wetzler

I think some people are misinterpreting "programming is easier than I thought it would be" to mean "programming is easy".

Just because the barrier to entry is lower than I expected does not mean I think your job is easy. I have a ton of respect and admiration for developers. I have led teams of developers that could do things I could never do. There is no need to get defensive.

The google translate metaphor is actually pretty good. Tech is evolving to make it much easier to learn. A lot more folks can dive in now. You don't always need to find a translator :)

I find your response to be a bit dramatic and troll-y, but you do raise some valid, common concerns which I will address now for the sake of others who might be curious:

[don't shit where you eat] If things start to get uncomfortable, for whatever reason, I can get another job. I'm smart enough not to be 100% confident things will work perfectly. However, I have lived with Kyle and the other founders for 8 years. We have a long and stable history.

[your husband is your boss] Kyle is a leader, but he's not my boss. We are a six person company and no one here has a boss. We treat each other as peers. So far it is working great. If we need to establish a hierarchy at some point, I trust we are capable of architecting it wisely. We are kind of obsessed with the organizational design of the company.

[two eggs, one basket] I'm not too worried about either of us being able to find a job. We have valuable skill sets which are in high demand. Plus, I have savings from my previous job.

[why did you blog this??] I put this on the blog because I thought it would be helpful to other people. It has received overwhelming appreciation.

Keen allowed it on the blog because we support a culture of transparency and because we think maintaining a blog that is useful to the tech community is helpful for our business. So far, it has worked very well.

[your finances will be joint, so why does it even matter what you get?] I'm offended by this question. I have always been the high earner in this relationship, and I still am. My salary matters a lot to me. The only way your question makes sense to me is if you think Kyle is rich (he's not), if you think he makes all the salary decisions in the company (he doesn't), or if you are speaking in the context of antiquated gender roles.

[you're weird] Thank you.

Did not realize the tax implications of the proximate living bonus when doing the analysis, but found out later. Thanks for pointing it out.

Keen also has <$1M in investment. My salary isn't quite market-rate for an engineer, but it's not too far off when you include perks (proximate living bonus, lunches, healthcare, etc). If we do raise series A (or become profitable quickly), we plan to adjust salaries toward market rate.

Not really, because I was managing large scale tech implementations. That's a full time job and then some. I don't have the dev chops to little projects for $XXX/hr. Maybe one day :)

Well said, tptacek.

Thank you!! I describe myself as "hard-working generalist". I'm good at coordinating teams and getting things done. I've been working on short and long term goal planning, customer dev, testing, documentation, and I wrote a rails dashboard that uses our API. I'm also involved in our design and strategy discussions. Lots of early startup stuff :)

It'd be pretty strange for a startup's first hire to be an office manager ;-)

I wrote this article because I wished it existed when I was going through this. Even something as simple as an example of a early employee's salary at a seed-funded startup is helpful. I also think the links I shared are pretty good. I'm shocked that my post got over 150 tweets today -- many of them saying "read this if you're considering joining a startup" or "great read". I thought some people might take interest in the story, but I'm completely surprised by how many did. There have been over 16k unique visitors since I posted it this morning.

Phil - I agree :)

Cool. Do you think the intro I added resolves the confusion?

"Hi, I’m Michelle. I recently left my job as a technical consulting manager and joined my best friends and my fiancé, Kyle, at Keen.io (I wrote about that here <link>). This is the story of how I negotiated my compensation."

OP here. You're right - it was confusing! I tried to evaluate my offer objectively and wanted to share the tools I used to do that (as well as get feedback on the approach). My relationships with the founders were a key part of the story that I didn't mention until late in the post. I added an intro which hopefully makes it more readable now.

It just occurred to me that I should have posted this on HN before finishing the negotiation. Would have been great to get this input then.

Great point. To sum it up briefly: we have no kids, no debt, and some savings. Now is the best opportunity to try and do this together. It's something we've talked about for a long time.

I'm pretty sure consulting work will still be there if the startup doesn't work out. I have SAP and Salesforce.com experience; both are widely implemented across the US.

Thanks for reading my post :) I wrote about my decision to make the jump in a previous blog post: http://blog.keen.io/post/26096112831/why-i-left-consulting-a...

Some things to consider: 1. Consulting work is still there if I need to return to a higher salary. 2. My salary in the startup will be adjusted if the startup does well. 70k will not work out long term in SF, but it's ok for a year or so.

Yes. Maybe a whole separate blog post coming on that :)

I authored the post and you're absolutely right. It was a lazy approximation. My healthcare in the startup isn't quite as good now, but I'm also very fortunate in that I don't have any healthcare-related expenses.

Thank you for bringing it up here, it could be a significant differentiator for some folks.

I modeled the cap table and various financial outcomes to figure out what 1.25% might be worth. In fact, we reviewed those numbers as a team (this was in my post).

The founders also set expectations that we'd adjust salaries to market value in the event of a Series A, though that isn't something I relied on as a part of my decision.

Totally strange. I did most of the negotiation with Dan, our CTO, though Kyle (my fiance) is the person who gave everyone the first verbal offers. I just updated the blog post to make that more clear.

I think in the end being friends made the negotiation much easier. I am confident we all wanted what was fair for the business and each individual, and were able to talk at length about that until everyone felt comfortable.

hopefully I cleared up the confusion with the intro I added to the entry.

Thanks for the feedback. I realized the article was confusing so I added an intro.

However, I feel no need to mention my gender or sexuality when introducing myself. If I didn't have a clearly female name, should I have said "Hi, I'm Pat, and I'm a female in the tech industry"?

Thanks for the thoughtful response! (I wrote the post)

I tried to take the approach you recommended and arrive at some numbers completely independent of the offer. I don't think I made that clear in the post, though.

Calculating the company's worth based on the offer is a cool idea, wish I would have thought of it at the time.

A big Series A is important because we discussed adjusting salaries to market value in the event of a Series A.

I'm really surprised by the number of "what did the women expect??" comments in this thread, but I'm glad there are a few smart, well-spoken, good folks in here too. Groping strangers is inappropriate in any public environment; I can't image how it would feel for a woman at a tech conference. It's already a weird feeling to be outnumbered by so many men. You wonder if they consider you a part of their peer group. Getting groped by one of them would be an obvious signal that you're not.

I have a great example of serendipity. I was visiting a former coworker in San Diego and she setup a lunch with another one of our buddies from work. We hadn't seen each other in years and of course I was excited to tell them about our new startup. A week later I got an email from the guy, asking for a product deck. He does technology resale to the Fortune 500 and wants me to pitch to all the north america sales leads. :-o

I just looked at my metrics dashboard. Wow! Almost 4,000 hits from hacker news! thanks ya'll, hope you got some value out of it!

I'm not sure if this was a joke, but I thought it was funny, especially with that username. True too.

Wow. Age discrimination is illegal here in the US. I was a young manager and all of my direct reports were older, some of them over a decade older. Not a problem. Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work anyway!!

I think you have the right idea about going in at a lower level first. I saw managers hired from outside of the consulting world get crushed. Even after climbing my way up the ladder, I sometimes felt a bit in over my head as a manager. They really expect you to have a lot of things polished - understanding project financials/contracts, presenting to client execs, negotiating with other vendors, managing your team, the firm's project methodology, etc. That last one would be especially challenging for someone new to the company. Is there a way to tailor your resume/experience so that it looks more natural for you to be started as an experienced consultant rather than a manager?

Do it! Let me know if you want to chat. I had a lot more to write but had to cut the thing down so that other humans could read it.

I've been reading your blog for months, so this makes me really happy :)