point, I'm complaining, because the system is the way it is and we have to live with reality. And I understand that if founders didn't make it out big enough, they wouldn't start one in the first place. But I have a feeling that if enough people were educated on how much a bad deal being an early employee was, we could tip the scale a bit.
I'm happy you say this, and I wish it was more well known, even if obvious. People join early-stage startups for the potential bucks. I'm not saying that's a good reason, but I'm saying most graduates, who are not as educated about the world, will join a startup for the money upside. Being honest like you are is not the same as admitting there is some degree of deception in the culture about how well off you'll be as an early employee in the startup world.
I see your point, and I agree. I'd also say that even though people are "deeper" at larger places, there are so many different "deep" people that you tend to get "wide" if you need to. Just ask a different person.
The problem is that since we are drawn to startups, we tend to read material about startup by startups. And startups would never say joining one is bad, since they need employees. And they would never make it easily known that founders get most of the benefits here. They throw things around like "great culture" and "office perks" but at the end of the day, they walk away with millions and you walk away wiser. Saying you're the next Google is like saying you're the next Buffett - the numbers make it too unrealistic for an early employee to do well.
Opportunity cost being the main one, and living uncomfortably. Benefits were not that great. Resources were small, which limited potential for expert help.
This. I joined a moderately successful startup (good acquisition where founders made > $1 m) and the rewards were not worth the risks as an early employee. Also, the RSUs are low risk, high rewards at the "usual suspects". Unless you love working on a small team with more autonomy, but without comfortable resources and losing sleep over whether your company will be there next week, I just don't see the attraction of joining a startup as an early employee. You can learn a whole lot from a "usual suspect", where the world's experts reside, and a whole team of competent and hard-working people are also.
With that said, I'm super interested in how we can make it better for early employers, and the obvious solution is to give them more equity. Why do founders get over 10x early employees ? Just doesn't seem fair.
It's like going to lunch with a group of people. If it's just you, you can go wherever you like. Once it's with your partner, you have to take their interested into account. Have you tried planning a lunch for 5 or more people, taking into account dietary restrictions, location, time, etc.. ? And imagine when it's 400 people - now you need to make sure the restaurant can hold that amount of people, and if it's available during times that you like. The more people that are involved, the more variables are introduced that influence decision making.
Before anyone says Facebook's testimony is just fluff, we're a business that relies on Facebook's API to monitor activity, and we've been severely impacted. We no longer can get data as before - it's having a large effect on our business. So we definitely feel that action is being taken.
"The issue is that violence is a poor metric for progress." Just to echo the commenter, I don't think Pinker is stating that humans are progressing in general - he is just stating that violence is decreasing. I also agree this is a measurable metric, that Pinker does well to argue for.
If he claims things "are getting better", I think he says that "violence is decreasing", where "violence" is a measure of worseness.
If we want to talk about progress, though, we would have to define what progress really means. Will Durant (from "The Lessons of History") says progress is more like the increasing ability of mankind to control his environment. If so, I would think there is some evidence for that.
In terms of social injustice, Will Durant also makes an argument that there will always be this. Power is always concentrated to the few (that's just how it works in order to have organization), and those not in power will always have some level of injustice. The amount of people in power and their motives can change depending on the era/civilization/society.
I invite everyone on this thread to read "The Wealthy Renter" by Alex Avery. Also, no, the primary reason is not so you can relocate. Buying a home could be a very bad financial decision for most people, who don't realize it and just do it because everyone around them tells them to.
I agree you are trying to do that with this post. But YC startup information sometimes markets itself as knowing what others don't know when it comes to growing a business, and say they know best since they've seen so many startups in their cohorts. It comes across as revolutionary ideas, even if those words aren't exactly used.
For people just coming out of college, the advice given by YC might seem very "groundbreaking". But honestly, these are not new ideas. I listened to Sam's lectures at Stanford, and listened to Brian Tracy's business books, and they are the same advice. Not to hate on YC, but I just wanted to keep it 100.
This is interesting. I have to say that for all the power that Python has in the scientific community, and scientific computation in particular, visualization has a long way to go. There are charts I made 5 years ago in C++ using a framework called ROOT that was much prettier. ROOT was only maintained by a couple of people at the time. This was particle physics.
I think this is a great list, and I'm so glad Susan took the time to lay all of this out!
I have to add these two books to the list. I was surprised to see they didn't make it, even though she nailed some of the other "bibles". The following were my favorite books as an undergraduate physics major:
- Introduction to Mechanics by Kleppner and Kolenkow
- Electricity and Magnetism by Edward Purcell
No true physics education would be complete without reading and going through the problems in those books. I knew physics was my passion before, but these books helped me fall in love with physics even more.
Chiming in to say that I have the same exact experience :) I work in security, and we use these methods to detect anomalies or classify malicious content or URLs. A silly false positive is embarrassing, even if it happens once. Humans always augment our methods, or we have to set expectations to the customer that we are trading off accuracy for speed. Fast customer support usually helps against false positives too.