I have doubts about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013?
If you know any history, #4 is how many new areas of technology go. A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. Intel was founded with less than $1M, and fabbed its own chips. Vs. what would be the ante, today, to get into either of those industries?
If they're being realistic, for sure, but there was a period where investor money was flowing freely and the news of investment rounds, IPOs, and individual financial success was a regular occurrence on HN. I don't know if that has lessened, but the discourse around it definitely has.
IMHO building startup became a status symbol which means that the payment in respect for making a courageous adventure is lost and commoditized. We are slowly seeing the same for academia.
Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it.
For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem.
I feel this. I keep thinking there has to be a competitive advantage in being more conscious about the creation than the extraction. The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.
I highly agree. And I think in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product. I think part of the reason why is that all over social media and the internet there are gurus telling people "you can be the next to be rich and you deserve it". But that's the wrong motivation to have ingrained in every potential founder.
> in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product.
If it can survive. The problem here is that startups compete in the same economy as those more sustainable, passion-driven businesses - and because of their ruthless focus on growth, as well as access to vastly more capital, they win, effectively suppressing good products or outright preventing them from entering the market.
Free market thinkers should realize that market doesn't work as intended - it just works. POSIWID[0] and all. The workings of the market are sometimes aligned with the best interest of humanity, but not always, and they have no obligation to be, because at this point, we've long lost any control we had over it (if we ever had any).
I believe that's not really saying anything if the market is intended to work by the forces of the invisible hand. If it is, the it is working as intended.
If you believe that, you're effectively believing that a runaway system of feedback loops is right by definition. But that's basically just a religion that worships a non-personified deity.
I was merely pointing out that saying the market 'just works' instead of it 'working as intended' logically doesn't add anything, because in the free market concept it is meant to to "just work", which implies that is what it is intended to do.
Sure, but in the real world, there aren't that many true believers in the Free Market. There's just a lot of people confused about what the market is, and it's useful to help them realize that it's just a name we give to a complex set of feedback loops. There is no intention behind them - it's just what happens when people do stuff people do. It is not a moral authority, and it does not magically limit itself to trading dollars for food or sex either - we limit it to that conceptually, by drawing a border and then regulating it to stay away from the other things.
A truly free market just degenerates into the "natural state" in which non-social animals live. There is, nor there ever will be, a truly free market in a human society. The only intentional thing, the only thing we can discuss whether it "works as intended" or not, is the boundaries (cultural and regulatory) we set around the market. It's the only thing we control (sort of - the same feedback loops that form the market also affect our attempts at regulating it).
> entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed
If you're in for-profit sector, I don't see why being concerned with the main goal first and foremost would be a bad thing.
No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
So if the problem is worth solving in this ecosystem it's worth it because it does actually turn a profit instead of some fantasy that it will magically appear at some imagined scale.
I also don't focus solely on the fact that I earn money from my job, when I speak to my colleagues - no, I wouldn't be on that job, if it didn't pay.
> No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
This is a very specific understanding of startups as entities receiving foreign capital or debt.
The act of doing entrepreneurship or stating up is inherently devoid from profit motives - or should be IMHO. Money is what makes it possible and not the core reason to do it.
And by that we return to my core reservation as written out in the initial comment.
> The act of doing entrepreneurship or stating up is inherently devoid from profit motives
I am assuming one is operating in the for-profit sector.
If one is NOT operating in that sector then yes it is all the more reasonable to assume that the enterprise should be focused on solving a problem or creating some sort of intangible value.
We can observe this is well with the open-source community, where profit motivation is not the main driving factor.
However, I reiterate, if the venture is to operate for-profit then it's potential to be profitable should be for most the aim otherwise it's not solving a problem because it will fail.
VCs aren't banks and startups (in the SV sense) aren't seeking funding to do something tried and true in a new place. A VC invests expecting most of their investments to fail.
Banks expect returns, and the things they fund are expected to turn a profit. There are systems in place to claw back assets and funds in the event it fails to do that; and most will, but they're expected to come to the bank with a plan for profit in hand. There are different kinds of bankruptcies to address different kinds of failure. Banks tend to not give loans to people who fail a lot, and the terms get worse with each failure.
Meanwhile, in VC-land, the 1/10 startup that brings the profit for the fund could very well be started by the person who failed the other 9/10 times.
It seems like if the expectation is, with rare exceptions, most startups won't turn a profit, and there's no real penalty or punishment for repeat failure (because it's expected), it's not a for-profit system. It's a patronage system that periodically mints new patrons.
> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns
That general mindset was a major source of pain for me. I used to say I had founded a startup just to get along with the other entrepreneurs, but in fact I couldn't care less about fast growth, product-market fit and other common concerns in the field -- heck, "consulting" was in my list of services and some of my peers couldn't even wrap their minds around that concept -- and the ones who did, frowned upon it. They just kept asking about product, competitive edges and so on, while all I cared about was joining a growing market served until then by a handful of small but profitable companies in my country.
> For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
Do you think some of this is idea related? If you're building software, many new ideas are not truly innovative in a way that would make execution seem like the place to focus?
An experienced person might hear the idea and instantly have a general idea of how to build it -- but know that the real hard parts are distribution, finding customers, talking to customers, and building the profit flywheel that lets you do more of the previous.
Taking AI as an example just because it's hot right now, but it's a very different conversation if your idea is building a alternative to the transformer (assuming you're talking to someone who could even speak authoritatively on the subject!), versus building an "chatgpt wrapper" app, even if it's very complex/tailored to an industry. Most people won't be able to discuss the industry specific bits so they focus on the tech bits, and then the differences seem to be mostly execution?
When I pitch my calorie counter app that uses AI - fair, that is not new.
But eg. working on an idea around decentralized dating app that utilizes federated learning, blockchains, en cryptographic distributed filesystems to make a truly open and algorithmically transparent dating app - and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that" instead of starting to jam on good privacy preserving techniques in FL that still yields good results. ...
In honesty, I think the main issue is that the people have _not_ been able to understand these technologies. It has probably been _too_ innovative?
> and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that"
I believe one cause for this response is how someone tells the other person about that idea. If you make it clear that you are building something for fun, I think that response becomes less likely. But if they believe your project idea is also a start up idea, then they may ask about the business side.
Sometimes I do see a cognitive dissonance when computer-first people and business-first people discuss software. IMO, making it clear where the person starting the conversation is coming from would help both groups not talk past each other when engaging. A startup-minded person won't necessarily ask about monetization if the other person made it clear they're talking about a hobby. I believe it would be less likely, at least.
> For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
I think this is in part a market correction. Whether it's over correction, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
There's been a lot of really bad startups making a big splash, often without any experience or knowledge of the field they were trying to disrupt (so they don't actually know what the problems really are, or what was really needed), and with far too vague hand wavey ideas on how they'll actually reach sustainability.
There's been far too much of engineering being a hammer, and seeing every problem is a nail
> every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem.
Talkers hate doers and those who dare to think of doing something.
A big trend in science now, at least for those less fortunate researchers, is basically only being allowed to do research that you already know the outcome of.
>The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.
Indeed, for me it is: whats the point of working in some random ass startup making yet another crud app and/or with 100 users when you can go to faang and work at giant scale or go to work in semiconductors and work on very interesting, deeply technical stuff?
Sure, there are interesting startups, but they usually dont go big like uber for x and so on
I believe the main change is just that Hacker News went from being a very specific subset of the population to becoming much more mainstream. Ten years ago it was, at least in my opinion, mostly early adopters of internet technology and in general people who had enough funds that they could fail without being devastated. Nowadays, in addition to the traditional VC route, there's also the indie hackers movement. Those founders typically aren't friends with old money, so they will bring a different perspective on financial risks.
You should watch the Arstechnica homepage then. They have authors who essentially get all their writing assignments based on how popular a story is ranking on this website. That is pretty mainstream.
> Nowadays, in addition to the traditional VC route, there's also the indie hackers movement. Those founders typically aren't friends with old money, so they will bring a different perspective on financial risks.
When I first started hanging around HN (around 2011 or so), the general vibe seemed much more like indie-hacker types to me, lots of anger at VCs and the hockey stick growth required.
Honestly though, the following decade was a massive tech bull market which presumably pulled lots of HN denizens in (including me). Maybe we're getting back to that a little bit with tech layoffs and potential opportunities in other industries.
Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much.
But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups. That broader group was always there, of course, just its proportions relative to the hard core of entrepreneurs has changed.
I'd love to see some objective analysis of how things changed after the twitter and reddit kerfuffles, but I don't believe the article's thesis that the zeitgeist is the cause.
PS I could live without the stories that violate the precept of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." ... but it's still pretty good here.
This is just another public website, various people come here since its interesting and discussions engaging. Its one of the last places which is free/public and discussions don't immediately turn primitive, political and emotional unlike rest of internet. People from various backgrounds come and have interesting things to say, which is often refreshing and enlightening (at least to this fella).
Many if not most of folks at this point have nothing to do with neither startups nor hacking. Neither do I for example, and I am here for a decade+.
> I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups
This is certainly me. Generally interested in tech (and many of the other things that HNers seem to be interested in these days), but no real interest in startups. Hope I am not ruining HN for the old timers.
I started using this place a lot more in the last couple of years as Reddit went to shit, so I suspect that was a big driving force in changing the audience here.
This was always me, and I've been here 15 years. It was pretty much a tech forum then (arguably more then than now, there's much more discussion of culture war issues now, even when stories are flagged it's ever-present in the comments). I think the time when HN was primarily startups was much further back and much briefer than most people nostalgically remember.
Yes, but the proportions have still changed. It's not static, it's a progression.
2010 will have been different to 2008 (when I joined) but so will 2013 with respect to 2010, 2020 with respect to 2013, and 2025 with respect to 2020.
It's fine that it's much more broadly a tech forum now - but it's silly to infer things about the wider world by comparing attitudes in HN across eras unless you take account of the change in demographic.
As to the culture wars? Perhaps it's time for another "erlang love bombing" campaign to recalibrate :D (When was that anyway...?) Edit: Ah yes, it was in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
I mean, it’s not called Startup News. There’s a group that assumes real hackers all want to do startups (and the site is run by some of those), but that isn’t really the culture. We mythologize Woz and Gates and Page, but also K&R and Knuth and Dijkstra.
Interesting that you both put Woz in this group, and omitted Jobs. To me, one of the better analogy of the difference between two groups/interests is Woz vs Jobs.
Relative out-timer here. I came here because of smart people having smart discussions about life, universe, and everything (tech or otherwise). HN both got me to drink the startup kool-aid early on, and then cured me from it later on, ultimately making me a startup-skeptic (and infecting me with an unhealthy dose of cynicism). I guess this is how growing up looks like :).
Ultimately, I still hang around HN because of high-quality discussions; there's really no other place like it, or at least I've found none. Or maybe after all this time, it just feels like home. Still, were the balance to shift hard towards startup talk, I fear we'd lose all the intellectual curiosity driven submissions and discussions - they'd just turn into sharing tips and tricks to make moar moneys with tech, which I personally find BOOOOOORING AF.
Yes to the first question, no to the second. In fact it's not just tech, as I sometimes see interesting articles about history or the arts on here. But of course it is mostly tech-related content.
> But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group
This miracle is probably just hard work in disguise -- dang et al. HN also has a self-censorship bias and some self-enforcement, but mostly not an abrasive kind -- people (mostly) gently remind each other of the rules, and sometimes viciously downvote comments that are not useful/in the spirit of HN.
HN and Dan’s work are arguably worth more than the VC part of YC. The VC side plays the capital musical chairs game (selling the equity to a greater fool before the music stops), this is the valuable output from that.
Oh I entirely concur; I think there's a team of sorts, not just Dan, but I'm sure the gentle steering is a huge part of the reason things are still on course.
As a Canadian in a low COL area working somewhere with almost absolute job security, a pension plan and plenty of opportunities for learning (I have a few 3 hours sessions on quantum computer starting next week :D ) I don't care much for the SV startup ...
I am here for the selection of interesting articles and the high quality
comments when it's not a political thread (those threads have less rational lower quality comments and I am also guilty of producing some os them, I apologize dang).
If I were to make an off topic comment and by no means I am picking on you personally, however as another Canadian, I find this general attitude of Canadians towards innovation unsettling and dare I say it's the reason why we are always playing catch up with US. It's also the number one reason why we are bleeding top talent to Americans which results our nation great economy loss.
I suppose you can argue that we have more of a "European" attitude, to which I would respond that while we pay high taxes like Europe, we hardly get any of the social security benefits that they enjoy, so in short we end up with worst of both worlds: high taxes, low salaries and limited benefits.
You can't expect a nation to develop the next FANG when people's idea of business is purchasing a home in the "suburbs" of Toronto and renting out its basement.
> You can't expect a nation to develop the next FANG when people's idea of business is purchasing a home in the "suburbs" of Toronto and renting out its basement.
Serious question: do you think having the next FANG is desirable? Many people would say that those companies (Netflix are kind of the exception) are too big, too powerful, stifling competition and innovation, and even deserve to be broken up.
Lots of folks would create their own business, but it takes a special person to dream of world domination and want their company to be a global multi-industry behemoth. As a fun example, contrast successful restaurants in France vs in US. In France, very few restauranteurs branch out with other locations or start their own chain, it's considered a sort of selling out/diluting of quality. That's how you have decades old highly profitable and loved restaurants that are just there and work well. In the US you have to make it big, expand, increase sales, add locations, make it a chain, etc.
As another Canadian (who is living in the US and working in tech), this is just naive on so many levels.
Firstly, unicorn valuations does not necessarily mean innovation. There is nothing innovative about the Salesforces and Zendesks of the world, they're great market fits in a very profitable corporate world.
Secondly, the whole world is playing catchup to US which it comes to money, not just Canada.
Lastly, the valuations & money in US are a result of an insane ethos (working hard, breaking shit), very corporate-friendly government policies, and a very capitalist society.
Canada isn't perfect, our housing is way too expensive and we'll always play second fiddle to USD. But Canadian society is miles better than anything you'll see in US, and for that I'm forever grateful. Giving up that peace and security is just not worth it for any amount of money.
Good point. I started looking at HN a few years ago, and though I knew it was run by YC it didn’t even occur to me that it at one point was startup-oriented
>be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups.
For me what hn use to be an interaction between art and tech in the theme of hackers & painters. Tech along is not so interesting IMHO unless it's in the context of art and/or humanity.
Maciej wrote "Dabblers and Blowhards" in 2005 (that was an eyeopening date to go check). Hackers and Painters was always for the fresh and easily impressionable to feel a sense of specialness.
I'm vibing that the original sin of HN is the shame in being a midwit. Maciej comes off as being an incurious blowhard too..
(Consider that the word "painter" itself has complementary high/low meanings)
Currently I'm low-key mulling about the possibly not-even-wrong idea that in some cultures, there simply isn't a clear distinction between high and low art.
1)YC and HN won't attract a lot of people from such cultures, at least not the ones they hope to get (the supposedly curious AND effective folks)
2) eternal September is inevitable, especially for folks who have Alan Kay in their pantheon of heroes
Separately, California seems like it could very well host a ommerist culture in a century. See the Oscars, very much a blowhard affair though you could almost call it "communal" (blowhards celebrating shitting in public?) -- Hollywood still has to go through the prepubescent phase of totally embracing their inner and utter philistine. (Compare Kaurismaki, maybe he got a bit enlightened by eastern filmmakers?)
Upvotes and downvotes are about art vs humanity.. ("painting with #s"[0])
see below
[0] an inane activity which has often been unduly embraced/denounced
>In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York accepted four early designs of paint by number by Max Klein for its Department of Architecture and Design, donated by Jacquelyn Schiffman.
Everyone is so negative, cynical, and bitter on HN now, it's really sad to me. I went through YC in 2012 and I feel like the community here is unrecognizable, the quality of discourse is so low it feels hard to participate.
The promise of technology was different. The stories of engineers at FB making millions in options were still fresh in people's minds. The untapped potential of mobile and SAAS and a dozen other things.
Tech lost its glitter. It is now just another arm of rentier capitalism, not too dissimilar from banks and finance.
> Everyone is so negative, cynical, and bitter on HN now
Our profession got hollowed out over the years. Of course the vibes at the bar next to the plant will be down.
> it's really sad to me
There's a thing I've seen on HN a few times over the years, where people expect HN to be like a secret oasis of fun away from the realities of the professional pursuits that brought us together in the first place. Why is that?
I can understand complaining about cynicism, but it's dishonest to pretend it's not coming from a real place. All the complaints people are voicing elsewhere in this thread are true:
- it's true that you will get jack squat if you're employee #4 or later (and in the process you'll work more hours with less job security than at a FAANG)
- it's true that the startup scene has delivered basically nothing of real value to the economy in the last fifteen years: it has all been regulatory arbitrage, intrusive ad-tech, financial engineering, and, of course, shitcoins
- it's true that the people at the top turned out to be amoral psychopaths who practically tripped over themselves to kiss the ring when authoritarianism arrived and their talk about improving the world was hot air
If you're going to complain about the cynicism, you should at least respond to the above instead of pretending it's just grumps wanting to ruin everyone's fun.
Thank you for collecting these here--it's been very heartening for me to see that I'm not the only one around here that sees these kinds of things and finds it difficult to maintain a positive outlook. I appreciate that there are still folks on HN willing to point out stuff like this.
"Jack squat" is still in the millions of dollars for holders of a golden ticket, but it is fundamentally a gamble.
> it's true that the startup scene has delivered basically nothing of real value to the economy in the last fifteen years
"basically" is what Wikipedia calls a weasel word. If you're determined to look at the world through a particular lense, by discarding any points to the contrary, you're basically right. That's not the same as actually being right, but it comes down to attitude and world view. If you believe the world is shit, you can find countless examples of it being shit. Because sometimes it is. If you want to have hope and believe in better, you can find those examples too. Because they're also there. Life isn't a math problem though, so you can't take 100 misery points and combine them with 200 hope points and end up feeling happy.
As far as the people at the "top" being amoral psychopaths. It's the amoral psychopaths who make the most noise. A humble quiet person funding soup kitchens and not talking about it isn't going to ping on anybody's radar. Yeah the psychopaths exist, but so do the helpers.
no one wants to believe they're the grump ruining everyone's fun, but would you take all that emotional effort to go challenge the grumps, who are just going to argue, aren't going to appreciate anything you do, and are just a bunch of cynical unhappy assholes, or would you just go find a different digital lawn? (which may just be one thread over, having fun with the idea of an electrostatic wall)
> "Jack squat" is still in the millions of dollars for holders of a golden ticket, but it is fundamentally a gamble.
I was interviewing with a bunch of mid-stage (series A/B) startups for senior/staff roles. Without exception, every single one offered me so little equity that the only way they'd EQUAL big tech pay was if they hit a slam dunk and became multibillion dollar monsters.
> no one wants to believe they're the grump ruining everyone's fun, but would you take all that emotional effort to go challenge the grumps, who are just going to argue, aren't going to appreciate anything you do, and are just a bunch of cynical unhappy assholes, or would you just go find a different digital lawn?
The situation above was without factoring in dilution and across a few different sub industries. I think it's pretty reasonable to make fun of founders for this.
I'll just point out that you're presenting your view of the world and beliefs as if it were based on objective fact. The things you've listed here are all narratives pushed by the media, so I would be understanding that you and many others would feel because of this that they are indeed objective truths, but they are in actuality far from that. Even if these stories are made up of objective facts, they ignore many others which contradict them. For example, I also consider myself grounded in reality and I can think of ways in which these things you've listed as "true" could turn out to be far more complicated.
I like this comic / poem, which I feel captures the essence of what I'm trying to get across here:
Try as I might to live simply, my life tends towards complexity.
My ordered thoughts veer off track, once they turn inward I can't turn back.
The path forward twists and tangles, I lose myself at every angle.
The clear vision I hold inside me, fractures into something far more exciting.
I'm not cynical, but my relationship with technology has surely become adversarial.
I still remember the days when self-driving cars seemed just around the corner and inevitable. When Google was organizing the world's information and ethically pure. When I trusted software to do the right thing.
But nowadays... Good luck finding any trustworthy megacorp. We've commoditized trust for profits (e.g. from Couchsurfing to AirBnB) and the result is that people became less trusting.
> I still remember the days when self-driving cars seemed just around the corner and inevitable.
Inevitable or not.. I did not consider the other things this would enable. like mass surveillance! I thought it was going to be a relationship between me and my car. I did not realize the relationship was actually me, my car, and the company tracking my every move.
That is how my relationship with tech became adversarial.
the only thing that I've seen growing that I hope is pushed back is the growing number of jokers. I see people posting here like it's reddit or slashdot. it's not, and that's part of what makes it valuable. every joke comment is a loss of signal in the forum.
jokes are great, but unless it's a joke that has some truth squirreled away in it that's worth knowing and well transmitted by the joke, it shouldn't be here. especially on its own. little joke at the end of a long relevant anecdote? great. just replying because you had a moment of wit you'd like to share? think twice and don't, please.
there are plenty of places to be a comedian. I enjoy it myself on more than a few. but I would prefer it not be here.
Yeah I'm here because reddit's programming community became unusable in the late 2010s but especially over the last few years. For example, I'd see a post about CockroachDB and every single reddit comment would be some low effort joke making fun of the name. Meanwhile I'd come here and the creator would be in the comments answering questions. When reddit changed their default sort away from upvotes and towards engagement metrics in 2021, most of the useful places there sort of withered away.
I guess it's mostly the same people on HN as those 12 years ago. Apparently I'd created my account in 2012 and at that point I'd been lurking for some time.
Well I'm still here but I've gotten a lot older. And you have, too!
I stopped reading hn regularly a couple years ago just because the top-voted comments were so reliably negative cynical takes. And not just for articles related to startups.
This is definitely true. I'm working on a project to recap 2024 HN.
Two things that immediately jumped out at me:
1. 40% of the posts/comments in all of 2024 came from accounts created IN 2024. There are a LOT of new people on HN.
2. The most commented post of the year was a news article about Donald Trump's election victory, so TV news-esque content is definitely getting more traction than expected.
I'm a startup founder doing startup right now. I'm experiencing burnout, by which I mean, after half a year of working 6-7 days a week 10-16 hours a day I really needed an 8 hour workday to get my focus back. Specially after working non stop for two weeks for a demo for McDonald's with only 6hrs sleep per night and then two devices fried because of a messed up 5v connection so we missed the demo. Went to bed at 20:30 today because the startup hustle is real. No rest for the .. startup founders.
Want to have one day of 8hrs of work only so I'm fresh tomorrow to visit a car factory and to write two papers in the weekend.
I just started a relationship though, you do get used to the sensation of falling down a cliff trying to build a plane as you fall while eating glass and barely being able to walk out of exhaustion because it needs to be ready tomorrow so you're the only office on a Sunday night at 3am with the lights still burning while knowing that if you cannot borrow money within 4 days you cannot pay rent.
It's an acquired taste :)
I agree that SaaS is a dead end. I had a talk with two of our investors this week who run a SaaS company trying to convince me to stop hardware and go 100% to SaaS because it's such a great business model. But for that I think you're too late. The only new SaaS I consistently see people trying out are AI SaaS.
Because of that I'm doing SaaS with AI but combined with physical devices. I do think manufacturing is going to grow in the US and Europe, simply because factories need (way way) fewer people. Regardless of tariffs, protectionism, etc., the playing field has changed. Labor cost has become a tiny fraction of manufacturing cost. Offshoring makes no real sense anymore.
Therefore I make real physical AI, cameras and robots, to help people, well people and bigger people like McDonald's and car factories, build ultra-low-labor factories. That's what's going on in the US and in Europe right now, not SaaS. But the principle is the same: Startups just move to where the money / growth is.
All of the arguments presented in this were equally true in 2013 as they are in 2025 and there are many more dimensions than you are taking into consideration. For instance, the demographics of HN users could have changed, or the economic climate is cyclically more defensive and 'risk off', which is well known. I suspect this is more related to economic cycles than a cultural paradigm shift and would suggest the author to think more deeply than forming vague generalizations around some HN comments of anonymous users.
In 2013, the Ponzi scheme of VC investing still existed. The VCs could pawn off their money losing companies to the public market, sell their equity fast and watch the stock either quickly decline or stay flat.
Pretend all you want but interest rates make a ton of difference.
If you can make a safe, compounded, perhaps leveraged 5% from treasuries the financial bar that a successful startup has to pass is so much higher
Interest rates are like a dial which turns economic activity up and down.
I’ve always understood that in theory but it’s the first time I’ve actually lived through it and it’s wild.
A few years of higher rates and half of the tech industry and the people who buy tech seems to be on hold.
It makes me realise how vacuous the last decade was and how a lot of our jobs and businesses existed because of dirt cheap money. I’m glad I saved some money rather than thinking it was going to last forever!
If you were older, you would still consider current rates low and recent past an obscurity that couldn't last long. I can say that definitely about Europe, ie here in Switzerland interest rates used to be around 7% for quite some time and economy was doing fine, then it dropped to negative and afterwards people complained when they rose to 1-2%. 0.4% now, not complaining.
If you're that old, you probably already have a house when it was much cheaper relative to income levels. Now, a tiny shift in interests rates affects not only the general economy, but people paying back mortgages which can take a significant chunk out of your income.
Yep. When we bought our first house (mid-1990s), interest rates were over 7%.
The future is hard to know, but demographic changes are going to move a lot of money out of the stock market (because retiring boomers and soon gen-xers will want safer investments). At the same time, labor will itself become more valuable, because the same forces are going to tighten the labor market. To me that is suggestive of an environment where the rewards of startups vs. engineering jobs are weaker.
To really drive the nail in... consider what advances have been made in software over the past 30 years. In software specifically, NOT software enabled by faster hardware.
What can we do now in software which would not have been possible in 1995, even if we were to somehow make our hardware today usable by programmers then?
I realize that you are asking a rhetorical question, as the answer is supposed to be a bit obvious and maybe even mind-blowing... but I actually struggle to come up with really good examples. Most of what I come up with are places where math struggled to keep up, notably in cryptography and consensus (and thereby, quite powerfully, in the intersection of these we have cryptocurrencies). Oh, here's one great such example: compression algorithms!!
However, the vast majority of the crazy things I feel like I'm able to do in software today aren't really because the software is--or even the protocols are--better, but that I'm capable of executing so many instructions in so little time on such vast quantities of stored data while communicating massive results over large distances reliably using computers that are so cheap and so small that virtually everyone in every financial class is surrounded by them.
Hell: even with large language models and the recent birth of working/useful AI, we are right on track for the timeline for progress along the road towards the singularity laid out in the late 1990s by Ray Kurtzweil, who was merely looking at computation per dollar, working off of the expectation that if the hardware can do it the software will figure it out. I could go back in time with the code for a modern LLM and I'd still have to wait for 2020 to deploy it.
When you consider that the dot com era had mortgage rates similar to or maybe even higher than now, and same with federal rates, I tend to think there's a combo of recent startups having poor/LCD ideas w/ recency effect leading to overvaluing current rates against potential growth.
Absolutely, and in practice it's not a well analyzed spreadsheet problem with a smooth transition. The change in interest rates moved necessary payoffs from the "later" bucket to the "soon" bucket.
A whole segment of product stories only worked when investors wanted to believe in them so that they could park their money there. With everything oversubscribed, products would get investment as long as success wasn't provably impossible - so CEOs and PMs optimized for inscrutability and constant pivots. More thoughts here:
Scenario 1: an ambitious guy in his early twenties fails and writes anonymously about how it feels to see your company collapse and your investors shun you. He felt alone and ashamed and he had to pick himself up.
Scenario 2: a guy who already made millions in tech and who is a venture capitalist on the side coyly brags about his business failures.
> 4. The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.
I disagree: In my feeling truly innovative opportunities are still rather easy to find.
I feel what rather changed is that with VC becoming big and mainstream, investors have become more risk-averse in investing into innovative ideas (that they don't really understand). Perhaps also society has become more conservative, so selling a really innovative product to a customer has become harder.
> Perhaps also society has become more conservative, so selling a really innovative product to a customer has become harder.
Customers are more locked into existing products. Network effects, switching costs, familiarity and branding, staff training (for businesses) and learning something new....
I'd claim that also before the customers were locked into existing product. What is different is that in former days they were much more willing to get away from this lock-in.
The reason for this that I consider to be the most plausible one is that society has become more conservative (i.e. less willing to change things or try out new things).
Lock is has been a problem for a long time, but I think the lock in is stronger. You have dependencies between multiple systems, dependencies between systems, data that is no longer stored locally on machines you control, etc.
Strongly agree here that there is platform lock-in; all the large platforms are playing subtle games to make it harder to explore new services outside them.
To some people this might look like consumers are more conservative, but really it's just hidden dark patterns keeping them in the big platforms.
I really wish the US government was more pro-business competition; they're merely pro-business in terms of ensuring existing winners continue to win. Across the pond, the EU seems to get this with measures like GDPR which make it actually easier to port between platforms.
> Strongly agree here that there is platform lock-in; all the large platforms are playing subtle games to make it harder to explore new services outside them.
> To some people this might look like consumers are more conservative, but really it's just hidden dark patterns keeping them in the big platforms.
I personally observe that people have quite different "sensitivities" to this phenomenon. It might be true that such people exist, but at least in my "echo chamber" it's rather exactly the other way: the more dark pattern such people observe, and the more they feel "jailed" by these large platforms, the more they are willing to leave the platform - just out of spite. Thus, at least many people of my "echo chamber" show exactly the opposite behaviour from what you claim and the platforms intend.
Thus, I believe the conservatism is a different phenomenon: people become less willing to try out new things because they observed far too often that a new interesting service turned more and more into a dark jail over the years.
> > In my feeling truly innovative opportunities are still rather easy to find.
> Such as? Can you name a few?
Naming them would need long explanations (and a lot of my thoughts are still in an early phase), but I can give you a rough sketch of one possible way how one can find them (but note that there exists an insane amount of other possible ways to find great innovative opportunities):
Simply read sophisticated scientific literature about mathematics and related areas, in particular about insanely deep results that were (possibly) honored with high awards (which gives you a strong evidence that there is indeed something deep to find in these results). Then find cool, exciting applications of these results in an area of your choice.
Why does this simple approach work? Answer: the state of the art in mathematics is in many cases simply working with science-fiction technologies from, say, 50 years in the future already today.
Honestly, this way I find raw ideas for possibly cool, exciting opportunities basically every few days.
It seems like there's an expectation of having to get investment as quickly as possible for your company in order for it be "worth doing", which feels counter-intuitive. It sucks that this is the first thought and must prevent a lot of good stuff ever getting started. At least in the UK, a 300k salary for a senior developer is not plausible for most people. But the idea of growing a something slowly, without investment and reaching that sort of income definitely seems more likely. I guess it's all different circumstances!
extrapolating from one post instead of total Series A-F raised without accounting for interest rates as well as political motivations to weaken tech seems a bit sensational imo
I think the bigger issue is that most of the financial upsides of startups were illusory
Unless you're a founder, you're unlikely to make any money, and predatory VC/backers using convertibles/senior debt to turn your equity into Zimbabwean dollars. Thats before any stats are calculated for lasting long enough to either IPO, make money or get bought out.
As someone who did successfully exit, the stories of multiple-millions being handed out turned out to be legends. Dodgy accounting & staff retention meant that actually you don't get fuckyou money.
The only realy reason to join a startup is that you either believe in the "mission" or that you believe it will bring you joy to work in that way.
> The only realy reason to join a startup is that you either believe in the "mission" or that you believe it will bring you joy to work in that way.
Or the startup was a stepping stone in your career. Big Tech wouldn't hire you, b/c you have a different background, so you work at a startup to develop experience and then switch to Big Tech.
I mean yeah kinda. But the skills for a startup map poorly to big companies.
Startup: you look at something, plan, execute, learn skills as you go. Big company: here is x, do as I say. You must use these things from these teams, don't make it yourself.
Coping with the step down in responsibility is hard. Going from owning the entire stack to not even having a real decision in planning is very hard to deal with, especially if you've done that $thing before, and have to mount effectively an election campaign to change direction.
I can see your point of view, but I gently disagree. This is based on my own experience.
Being able to see, react and change based on changing business goals was the key to my career success. Being able to talk to decision makers and get something in place to mitigate risk/take advantage is a key thing in buisness.
Going from being able to do that, to not even knowing what the business goals are, much less getting access to any kind of decision maker is a tough change. Its like having the scope of a CTO and then going to a scope of an intern. You feel infantalised.
The other bit here is that hacker news attracted a lot more engineers (vs more entrepreneurial-leaning folk) in the intervening time - and engineers never really made bank on startups. Even in successful startups the engineers are typically lower on the pay-out ranking than the less-technical founders and the VCs...
I'm not sure I agree with that - good engineers should be experts at managing risk. True risk aversion is an impediment in most fields that engineers are called to solve problems in.
That said, we're also pretty analytical, and when one could warm a seat in FAANG for ~$400k/year, even many successful startups weren't outperforming that TC.
> I think the bigger issue is that most of the financial upsides of startups were illusory
I wouldn't say I'm an old-timer by any metrics, but even back in 2012 when I first discovered and joined HN, I remember it was pretty clear in the community (and people I spoke to around me) you shouldn't go to work at a startup if you were looking for "a lot + safe" money.
Sure, you could belong to the 0.001% and work on the next Dropbox, but most likely you would end up not, so don't start at a startup to chase riches, as there are better venues for that. Do work at a startup if the environment/mission/team feels right to you, but with no expectations of a big payday-exit.
That's assuming "Winning" means "More money", but that's not everyone's goal in life. There is plenty of space for smaller companies that earn enough profits to let every employee live a good life, without chasing unicorns.
Correct, but if you're interested in that, you start a regular small business, and you take a loan from a bank for seed capital. Venture Capital will give you much more more money and ask less questions precisely because they expect you to go for world domination - and they expect corresponding returns.
You don't reach for VC if you just want a lifestyle business, much like you don't reach for mafia money just to pay down your mortgage earlier. You have to know who you're getting in bed with, and what their expectations are.
I think a lot of people get annoyed (probably including myself) because the term sort of implies that there's great work-life balance which definitely isn't the case with a lot of small businesses.
Actually, what I was referring to is just called "company" or "business", or at least used to be called that.
I understood "lifestyle business" to be a company that tries to be adoptable to the lifestyle of the founder/owner, but maybe I understood it wrong or it changed.
Fact check: almost totally correct, most founded in 2009 except Airbnb which was 2007. Interesting. Seems like 2009 was a good year for startups; I guess building at the market bottom is a good way to ride the market up.
Why the after 2008 foundatuon criteria. Someone who joined FB in 2010 could have got rich right? Same with Google, Amazon, most other unicorns that established before 2008.
Oh, it's somewhat arbitrary, but Facebook was founded in 2004 and by 2010 no longer counts to me as a "startup". I suppose 2010 is still pre-IPO (2012) and therefore has a chance for advantageous stock grants.
(Not lost in all this: over the years the tax treatment of option grants has changed! It used to be a hugely advantageous way of giving employees something of value, and that's been eroded a lot.)
Get rich in the sense of "decent salary, and HODL the company stock", sure. Get rich in the sense of riding that startup VC wave, no.
Amazon had north of 100,000 employees by the time I joined in 2012. The "plucky startup" days were long gone, even if they did still tell the fable of the door desks at every orientation class
If you look at the companies that went public from 2018-2021 (boom/tail end of the latest "bubble"), you should assume that all of those generated somewhere in the range of 25-500+ non-founders who cleared $1m+ worth of stock pre-tax (a small-mid cap SaaS will be on the lower end, Uber/AirBnB will be at the higher end).
It's harder to know from acquisitions, but I'd guess that most of those with sale prices >$1b generated ~10-250 non-founders with $1m+ share packages. I think that the Qualtrics founders said that they minted 250 millionaires from their initial sale to SAP.
The thing that puzzles me is the early "only eating Ramen and pulling all nighters" startup founder story. I suppose nobody believes this anymore, fortunately.
I mean... we all agree, it would seem, this is not the path to getting rich for most people. And it's unhealthy and stressful, so it's also not the best way to work.
So it has to come down to "the mission". You must be doing something so amazing, so innovative, a boon to mankind, that all else is secondary and you're willing to endure financial risk and a stressful job, right. Right?
But no. Most startups' products are unremarkable or banal -- with some honorable exceptions -- and mankind doesn't really care either way.
It is hard to build a successful business out of even a most mundane ideas. That alone can be a great accomplishment that many people strive for. Also to be able to set and execute initiatives is also a great motivation. Seeing the fruits of your labor can be very rewarding.
Or you think you’re special. You know it’s risky and many people fail, but you’ve got the right idea, intelligence, work ethic, etc. It might even be true sometimes. I’m sure success isn’t randomly distributed. The trouble is figuring out if you really do have it or if it’s self delusion.
I'm not saying it's completely random. It's very likely a combination of skill [1] and luck, with luck being the bigger factor. So even if you're "special", you're unlikely to make it.
[1] And possibly contacts, or safety net, or wealthy family and/or friends.
I think there are special circumstances where success, while far from assured, is a lot more likely than usual. Apple and Google probably had decent odds. (Where “decent” here means something like 10%.) But they’re really rare, and honestly and correctly evaluating whether you have an opportunity like that is really hard. I think that’s why a lot of people do startups, anyway.
I saw the same posts you did, but how many people actually listened? How many, instead, came back later asking how to salvage a situation that didn't match the dream?
There are always cooler heads raising alarms on these booms. What turns them into bubbles is the inflection point where there are more people coming for the dream than for the thing that motivates people who understand the risks and know the statistics.
I seem to remember 2015 or near it as that inflection point. Tech media went from worrying about the steady march of unicorns to not talking much about valuations.
This looks exactly like the story that convinced me I would never accept a loan with the preferred stock bullshit. Except the year 2021 is much later than when I decided that.
> If you join early, got plenty of stock options and the startup turns into a unicorn, those millions are totally possible.
GP comment argues correctly that there's no guarantee that employee stock options will return a profit even in the case of successful exits. Valuation multiples, senior debt, clawback options (see Skype exit [0]), fractional stocks being rounded down to zero after stock splits have all been implemented successfully by startups and VCs. I wouldn't invest my time, which is very precious compared to my capital, into any company that is managed by someone I don't know personally. I would rather earn surplus money to invest into high risk high return options. Treat startup equity as a lottery ticket and don't pay too much for one.
This is why I joined AWS 9 years ago, and left the startup world. I own (still?) 15% of a company as a founding engineer (with no voting rights). As part of a raise, the company sold its IP to another company for a 0.5% stake in that company. So now I own 15% of 0.5%....... I just didn't understand the business side of all this at the start. As I understand it, the raise wouldn't have happened and the original company would have folded if the deal wasn't done, so you can't really argue fraud.
Since then, I have seen similar things happen more than once to other friends. I can only imagine that as the number get larger, the problems become more complex.
My other option was AWS though. That $700k is like 4 years of effort, and I get vacations. Actually realizing a sale on a billion dollar company after 4 years is just incomprehensibly low. TBH Amazon is also less work than running a startup. If you think AWS oncall is bad, think about having even less people on your team to handle the load, or to build the product durably in the first place :)
Also, I have no way of knowing if the same ownership thing is going to happen again. Giving me another 0.5% of the above calculation. Sure, lots of people make millions in a startup. Way more people make millions, although over a longer time span, in tech companies and index funds.
> If you join early, got plenty of stock options and the startup turns into a unicorn, those millions are totally possible
That's the thing: there's literally no business idea in most startups beyond "sell to the highest bidder at 1B+ valuation". And the rest are hoping to coast on unlimited investor money.
That's it.
There are no business plans of, you know, building a sustainably profitable company.
For me the better question is: Why is anyone with enough money to invest in startups not just investing that money in a safe index fund or real estate instead?
> If you join early, got plenty of stock options and the startup turns into a unicorn, those millions are totally possible.
lets take this bit by bit.
First, you need to have a decent % of the company. At each raise your share of the company will dilute. So you might have 1% at join, but by series d its been diluted in % as well as seniority.
You reach unicorn status,but the company isn't making money. So it might take on debt.
Eventually you then IPO. You either have your options converted to real stock (for a fee) and a covenant saying that if you leave before x, you'll have to hand back those shares. or if you are lucky you might be able to sell after say 6 months (super rare)
so after n years, you are able to sell your 10k in ordinary shares.
But in 2024 there were 21 IPOs. The chances of IPO are vanishingly small.
I was the second engineer (series A) at a company that IPO’d at a unicorn valuation. By all rights that’s a great outcome. I made about as much in that exit as I would have if I were just at a FAANG instead
Yeah, this is often overlooked in all the talk of $300k FAANG salaries.
Few people get those senior salaries, and those who do get it because of their unusual skills and experiences.
A stint at a startup is still a pretty good way to get those skills and experiences, compared to spending the same amount of time as a junior developer somewhere else. If you can make capital gains equivalent to FAANG senior salaries while doing so, even better! But if not, at least you'll have come out with a more interesting resume.
levels.fyi will give you some confidence in the wage.
Google, Meta, Amazon & microsoft all do banding, so the base wages is mostly public (hence why its all bollocks about wage negotiation, there isn't any.) The first level of senior for most of these orgs will tip the scales at around $300k
Having worked at both startup and FAANG, I don;t think startups actually give you the skills to flourish here in corp land. Sure, you might be a good coder, but most of the time its navigating politics that actually gets you promotion (that or good luck with a successful project)
You really don't need to be a good coder to be at a FAANG. Sure there are specialisms as you point out. but most of the time its just entry level CRUD, followed by manic debugging with shitty non-documented tools.
Wage negotiation means getting to the top of the band sooner. Other people might have to perform well at the level to get to the band, but a wage negotiator might just get there on their first day.
Most of the time the wage is not up for negotiation. Forget about it, you can't change it. HR and your future boss are tied up with company policy which says you start at X and you can't change that.
Spend your time instead on getting more vacation from the start. If instead you ask for 25 days of vacation per year instead of the default 10 you have a deal (or maybe they bring you down to 20 days). You can't get 50 days of vacation (there is a company max they can't go beyond), but you can get a lot more time.
I haven’t experienced what you claim. I’ve succeeded to the 99th percentile with wage negotiation the last 2 times I job hopped (both FAANG). The trick is you really do need to do the work to collect a poker-hand of competing offers with which to have leverage. You can then say “I won’t take your offer unless you make it (top of band, L+1, remote)” etc.
This has not backfired on me. It just takes 8 times more effort than getting hired at one place. I figured the benefit would compound.
Every company is different. Congratulations for pulling that off. It won't work everywhere though. The real trick is figuring out where they can negotiate - there is always something.
I know multiple successful wage negotiators at FAANG. Before their promotion their annual salary increase is on the order of hundreds to low thousands because they are already at the top salary for their level.
negotiation is very much a thing even at FAANG. If anything, it can help you being at the top of your assigned band. Other things can be negotiated.
Source: I am no great negotiator, but I've always negotiated my salary and got 10-15 % more than what I would have had w/o asking anything. This compounds after a few stints. And I've been a manager in startup/mid size/big tech: always negotiate.
There is also the signing bonus, which is usually available for a recruiter to sweeten things if the first offer is marginal. Google-recruiters for years claimed it was non-negotiable, all the while negotiating it for people who were willing to play the game.
Funny, my experience is engineers (at ICT level) at big companies are also really bad at politics - all they do in public setting is ask for more perks and benefits.
I see this too. An incredible amount of griping about the Wednesday cookies. Not much about how the shop across the street is giving an extra $100,000 for the same work profile.
Being successful at a startup isn't about being a good coder, either.
Especially if you're a founding member or an early hire, it often has much more to do with having good insights about where technology meets business, knowing how to tackle difficult problems using limited resources (IRL, not just in a computer), and even a sprinkle of politics if your startup happens to "disrupt" the wrong kind of industry.
If your startup has a management team that can abstract away all of that stuff so that you can just code in peace, I agree that your tenure there will probably not be worth the hassle in a resume.
That doesn't really address that the burnout/startup/hustle culture is part of the risk/reward valuation employees make to work at a startup.
If I can get the same compensation working at a FAANG with less stress, better hours and more balance/control over my life, and the resume entry may be 'more interesting' in some ways, but its hard to argue with FAANG on a resume either why wouldn't I? the choice to risk all of that for only a chance at reaching that compensation is a hard sell.
The possibility of pouring your hard work into a company from the start/early on with others equally dedicated, and if it blows up you all blow up is the selling factor.
On top of that, how many startups came from employees of previous successes that turned that wealth into more innovation? Restricting that path to wealth for many and concentrating the profits to a smaller and smaller group doesn't seem to me the best economic bet to make long-term.
Some people just like the hustle culture. They can't seem to stand the boredom of a sustainable company with years of runway. So it obviously depends on your personality. For some, the thrill is worth the risk. For others, it's a huge bag of nope. I for one am clearly moving toward the latter group as I get older.
>I for one am clearly moving toward the latter group as I get older.
For me, I'm strongly moving towards the mentality that a startup I care about would at least give me outcomes I care about and an environment I can enjoy without the BS of big tech corporate and the need to prioritize stability, but its largely because I can increasingly afford to consider risks and lower income positions because my current job and income that isn't a startup.
The time/stress trade offs at big tech are increasingly diminishing vs startups (hussle culture taking over there now too), so if I'm going to have to deal with it it might as well have the least amount of BS possible... Its interesting how I prioritized stability early on in my career, and now consider less stable/risky roles that are more interesting or exciting, while you seem to be going the other direction. There are certainly a lot of different journeys through life.
This is the opposite of my experience. Big tech is far more hours and stress. And the work is much narrower and boring. The system is designed to make people into commodities and make you do work in the way that most benefits managers senior to yourself. Solve this narrow piece of a problem using this specific method alongside 5 other people doing other narrow pieces, versus a startup where you can just own the whole thing and iterate it faster.
Startups pay less and have to take what the can get. This probably causes a vicious cycle that makes the pay gap worse and worse.
IMO the stress is different. In startups you own things a lot more personally, and depending on how you handle stress that can be more challenging than the stress at big tech.
Hours can very much depend on the big tech and startup individually, but big tech is certainly moving in the wrong direction here, and in the typically big corporation/enterprisey worst way possible (increased employee monitoring, shallow and manipulable KPI's that act more as perverse incentives than actually improve anything and that increasingly show the disconnect between upper management and engineers)
> And the work is much narrower and boring. The system is designed to make people into commodities and make you do work in the way that most benefits managers senior to yourself. Solve this narrow piece of a problem using this specific method alongside 5 other people doing other narrow pieces, versus a startup where you can just own the whole thing and iterate it faster.
I agree and its my primary complaint/dislike for my job. I would love to, and probably will change to a startup or other job with a company I actually care about and a role I find valuable, but I expect the pay to be a significant drop when I do. Until then I'm leaning on the salary to reduce the amount of time I need to work overall significantly and putting in my time so to speak.
For now big tech is winning, but if startups and employee equity start having the potential payoffs they used to then it changes the balance of the above equation by quite a bit.
You'll find that outside the startup, the director/vp/cto title doesn't translate. Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position". Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.
The corporate world is simply a different environment with a different set of rules and a different set of engagements and thus requiring a different set of skills. A director or VP at a startup and a director or VP at a Fortune 500 company are two totally different things.
A CTO of a startup might be coding day to day, making technology decisions, and have a team or two underneath them. In F500 or Corpro world, this is more like a engineering manager or tech lead. In most big companies a manager does zero coding and rarely makes a tech decision, you go up to a director level, they might have 100-200 people under them, direct reports are almost all managers, and they never touch tech. Go higher up to VP or CTO levels and they are just so divorced from code that it doesn't make sense why a CTO in a startup would translate.
> Larger companies will often write you off as being "not experienced" enough which is often code for "you don't look old enough for this position".
It's not about age, it's about what you actually had to do. Company size, company age and political complexity are strongly correlated.
A successful large company engineering director spends their day mostly doing politics across the org, while a successful small company engineering director spends a lot of their day writing code, being an architect, filling in for product management.
> Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.
Big companies want you to know how to play the long game.
That latter person sounds like a normal L6 at FAANG. Director is 8. They truly haven’t had the exposure to build the required skills for that lateral transfer.
Agree. Just an inflammatory observation that we are prone to both villainize and glorify the institutions that be without much cognitive dissonance. :)
On second thought, "irrationally preferred during hiring" gets at that idea better.
I've always found it amusing that FAANG pedigree is considered a plus for startup founders when the skill set is not only different but sometimes detrimental.
No, the VCs tell the founder/CEO to hire people who've done it before to help pay down the risks of unknown unknowns (which are real – this advice is overly simplistic but isn't conceptually wrong). This translates into them hiring from FAANGs if they take the advice semi-literally.
>> I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career.
Startups hire those people when they are risky and the future is unclear. Once there is traction, the VCs and insiders bring in friends for cush Director/VC posts. Quite often the people who took the real risks get left out.
And that seems like safe capital preserving thing to do. A director role isn’t a prize for loyalty, it’s a job with a skill set. Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where
Sorta. A very common pattern is for startups to make abysmal hires for these "executive" roles, because the people in those roles in big tech bring loads of politics and a very narrow type of experience. They bring in their friends, and it isn't terribly long before the people who got the company to the place of initial success are gone. I've seen this play out many times.
Not to say that the early employee is necessarily guaranteed to be better, but at least they're a known quantity, have demonstrated loyalty, and have loads of business context that the shiny exec hire won't have.
Good points about roles not being prizes (unless that was the deal, which it sometimes is), but I'll devil's advocate this anyway.
> Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where
If you hire smart people who learn, and who believe in the mission and team... that programmer might well be in the running to lead engineering.
Knowing tech industry a bit, I'd be at least as skeptical of directors from outside. Of course I'd have to consider them, at times. But I expect at least half of the outside candidates for leadership roles will be disingenuous halfwits.
Meanwhile, if you've got people who had the grit to help get you to that point, and demonstrated alignment and loyalty when it mattered, and who foster that trust in your company culture, then you'd be an idiot not to try to find a way to get rare goodness like that in your leadership.
It depends on the investors. Sometimes they will insist on bringing in their own people who will skip ahead. This can happen if bigger investors are brought on late or if the business is not developing according to plan and equity has to be sold.
Not everyone is in a position to work for a FAANG - they don't support working in all areas in all countries, often have formal education requirements and generally will be less flexible hours-wise than working for yourself.
If you don't want to leave where you are, a full time or side-project web startup can be started and bootstrapped with barely any prior requirements that you can't teach yourself and could be a good option.
I've learned not to expect anything from being an early employee. It's right in the name, you're an employee. Expecting some sort of consideration for being early is naive. Every time you receive a paycheck you and your employer are even and you shouldn't expect anything more.
This is true, except in the usual case where early employees are made offers that include some presumption of partial ownership of the company through stock grants or options, often with a corresponding decrease in salary that scales inversely with the strength of the founder's reality distortion field.
There's no such thing as presumptive partial ownership. Lando had a presumptive partial ownership and if you do you should expect the Vader treatment, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further".
Sorry, I do love Zim really. I was looking for a metaphor that non-history nerds wouldnt confuse. Papiermark would have been better, but needed explaining.
Germany’s worthless currency got overshadowed by subsequent events, so I suppose there’s something to be said for Zimbabwe still being notorious for this.
I've had one successful exit as an engineer. Made enough for a (very) fancy dinner for two, or a short city break. Just a fun bit of pocket money, essentially.
Founders made more than I'll probably earn in a lifetime.
Yes, that's probably true. Investors, or people who take a risk, get the payoff from the risk. If you join as a salaried person, you're taking zero risk (other than that you might need to get another job if the place folds, but then all the money's gone anyway), as you're just getting paid a salary each month regardless of how the company's doing, so you don't get an outsized reward.
We're not talking about that kind of risk. It's just a synonym for the amount somebody is going to lose if the company fails, regardless of what the amount means to them personally.
VC invests $1M in a startup, they are risking $1M. You just work at a company, get paid every month, and don't buy any stock, you are risking $0. That's all.
If the company does well and the VC makes $5M back, it probably won't mean much to them, either. But that's how the contract was written, because the company needed that $1M.
Yes I understand this. My point is, what “risk” are the investor class actually taking? Not much, because they have enough to hedge their bets many times over, while a salaried employee can’t even be in the game. They simply can’t afford one measly chip.
The risk of investing time in a startup is in the lost opportunities (ie. opportunity cost). It can be dollarized with discounted cash flow as an approximation. Could you earn more at a large company than at a startup? What are your options? Do you even have better options? How high and how likely must the "lottery ticket payout" be to break even? And don't forget the time value of money: How much could you gain by investing the excess money during those years?
Time is the most precious resource we have. It's per-se underrated whenever it's dollarized. Unfortunately, most don't have a choice than to sell their time for money. Thus, it's even more important to spend time wisely.
Thinking, you don't risk anything because you don't spend money on a startup is wishful thinking. Or more likely: It's just a good story VCs and founders like to tell, because it's in their interest.
There are opportunity costs no matter which job you take, from startup to FAANG. So of course this is assuming that you joined the startup after carefully considering other employment options, as you absolutely should. No disagreement there. :)
> The only realy reason to join a startup is that you either believe in the "mission" or that you believe it will bring you joy to work in that way.
If the goal is economic security (FU money) then the quickest path is to get a job at a big tech company. This requires engineering skills and also the ability to play the various corporate games (ugh).
For the rest of us there's entrepreneurship and joining startups.
Having done both for a long time, I have to agree. However, generally, there's more choice as to whose games you want to play with startups. And being a startup with limited resources means there's only so many games that can be played before the noise overwhelms the signal and the company goes under (essentially a self correcting effect).
At big companies with lots of revenue the shenanigans can become fortresses of crazy (cough Google cough) that can go on forever.
>> Dodgy accounting & staff retention meant that actually you don't get fuckyou money.
The insiders get rich via salary, bonus, benefits, and looking for their next job while they are on startup-expensed conference tours, paid forbes articles, and company-sponsored fellowships.
This reason I think more than any of the other reasons stated is the cause.
Once the financiers took control and ensured they would reap the majority of the rewards, the risk/reward ratio was no longer there for many workers who gravitated towards big-tech instead.
Now big-tech is pushing burnout culture hard, and with higher interest rates limiting capital investments from VC's I wonder if we will start to see movements of people away from big-tech to more traditional startups again in the near future?
AI startups I believe are already showing this trend away from big business (and even away from their own 'big business' towards smaller startups within AI), but that probably falls more into the group that "believe in the 'mission'" as you point out.
I've worked at a few startups now but never do it for the equity. I do take equity, but as far as I'm concerned its more a signal that I'm "invested" and have a stake in the game.
I work at startups because I prefer the type of work generally found there. I like smaller teams, I enjoy having to learn new things, and I (usually) enjoy how quickly projects and direction can change.
For anyone considering a startup I'd say to just consider equity a lottery ticket for a decent bonus. It will probably not amount to anything, and it probably won't be worth what many expect, but it can be a nice bonus if you like the job and team regardless of an exit.
I was the ~15th engineer at a YC startup that had a very big exit. Over 4 years I made less than $80k total (20k/yr) from my options while the founders made high 8 figures. Had I joined BigTech I would have made over $1 M just from stock and I would have worked less.
Back during the dot com days, everyone from the secretaries to the chefs to the founders were getting rich but nowadays YC teaches their founders to keep the money and stock options for themselves and for the investors. The only way employees make life changing money is if the company exits for over $10B.
> nowadays YC teaches their founders to keep the money and stock options for themselves and for the investors.
In founder-matching profiles, I've started saying that I wanted to spread the wealth around with early hires, more than the convention. If founders win, the early hires also win.
Lesson learned: no matter how busy a founder is, they are no less petty than anyone else, and some will make time for a call, just to see who this hippie a--h--- is. :)
Maybe, but people are generally like that. When they’re in the same situations they do the same things. I think few people are honest with themselves, or even know themselves what they would be like if situations were reversed.
I’m not sure it’s just the financing being controlled by “the VC’s”, but also definitely the entire culture.
I mean, the model for most companies - having a very heavy legal component when big money figures are being generated/spent - requires a great deal of bureaucracy which, somehow, inherently prohibits participation at an individual scale, in the massive profits.
It seems that a lot of it hinges on the nature of work for hire. If only there were systems in place that could make every human being a work for hire payment, even those performing CEO duties, then possibly the profits would be easier to spread.
I think a lot of startup problems exist in the Founder/CEO versus Founder/CTO versus Founder/CFO dynamic, which is what any company following the legislated structures must deal with.
VC’s exploit these dynamics, they can do it with money/financing, and they can do it without it, as well.
The crazy thing is, cases exist throughout history of three individuals getting together, building something great, and doing it without requiring any venture capital, generating through their own efforts, adventure capital.
We were rejected from YC because we wouldn’t dilute to 0 some of the early people at the company
They first told us we were in, but that we would need to adjust our cap table so that only 2 founders would have equity. They gave us a phone call, we pushed back, and later they sent us a rejection email
Your guess is as good as mine. My memory is a bit fuzzy about the details now, but I remember a very awkward phone call with one of the partners in which they were saying things like “the cap table is too busy” and that they only wanted founders having equity
We were willing to compromise to some degree, and the non-founders said they would give up most equity if that meant getting into YC
But after the call, we got a rejection email saying something weird like “your cap table seems to be in flux”, thus disqualifying us
> Back during the dot com days, everyone from the secretaries to the chefs to the founders were getting rich
As someone who is old enough to have been working in tech since the 1990s... not really. I mean, it happened on occasion but it wasn't actually a common occurrence even during the heyday of large dot com exits.
The idea of this was massively propped up by overhyping the vanishingly few cases in which it did happen.
I'm not at all refuting your basic point that the "we're all getting lambos" fiction got increasingly disconnected from reality over time, but it was always more apocryphal than real.
I also worked during the dotcom days and worked for a recently ipo'ed startup. Everyone made money from it, so this is from experience. One of the assistants made enough money to buy a vineyard and this was from a company that IPO'ed for less than $1 billion.
I'm a little older than probably the average HN visitor, but I bet my experience matches a lot of peoples:
Mid 90's startup: Sold company, proceeds company covered debt, basically. I learned a ton on those 2.5 years, but had to have a part time job to make ends meet (and I was not living a lavish lifestyle).
Late 90's - Mid- 00's: Partner in consultancy that made generational wealth for at least one client, worked to burnout multiple times, never able to use the consultancy to develop a product with ARR. Made good profit share and salary the years prior to dotcom bust. Company was sold for basically the debt on the line of credit.
Mid-00's - Mid twenty-teens: Joined a "startup" that was really a consultancy. Spearheaded substantial growth, Shareholders just increased the dividend amount every time company grew year over year. Unable to negotiate an equity position that aligned incentives (me giving up my life and energy to further build the business) so I left. I was forced to surrender the equity in another startup when I quit the first one. The other start up is limping along, I think losing a (manageable) amount of money annually. I never valued this equity because the shareholder group was the same as the parent company, so this one had the same issues.
So I guess in a 25 year period I had something like 2-3 exits. I worked more than full time between 1998-2015.
I'm now a firm believer in that a successful exit takes knowing the right people and getting lucky.
The math is not in favor of working at a startup, if you do it, don't do it for the money. People finally wised up to this.
Even as the founder, working at a FAANG usually works out better financially and is much less stressful. VC's do all kinds of horrible things to founders, like firing them, forcing them to sell at a price that means they get $0 (VC's get preference usually up to 2x their investment - if the sale price is lower than 2x the investment, founders and employees alike get wiped out.) People are also wising up to this.
If you're going to found a company think really hard about joining YC and/or going the VC funded route.
I think it'd be a lot more pleasant to found a company worth $10 million after 10 years, and own 100% of it, than to found a company worth $100 million after 10 years and own 10% of it.
VC is only really for when you've found real product market fit and your biggest problem every day is meeting the insane demand. Everything is just falling over and you can't scale fast enough and you're leaving piles of money on the floor because you just don't have the resources to serve those customers. Then maybe it becomes a good tradeoff.
You definitely don't have that in the beginning, and most companies never experience that.
I used to drink the koolaid, I applied to YC multiple times. I'm still trying to start stuff on the side of my day job, but I no longer apply to YC and fully intend to bootstrap a smaller but profitable software business.
To add, VC is for when you have a market that is large enough to pay off their investment with something left over. There are a lot a business opportunities out there that only can return a million per year and they won't scale. This isn't worth VC time, but if you can find one, a million - overhead is still a nice income for you the private business owner. Just remember that as a business owner you need to watch the bottom line, many small businesses go under because they don't account for all the costs of running a business (both time doing bookwork instead of what the business is about and costs of supplies)
I guess even if, and that’s a big if, a founder agrees to give an early employee Class A shares (I guess that would be the top tier, wouldn’t it?), even that could be turned into nothing, wouldn’t it? Unless you’re already rich enough to be able to legally stand up for yourself.
Even class A shares are given in the form of options? Such that even to make it yours after a certain period (usually after leaving) you actually have to “buy” it and then pay taxes on its fictitious price difference.
I have come across ESOPs just once from an American startup (but I worked in my home country) and the whole thing just shocked me. The price used to change as if someone (Board? Banks? Founders?) woke up and just threw a dart on a number chart and that became FMV of that day! Even when there’s no funding round or so!
I wonder if part of the issue isn’t the startup world but the corporate world. There’s enough capital and anti competitive practices at big tech companies that startups are fighting for scraps. I would love to see a new movement to reshape antitrust laws and improve competition.
>Dodgy accounting & staff retention meant that actually you don't get fuckyou money.
What is fuckyou money at this point? Take the Mega Millions lottery jackpot, it's default is $20 million nominal. You get cash payout instead of annuity, now it's about $10 million. Maybe you live in a state without income tax (I do), but the feds get their cut, now it's $5 millionish. You look for a nicer house (been living in an apartment)... and, since you don't want to lose it to property tax arrears all that quickly, you budget for that too for the next 20 years. How much house can you afford? Turns out, you're getting at most some upper middle class home in a second class city. Maybe with a nice car in the garage too. No live-in maids and chefs, no 40,000sqft mansions with indoor Olympic swimming pools and gold-plated toilets.
Hardly seems like fuckyou money at all. I think while we weren't looking, inflation snuck in and changed what fuckyou money actually was. You basically need to not just be a multimillionaire anymore, but a sub-billionaire.
My definition is very different. It is about my ability to have control over my life in the areas that matter most to me. I value my time and personal development above material wealth (to a point). I don't need a giant house. I don't need regular fancy vacations or to own a car. I personally have been not working and living comfortably on much much less than 5mm in a high cost of living city for over five years. I do have to make many tradeoffs but I am happier than working a soul sucking job. It's not a path for everyone.
That's a young man thing. Still trying to grow, to attract mates, etc. It switches (at least for those who develop correctly), to be able to provide for offspring and descendants material wealth is key.
>I don't need a giant house.
Perhaps, but we were talking about fuckyou money. Living in a crackerbox isn't an indication or test of fuckyou money... if Warren Buffet drives a beat up pickup truck, he's not interested in signalling fuckyou money. But he could also drive 31 different Ferraris, one for every day of the month right? My point was that fuckyou money has changed, and that by any measure even lottery jackpots aren't really fuckyou money anymore. Those are "yay, we get to send the kids to college without them being debt slaves" money. It's a strange world now days, that didn't used to be the case.
Another reason to work at a startup is if you have subpar grades and the company is willing to take on a risky hire (and pay peanuts for the risk). An alternative for those who don't have the option of working for MANGA. Speaking from personal experience :)
I've worked at startups and at a FAANG. For many years, I've told people that they should never do a startup for the $$$; their expected value is higher at a FAANG. They should do a startup only if they're interested in the technology or the people.
Or if they have everything lined up already - idea, investors, customers, staff, support network, etc.
That said, even then, within the established tech companies there is space for innovation; if you can sell your idea within the company you work for, you have a lot more chance of success, and if you fail, you still have a job at least and / or you got paid during.
I had one product that took off, made more money than at any of my previous (big-tech) jobs, and I thought the tales were true. If you work hard enough, catch a lucky wave and have the skills to ride it, you're free.
The product peaked, and then very quickly dropped to zero in about two years, while I tried everything to prevent going out of business.
Back at the bottom, a year or two of aimless wandering, I figured, well, I've seen the light, I know how this dance needs to be danced, I can dance it one more time.
I've since had half a dozen attempts not even produce a handful of accounts (or in the better cases, paid accounts), and it's simply not sustainable.
I was finally getting to a point where I felt ready to give up last year, and decided to try one last time or get back into a regular job. The problem being, "getting back" now means that I am 20 years older and more than likely _not a great fit_ for many of the roles out there.
So, for now, I am once again knuckle-deep in a new product, about to have a first customer this week (if they sign up) and some light on the horizon.
Yet, even if I manage to surpass all the possible stretch-goals on growth I have set this year, it will still pay considerably less than minimum wage, and that's if everything (and more) works out within this and the next year or so. On occasional consulting gigs I charge $$$, and I don't even dare to compare that to what these Saas/products bring in, is just ... sad. And I hear someone clacking on their keyboard already, responding...
The usual reaction to a post like mine will and used to be: well, you've got the wrong product, audience, or both. But all I want to say after doing this for 20 years now, is: that's the default. If you're not starting from a large-enough platform, your only way to success is to be literally "failing" upwards, in baby steps, turtle-speed, and that only results in success if you can somehow sustain doing that long enough.
The default is that nothing works out. People love to skip over this and always feel it doesn't apply to them and their idea. It will fail. The game is not to make a great product, the game is to figure out how to not go under while waiting for and/or constantly provoking your lucky break.
You can get lucky, and if you try long enough and often enough, you at least stand somehwat of a (very, very, very slim) chance. And, then, even if you do, all that luck is very brief and temporary and you'll be thirsty waiting for the next strike to stay above water. There is no "I made it" — there's only "I'm safe for a second, but what do I do next" in the very best of cases.
All that said, I believe it is totally worth the life experience. Life is short, it's a noteworthy thing to go through. But after a decade of failing, it'll quietly turn into a question of character, responsibility, psychological or social issues and general life-planning skills rather than a question of "do you want it hard enough to succeed".
This resonates. Trying to get back into a tech job and they all need Kubernetes experience because microservices. I've spent 10 years developing MVPs that never scaled past 100 users, let alone anywhere large enough to need K8s.
And the ones that did have a platform team, you just write code as if you are using a lambda or something anyway. Tend to your allotment of in-house yaml and off to the races! Unless you want to be on the k8s team. I wouldn't hate it personally.
Same, at this point it feels like doing your own k8s configuration is re-solving an already solved problem. Surely deploying software in a scalable fashion is a solved problem?
It's a fifty/fifty, isn't it, part of it is actually exciting. Everytime I have a foot in a "proper" company (usually for a consulting gig), I'm always excited to learn about a bunch of stuff that I never had a moment to work with (because, as you say, it's usually a waste of time when there's less than a 100k users on it). The other part, however, is the insane slowdown of progress this usually brings with it. Everything, is, so, incred-ibly-slow at these corps. And policy and asking for permission and nobody wanting to be responsible unless upper management and and and...
It sounds like you were a bootstrapped solo founder in all of these cases? That’s the riskiest path, there are lots of other ways to navigate a career in startups that are not quite so brutal in odds or in emotional toll. (In the United States at least)
I have had a decently long career in startups (closing in on 30 years) and never once was a founder, in part because I always wanted to make a decent salary. Being an early employee at a decently funded startup has been a great tradeoff for me and my family. Even if all the equity over the years had amounted to nothing, I’d still have had few reasons to regret this path.
Yeah all bootstrapped, that's correct. And you're absolutely right, it just makes growing/building unreasonably hard at the beginning because the only funds you have are your own, and it's prohibitively expensive to run ads for the first 100k users when self-funded. The crux with investments always seemed to be the shift of power around the second or third raise for those who weren't runaway successes, when founders start to realize that pressure is now coming from two or three sources, self-worth, investors and possibly clients that were sold on promises and now want to see them implemented. In any case, I agree that being not the first but among the first dozen of employees can be a rewarding and fulfilling choice, it shields from the harshest fire but also allows enough flexibility financially to move on the job as well as in your private life, I'd guess.
Feeling the same pain of walking through the creator's hell.
Heard somewhere we are not supposed to be happy and absent minded. Staying on hard side of things shapes us and make complete.
I'm not sure if this helps, but I’ve personally stopped stressing about outcomes, "get rich quick" schemes, or being in the perfect moment.
The journey is what truly matters.
I use my own tools for consulting and eventually outsource myself as needed. If clients want to hire someone else, I don’t resist. I simply ask for two or three months’ salary for training and limited support afterward.
I’m not trying to build something worth millions to sell. I used to sell CRMs built on top of WordPress for a long time. Eventually, it evolved into a CRM I now use across several businesses. Over the years, I’ve also created numerous small tools that I’ve been using for over a decade—tools for tracking trends, education, and more.
I don’t aim to be in the top 5% of earners, just be in the middle for targeted niche is ok.
For me, freedom means working in "Pendulum mode"—six months of active client phases followed by six months of prototyping new ideas. That balance keeps me sane. No conflict of interests. Clients know I worked hard to kick off things, and productive than most other engineers in slow mode.
As for pressure of being update - I made a simple commitment to try new things 4-8 hours a week min. AI, ML, K8s, hyped programming languages. It was brutal at the beginning, and extremely joyful process now. It's getting easier and easier. The main motivation is to be connected with folks who will come after me.
I'm also trying to surround myself with builders, and be less with transactional people who simply wants salary. Helping other to overcome and internalize the essence of pain of owning code and full responsibilities make my struggles easier.
One thing I would never sacrifice for being in a creator mode - wellbeing and needs of my family. Whatever it takes to bring the food on the table. All high purposes come after.
Naval's mega episodes help me to settle things in mind really well too
I see this a lot in the local startup community too. There's a lot of "ecosystem" feeders who survive on the supply of newbies, but the old experienced founders have mostly either exited and retired, want nothing to do with the startup scene any more, or have just given up and got a job.
The buzz from 10-15 years ago just isn't there any more.
I'm not sure that there's a startup winter at all, it looks like a web browser tech winter to me. AFAIK YC also changed their focus and now are looking for physical things much more - like supersonic jets.
There is only so much you can do with organizing information and entertainment through HTML and JS and make a profit of it. Maybe there will be a nice whiplash gold rush for making the web great again as this pile of garbage doesn't inspire anyone anymore.
That will happen as soon as a new business model alternative to what caused the enshittification appears. Alternatively, maybe a new tech will emerge that will offer freedoms and possibilities similar to the early days of the web.
Yeah I agree. The market for companies that do something in a web browser may be saturated, but outside of that world it feels like there are more opportunities than ever. For example in the space of AI + robotics we’ve barely scratched the surface.
I wonder if part of what’s happening may be a generational shift in how people in and around the startup world view work/life balance. In my limited experience, GenZ folks tend to place a premium on reasonable working hours, so it’s not surprising they would evaluate the trade offs between startups and big tech differently.
I'm biased but I think the most interesting opportunities involve software that interacts with the physical world in some way. These projects will definitely involve some electrical + mechanical engineering, product design etc., but I'd guess that in terms of number of hours worked, they are still more software engineering than any other single discipline. Probably with a very different set of tools than those used on the web.
It is insane I have to say this, but this quite literally is the best time ever to start a startup.
The sheer leverage that AI provides founders today is simply astounding. I have leveraged AI tools to build things I would never have been able to build just several years ago.
The case in point would be it is now extremely easy to create Chrome plugins that automate aspects of my business simply by asking Claude to do so.
Another example I can point to is the use of GPT to create documentation for government tenders. Many of these tenders need supporting documents that, quite frankly, I would not have been able to create on my own. Everything from how to create documentation around modern slavery and supply chain audits, to indigenous inclusion. This is stuff they simply don't teach you at university.
We are living in a golden age where a solo founder can create so much value on their own.
This is not to say I'm not worried for the future, I very much am. I'm worried about an economic routing of the middle class caused by AI taking white-collar jobs...
By way of background, we sell STEM electronics hardware that has really low margin because it's designed to be excessively priced for education.
This need to be extremely efficient has caused us to do all sorts of things, like create shipping and fulfillment robots that pick products from the shelf and help our pickers and packers out[1].
I found that it's a lot harder to do things with atoms than just software. As a company, we have been able to automate a bunch of work that would have been previously done by an office admin. I believe this style of white-collar jobs is particularly vulnerable to automation.
I have two main concerns. One is that the folks with white-collar jobs that would buy our products will no longer have the economic means to do so. The second is, well, a lot of our products are STEM-based, and I'm worried that educators will no longer feel the need to teach coding and electronics, because in the future there may be the view that such work will simply be done by machines, and all what a student really needs to be able to learn to do is learn how to communicate in a clear manner using english...
It's more because people have realised that money is easier made outside of public space (crypto projects, scripts, other things that just extract money out of thin air) rather than by building something public that needs clients, investors, and exits.
I have yet to meet a single startup billionaire but i already know at least one person who made 1B+ through scripting and several who are in 9 digit range. It's just easier there because there is no law to abide (you are anonymous by definition, and frequently a sybil of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of fake people), and no need to "sell" or be liked by anyone.
It didn't exist before ~2017 because crypto/smart contracts were not a thing yet. SEO/SEO scams existed yes, but these never brought in comparable amounts of money and traditional startups looked more attractive in comparison. Today, many people just run dozens of solana nodes, guess how much they make?
Well, there is no notion of crime if there is no actual personality involved. It's hard to define crime on a blockchain.
Scripting could be in rust of solidity for instance, but sometimes it's just python or literally bash.
Prime recent example: solana mods that improve voting. Before they stopped working (as too many people started using them), hundreds of millions were made by gaining advantage in attracting stake on staking pools by those who used them while others didn't - as they could consistently get better voting performance. And a mod was just a hundred or so lines in rust.
Fairly sure the vast majority of Hacker News isn't making 300k a year in either big tech _or_ startups. Plus the author of the post mentioned wasn't some scrappy gung-ho founder trying to make it at any cost, they had Google money and one of their stories was their resentment at their cofounders forcing a $10m exit of one of the companies. No offence to them, it was an interesting journey described very openly, but it didn't sound like they were looking for a pep talk.
I suspect Hacker News is just bigger and less skewed towards Silicon Valley than it was in 2013. Maybe that changes the vibe, but I don't think anyone is (or should be) deciding whether to do a startup based on the tone of comments on an internet forum.
And if they are not worthless in general, they are worthless for you since you will get squeezed out because funders and founders need to take everything since they are the only ones who matter or do any work (/s obviously).
I certainly did. I have options/stocks from 3 different companies, all vested, but zero expectation of seeing any money out of it. One of them recently went belly up and had an exit for peanuts.
I didn't go for big tech but I did pick a job on a YC startup that, while demanding, allowed me to purchase my own house and work on my own stuff in the evenings.
Your options haven’t expired since leaving those startups?
I recently left a job at a startup where I had some options vested. It would be like 6k to exercise them. I was leaning towards leaving em, and now this thread has kinda convinced me
I think the calculus is different for exercising options after leaving than the scenario the GP described, in which the company is pitching current employees on a stock purchase scheme.
There’s nothing inherently wrong in the latter, but it’s super unusual, and it’s pretty safe to be wary of startups shouldn’t do unusual things with their financing / cap table.
Exercising options post departure, on the other hand, is par for the course with any option-based compensation (note that this shouldn’t apply to RSUs, since those are usually owned outright after vesting).
A similar question arises with payment of taxes for 409a elections. Can be pricey, but it doesn’t raise the same red flags as a founder asking you to pay to work there.
Sorry, my mistake. It's all shares, I don't know why I said stocks/options.
But it's all shares. First from being early in a marketing startup that recently closed, second from being one of the first engineers of an event ticket marketplace that's holding on for dear life, third from a tourism unicorn that paid half my salary with instant-vesting shares during Covid.
How did you manage to buy a house on your own while making just salary? Usually salary at YC startups doesn’t get past $250k and that’s not enough to afford anything in the bay.
9 times out of 10 the company sells, performs a reduction in force, or goes under before they vest. 1 time out of 1000 the company is worth something and remains operable over a 5 year period.
Rules of thumb for the green engineers:
- Take salary/health insurance over stock in almost all cases.
- At some companies employees who are greener and greedier will fight/sabotage all their peers to get rid of them, is this the type of place you want to be at? Insider fighting is often a big part of why these companies fail.
- Never pay into start up equity. If a company "offers you the chance to buy their stock" after X months/years don't do it and if you do, don't put much in. Have an excuse so no one gets offended like "I am saving for a house" or something. If you're looking at a 5k minimum simply don't do it unless that is peanuts for you.
- Make sure anything offered is in writing and completely understood before joining. Lots of things are said at final stage interviews. If it isn't in writing you are not getting it. Ask questions be annoying.
- Negotiate. Its the only way you can actually get what you want. If the stocks mean nothing to you unless you get them quick, negotiate that. Start ups close doors extremely suddenly every single day.
> If a company "offers you the chance to buy their stock" after X months/years don't do it
This generalizes to a rule of thumb, "Don't accept any deal you didn't go looking for." Same as a trapdoor firewall doesn't accept any incoming connections.
Someone on the street offers to sell you a bridge, say no. You get brightly-colored letters from your credit union selling you car insurance, recycle them. Your friend wants you to buy a bowling alley with him, refuse.
To be fair, who uses and comments on HN could have changed. HN cam be a great place but just as Wall Street isn't The Economy, HN isn't the whole of startup culture.
Interesting to read. Worth pondering. But with limits / caveats.
All that said, The Startup Industrial Complex is real. Plenty are being sucked in and spit out. That's going to impact Hearts & Minds, and comments shared.
I'd say starting a company to make something people want in order to sell it for money is still relevant. It's just that you're looking at working quietly, humbly, but perseverantly for the next 25 years, slowly growing the business and balancing the risks and opportunities along the way. You won't be looking for an "exit" because you want to take care of the company you built. That's a very different story from whatever vibe it is that startups acquired after the dotcom boom, i.e. find something that hasn't been done before, scales quickly, and sell the company after a few years for 1000x, and then something.
That never was sustainable, I think, and effectively it became a glorified hiring process for big tech who bought the best toy companies to get to the people behind. And now even big tech figured it's cheaper to just hire the talent directly and not buy their token company for a few million first just to get the guys in.
Not saying a good company with a good idea and execution at the right time couldn't still make it big quick: there always were some lucky ones and there will always be. But the process isn't repeatably stable enough that there's a lot of wasted effort to make a few shooting stars. And everybody seems to be slowly accepting that. Go for it if the opportunity arises but if you spend 10 years trying and trying without the fish biting you're likely better off saving off from a decent salary when those years have passed.
> you're looking at working quietly, humbly, but perseverantly for the next 25 years
> That never was sustainable, I think
Another aspect with this being (un)sustainable is lack of affordable healthcare. I bet many people would take more risks if they didn't have to worry about this aspect of their lives.
The Swedes sure seem to think so. Per capita Swedish entrepreneurship is like 7x the rest of the euro zone, and they’re convinced that it’s that aspect of the social safety net that help prop up that high level of personal risk taking.
The swedes do claim this is one of the things that leads to higher entrepreneurship, but yeah, it's certainly not an explanation in and of itself. Good contrary example is the UK - they also have the NHS, but real estate is so expensive that they can't generally acquire premises for HW labs.
I'm on mobile and can't search well but it's a topic that's been discussed on HN many times before.
It's not the only factor for sure, but it definitely contributes.
Jokingly Swedish and Spanish colleagues have said that weather probably plays a part too - because it's so cold outside, lots of time is spent indoors - some of it with friends socialising or chilling (they even have a word for it, Fika), but not only. So you have lots of opportunities to read, think, explore, experiment.
In contrast, in Spain the weather is often nice and sunny, so you're outside more often, with friends, drinking and eating. You don't really have a lot of alone time at home to think and tinker and innovate.
It's purely anecdotal, but there might be something to it.
Agreed. I was starting a small law firm (small biz, not a startup) and asked other dudes who had done the same what they did for healthcare. The all said the same thing -- I had my wife get a job at a bank.
But at that point, does it fit a startup definition?
In my view, startups always involve rapid growth and VC money to achieve it. If the company doesn't meet that criteria, isn't that simply a regular business?
I agree however it's the 'Paul Graham' definition. i.e. a trade off must be maintained between the bottom line and growth and a startup is a business that prioritises growth over basic financial sustainability.
I've seen economists argue the opposite saying a startup is no different to a regular business. It depends on which definition you wish to subscribe to.
What makes you think that? Still plenty of startups being founded, many achieving success. It's long odds, of course, but what exactly is "unsustainable" about this? (And unsustainable to whom, exactly?)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] thread5. 1 != 6
I have doubts about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013?
If you know any history, #4 is how many new areas of technology go. A couple ordinary guys built the first working airplane in their bicycle shop. Intel was founded with less than $1M, and fabbed its own chips. Vs. what would be the ante, today, to get into either of those industries?
Yes but big tech got bigger. Google had a 4th of its current workforce for instance, Meta a 10th, etc. It got much easier to get into those companies.
The problem typically is government regulations.
Given the failure rate I think it's always been hard to justify for the vast majority of people.
Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it.
For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
I feel this. I keep thinking there has to be a competitive advantage in being more conscious about the creation than the extraction. The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.
Bozo brainrot
If it can survive. The problem here is that startups compete in the same economy as those more sustainable, passion-driven businesses - and because of their ruthless focus on growth, as well as access to vastly more capital, they win, effectively suppressing good products or outright preventing them from entering the market.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I was merely pointing out that saying the market 'just works' instead of it 'working as intended' logically doesn't add anything, because in the free market concept it is meant to to "just work", which implies that is what it is intended to do.
A truly free market just degenerates into the "natural state" in which non-social animals live. There is, nor there ever will be, a truly free market in a human society. The only intentional thing, the only thing we can discuss whether it "works as intended" or not, is the boundaries (cultural and regulatory) we set around the market. It's the only thing we control (sort of - the same feedback loops that form the market also affect our attempts at regulating it).
If you're in for-profit sector, I don't see why being concerned with the main goal first and foremost would be a bad thing.
No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
So if the problem is worth solving in this ecosystem it's worth it because it does actually turn a profit instead of some fantasy that it will magically appear at some imagined scale.
I also don't focus solely on the fact that I earn money from my job, when I speak to my colleagues - no, I wouldn't be on that job, if it didn't pay.
> No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
This is a very specific understanding of startups as entities receiving foreign capital or debt.
The act of doing entrepreneurship or stating up is inherently devoid from profit motives - or should be IMHO. Money is what makes it possible and not the core reason to do it.
And by that we return to my core reservation as written out in the initial comment.
I am assuming one is operating in the for-profit sector.
If one is NOT operating in that sector then yes it is all the more reasonable to assume that the enterprise should be focused on solving a problem or creating some sort of intangible value.
We can observe this is well with the open-source community, where profit motivation is not the main driving factor.
However, I reiterate, if the venture is to operate for-profit then it's potential to be profitable should be for most the aim otherwise it's not solving a problem because it will fail.
Banks expect returns, and the things they fund are expected to turn a profit. There are systems in place to claw back assets and funds in the event it fails to do that; and most will, but they're expected to come to the bank with a plan for profit in hand. There are different kinds of bankruptcies to address different kinds of failure. Banks tend to not give loans to people who fail a lot, and the terms get worse with each failure.
Meanwhile, in VC-land, the 1/10 startup that brings the profit for the fund could very well be started by the person who failed the other 9/10 times.
It seems like if the expectation is, with rare exceptions, most startups won't turn a profit, and there's no real penalty or punishment for repeat failure (because it's expected), it's not a for-profit system. It's a patronage system that periodically mints new patrons.
The VC is there for profit because they expect the 1 win to overshoot the loss from the other 9.
They expect potential for profit in all the ventures they invest. Period.
And they put forth capital in the amount representative of their belief that a particular venture will turn a profit.
Those they believe have more potential will receive more funding/resources than those ventures that seem less favorable.
They are not, as you put it, performing in a patronage system, because simply they are not interested in losing their capital.
That general mindset was a major source of pain for me. I used to say I had founded a startup just to get along with the other entrepreneurs, but in fact I couldn't care less about fast growth, product-market fit and other common concerns in the field -- heck, "consulting" was in my list of services and some of my peers couldn't even wrap their minds around that concept -- and the ones who did, frowned upon it. They just kept asking about product, competitive edges and so on, while all I cared about was joining a growing market served until then by a handful of small but profitable companies in my country.
Do you think some of this is idea related? If you're building software, many new ideas are not truly innovative in a way that would make execution seem like the place to focus?
An experienced person might hear the idea and instantly have a general idea of how to build it -- but know that the real hard parts are distribution, finding customers, talking to customers, and building the profit flywheel that lets you do more of the previous.
Taking AI as an example just because it's hot right now, but it's a very different conversation if your idea is building a alternative to the transformer (assuming you're talking to someone who could even speak authoritatively on the subject!), versus building an "chatgpt wrapper" app, even if it's very complex/tailored to an industry. Most people won't be able to discuss the industry specific bits so they focus on the tech bits, and then the differences seem to be mostly execution?
But eg. working on an idea around decentralized dating app that utilizes federated learning, blockchains, en cryptographic distributed filesystems to make a truly open and algorithmically transparent dating app - and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that" instead of starting to jam on good privacy preserving techniques in FL that still yields good results. ...
In honesty, I think the main issue is that the people have _not_ been able to understand these technologies. It has probably been _too_ innovative?
I believe one cause for this response is how someone tells the other person about that idea. If you make it clear that you are building something for fun, I think that response becomes less likely. But if they believe your project idea is also a start up idea, then they may ask about the business side.
Sometimes I do see a cognitive dissonance when computer-first people and business-first people discuss software. IMO, making it clear where the person starting the conversation is coming from would help both groups not talk past each other when engaging. A startup-minded person won't necessarily ask about monetization if the other person made it clear they're talking about a hobby. I believe it would be less likely, at least.
I think this is in part a market correction. Whether it's over correction, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
There's been a lot of really bad startups making a big splash, often without any experience or knowledge of the field they were trying to disrupt (so they don't actually know what the problems really are, or what was really needed), and with far too vague hand wavey ideas on how they'll actually reach sustainability.
There's been far too much of engineering being a hammer, and seeing every problem is a nail
Talkers hate doers and those who dare to think of doing something.
Indeed, for me it is: whats the point of working in some random ass startup making yet another crud app and/or with 100 users when you can go to faang and work at giant scale or go to work in semiconductors and work on very interesting, deeply technical stuff?
Sure, there are interesting startups, but they usually dont go big like uber for x and so on
When I first started hanging around HN (around 2011 or so), the general vibe seemed much more like indie-hacker types to me, lots of anger at VCs and the hockey stick growth required.
Honestly though, the following decade was a massive tech bull market which presumably pulled lots of HN denizens in (including me). Maybe we're getting back to that a little bit with tech layoffs and potential opportunities in other industries.
Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much.
But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups. That broader group was always there, of course, just its proportions relative to the hard core of entrepreneurs has changed.
I'd love to see some objective analysis of how things changed after the twitter and reddit kerfuffles, but I don't believe the article's thesis that the zeitgeist is the cause.
PS I could live without the stories that violate the precept of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." ... but it's still pretty good here.
Many if not most of folks at this point have nothing to do with neither startups nor hacking. Neither do I for example, and I am here for a decade+.
This is certainly me. Generally interested in tech (and many of the other things that HNers seem to be interested in these days), but no real interest in startups. Hope I am not ruining HN for the old timers.
I started using this place a lot more in the last couple of years as Reddit went to shit, so I suspect that was a big driving force in changing the audience here.
2010 will have been different to 2008 (when I joined) but so will 2013 with respect to 2010, 2020 with respect to 2013, and 2025 with respect to 2020.
It's fine that it's much more broadly a tech forum now - but it's silly to infer things about the wider world by comparing attitudes in HN across eras unless you take account of the change in demographic.
As to the culture wars? Perhaps it's time for another "erlang love bombing" campaign to recalibrate :D (When was that anyway...?) Edit: Ah yes, it was in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
Well, not anymore it isn't: https://web.archive.org/web/20070601184317/http://news.ycomb...
Interesting that you both put Woz in this group, and omitted Jobs. To me, one of the better analogy of the difference between two groups/interests is Woz vs Jobs.
Ultimately, I still hang around HN because of high-quality discussions; there's really no other place like it, or at least I've found none. Or maybe after all this time, it just feels like home. Still, were the balance to shift hard towards startup talk, I fear we'd lose all the intellectual curiosity driven submissions and discussions - they'd just turn into sharing tips and tricks to make moar moneys with tech, which I personally find BOOOOOORING AF.
> But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group
This miracle is probably just hard work in disguise -- dang et al. HN also has a self-censorship bias and some self-enforcement, but mostly not an abrasive kind -- people (mostly) gently remind each other of the rules, and sometimes viciously downvote comments that are not useful/in the spirit of HN.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
I'm here for the tech porn mostly. I do read the business related stories but I mostly retain everything but whatever includes "founder".
(My account seems to be made in 2016, so i suppose i started reading in like 2013-2014.)
I am here for the selection of interesting articles and the high quality comments when it's not a political thread (those threads have less rational lower quality comments and I am also guilty of producing some os them, I apologize dang).
I suppose you can argue that we have more of a "European" attitude, to which I would respond that while we pay high taxes like Europe, we hardly get any of the social security benefits that they enjoy, so in short we end up with worst of both worlds: high taxes, low salaries and limited benefits.
You can't expect a nation to develop the next FANG when people's idea of business is purchasing a home in the "suburbs" of Toronto and renting out its basement.
P.S I hope you are staying warm in this weather..
Serious question: do you think having the next FANG is desirable? Many people would say that those companies (Netflix are kind of the exception) are too big, too powerful, stifling competition and innovation, and even deserve to be broken up.
Lots of folks would create their own business, but it takes a special person to dream of world domination and want their company to be a global multi-industry behemoth. As a fun example, contrast successful restaurants in France vs in US. In France, very few restauranteurs branch out with other locations or start their own chain, it's considered a sort of selling out/diluting of quality. That's how you have decades old highly profitable and loved restaurants that are just there and work well. In the US you have to make it big, expand, increase sales, add locations, make it a chain, etc.
Firstly, unicorn valuations does not necessarily mean innovation. There is nothing innovative about the Salesforces and Zendesks of the world, they're great market fits in a very profitable corporate world.
Secondly, the whole world is playing catchup to US which it comes to money, not just Canada.
Lastly, the valuations & money in US are a result of an insane ethos (working hard, breaking shit), very corporate-friendly government policies, and a very capitalist society.
Canada isn't perfect, our housing is way too expensive and we'll always play second fiddle to USD. But Canadian society is miles better than anything you'll see in US, and for that I'm forever grateful. Giving up that peace and security is just not worth it for any amount of money.
For me what hn use to be an interaction between art and tech in the theme of hackers & painters. Tech along is not so interesting IMHO unless it's in the context of art and/or humanity.
(Consider that the word "painter" itself has complementary high/low meanings)
Currently I'm low-key mulling about the possibly not-even-wrong idea that in some cultures, there simply isn't a clear distinction between high and low art.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42770351
The downside of that
1)YC and HN won't attract a lot of people from such cultures, at least not the ones they hope to get (the supposedly curious AND effective folks)
2) eternal September is inevitable, especially for folks who have Alan Kay in their pantheon of heroes
Separately, California seems like it could very well host a ommerist culture in a century. See the Oscars, very much a blowhard affair though you could almost call it "communal" (blowhards celebrating shitting in public?) -- Hollywood still has to go through the prepubescent phase of totally embracing their inner and utter philistine. (Compare Kaurismaki, maybe he got a bit enlightened by eastern filmmakers?)
see below
[0] an inane activity which has often been unduly embraced/denounced
>In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York accepted four early designs of paint by number by Max Klein for its Department of Architecture and Design, donated by Jacquelyn Schiffman.
Tech lost its glitter. It is now just another arm of rentier capitalism, not too dissimilar from banks and finance.
Our profession got hollowed out over the years. Of course the vibes at the bar next to the plant will be down.
> it's really sad to me
There's a thing I've seen on HN a few times over the years, where people expect HN to be like a secret oasis of fun away from the realities of the professional pursuits that brought us together in the first place. Why is that?
- it's true that you will get jack squat if you're employee #4 or later (and in the process you'll work more hours with less job security than at a FAANG)
- it's true that the startup scene has delivered basically nothing of real value to the economy in the last fifteen years: it has all been regulatory arbitrage, intrusive ad-tech, financial engineering, and, of course, shitcoins
- it's true that the people at the top turned out to be amoral psychopaths who practically tripped over themselves to kiss the ring when authoritarianism arrived and their talk about improving the world was hot air
If you're going to complain about the cynicism, you should at least respond to the above instead of pretending it's just grumps wanting to ruin everyone's fun.
> it's true that the startup scene has delivered basically nothing of real value to the economy in the last fifteen years
"basically" is what Wikipedia calls a weasel word. If you're determined to look at the world through a particular lense, by discarding any points to the contrary, you're basically right. That's not the same as actually being right, but it comes down to attitude and world view. If you believe the world is shit, you can find countless examples of it being shit. Because sometimes it is. If you want to have hope and believe in better, you can find those examples too. Because they're also there. Life isn't a math problem though, so you can't take 100 misery points and combine them with 200 hope points and end up feeling happy.
As far as the people at the "top" being amoral psychopaths. It's the amoral psychopaths who make the most noise. A humble quiet person funding soup kitchens and not talking about it isn't going to ping on anybody's radar. Yeah the psychopaths exist, but so do the helpers.
no one wants to believe they're the grump ruining everyone's fun, but would you take all that emotional effort to go challenge the grumps, who are just going to argue, aren't going to appreciate anything you do, and are just a bunch of cynical unhappy assholes, or would you just go find a different digital lawn? (which may just be one thread over, having fun with the idea of an electrostatic wall)
I was interviewing with a bunch of mid-stage (series A/B) startups for senior/staff roles. Without exception, every single one offered me so little equity that the only way they'd EQUAL big tech pay was if they hit a slam dunk and became multibillion dollar monsters.
> no one wants to believe they're the grump ruining everyone's fun, but would you take all that emotional effort to go challenge the grumps, who are just going to argue, aren't going to appreciate anything you do, and are just a bunch of cynical unhappy assholes, or would you just go find a different digital lawn?
The situation above was without factoring in dilution and across a few different sub industries. I think it's pretty reasonable to make fun of founders for this.
I like this comic / poem, which I feel captures the essence of what I'm trying to get across here:
Try as I might to live simply, my life tends towards complexity.
My ordered thoughts veer off track, once they turn inward I can't turn back.
The path forward twists and tangles, I lose myself at every angle.
The clear vision I hold inside me, fractures into something far more exciting.
http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2019/05/disorder.html
I still remember the days when self-driving cars seemed just around the corner and inevitable. When Google was organizing the world's information and ethically pure. When I trusted software to do the right thing.
But nowadays... Good luck finding any trustworthy megacorp. We've commoditized trust for profits (e.g. from Couchsurfing to AirBnB) and the result is that people became less trusting.
Inevitable or not.. I did not consider the other things this would enable. like mass surveillance! I thought it was going to be a relationship between me and my car. I did not realize the relationship was actually me, my car, and the company tracking my every move.
That is how my relationship with tech became adversarial.
jokes are great, but unless it's a joke that has some truth squirreled away in it that's worth knowing and well transmitted by the joke, it shouldn't be here. especially on its own. little joke at the end of a long relevant anecdote? great. just replying because you had a moment of wit you'd like to share? think twice and don't, please.
there are plenty of places to be a comedian. I enjoy it myself on more than a few. but I would prefer it not be here.
I really needed to hear this, thank you.
Frankly, the greater discussion diversity has improved HN for me.
I found the site dynamics compelling early on, bit often felt the discussion was narrow and to some degree an echo chamber.
Arguments that counted as points made then often fall flat now and that is A Very Good Thing™
Well I'm still here but I've gotten a lot older. And you have, too!
Two things that immediately jumped out at me:
1. 40% of the posts/comments in all of 2024 came from accounts created IN 2024. There are a LOT of new people on HN.
2. The most commented post of the year was a news article about Donald Trump's election victory, so TV news-esque content is definitely getting more traction than expected.
Want to have one day of 8hrs of work only so I'm fresh tomorrow to visit a car factory and to write two papers in the weekend.
I just started a relationship though, you do get used to the sensation of falling down a cliff trying to build a plane as you fall while eating glass and barely being able to walk out of exhaustion because it needs to be ready tomorrow so you're the only office on a Sunday night at 3am with the lights still burning while knowing that if you cannot borrow money within 4 days you cannot pay rent.
It's an acquired taste :)
I agree that SaaS is a dead end. I had a talk with two of our investors this week who run a SaaS company trying to convince me to stop hardware and go 100% to SaaS because it's such a great business model. But for that I think you're too late. The only new SaaS I consistently see people trying out are AI SaaS.
Because of that I'm doing SaaS with AI but combined with physical devices. I do think manufacturing is going to grow in the US and Europe, simply because factories need (way way) fewer people. Regardless of tariffs, protectionism, etc., the playing field has changed. Labor cost has become a tiny fraction of manufacturing cost. Offshoring makes no real sense anymore.
Therefore I make real physical AI, cameras and robots, to help people, well people and bigger people like McDonald's and car factories, build ultra-low-labor factories. That's what's going on in the US and in Europe right now, not SaaS. But the principle is the same: Startups just move to where the money / growth is.
The public got wise.
I’ve always understood that in theory but it’s the first time I’ve actually lived through it and it’s wild.
A few years of higher rates and half of the tech industry and the people who buy tech seems to be on hold.
It makes me realise how vacuous the last decade was and how a lot of our jobs and businesses existed because of dirt cheap money. I’m glad I saved some money rather than thinking it was going to last forever!
If it takes more hours of labor to purchase the same thing, it requires lower interest rates to borrow.
The future is hard to know, but demographic changes are going to move a lot of money out of the stock market (because retiring boomers and soon gen-xers will want safer investments). At the same time, labor will itself become more valuable, because the same forces are going to tighten the labor market. To me that is suggestive of an environment where the rewards of startups vs. engineering jobs are weaker.
What can we do now in software which would not have been possible in 1995, even if we were to somehow make our hardware today usable by programmers then?
However, the vast majority of the crazy things I feel like I'm able to do in software today aren't really because the software is--or even the protocols are--better, but that I'm capable of executing so many instructions in so little time on such vast quantities of stored data while communicating massive results over large distances reliably using computers that are so cheap and so small that virtually everyone in every financial class is surrounded by them.
Hell: even with large language models and the recent birth of working/useful AI, we are right on track for the timeline for progress along the road towards the singularity laid out in the late 1990s by Ray Kurtzweil, who was merely looking at computation per dollar, working off of the expectation that if the hardware can do it the software will figure it out. I could go back in time with the code for a modern LLM and I'd still have to wait for 2020 to deploy it.
A whole segment of product stories only worked when investors wanted to believe in them so that they could park their money there. With everything oversubscribed, products would get investment as long as success wasn't provably impossible - so CEOs and PMs optimized for inscrutability and constant pivots. More thoughts here:
https://coldwaters.substack.com/p/the-mystery-box-is-out-of-...
Scenario 2: a guy who already made millions in tech and who is a venture capitalist on the side coyly brags about his business failures.
Can you see how they are not the same?
> 4. The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.
I disagree: In my feeling truly innovative opportunities are still rather easy to find.
I feel what rather changed is that with VC becoming big and mainstream, investors have become more risk-averse in investing into innovative ideas (that they don't really understand). Perhaps also society has become more conservative, so selling a really innovative product to a customer has become harder.
Customers are more locked into existing products. Network effects, switching costs, familiarity and branding, staff training (for businesses) and learning something new....
The reason for this that I consider to be the most plausible one is that society has become more conservative (i.e. less willing to change things or try out new things).
To some people this might look like consumers are more conservative, but really it's just hidden dark patterns keeping them in the big platforms.
I really wish the US government was more pro-business competition; they're merely pro-business in terms of ensuring existing winners continue to win. Across the pond, the EU seems to get this with measures like GDPR which make it actually easier to port between platforms.
> To some people this might look like consumers are more conservative, but really it's just hidden dark patterns keeping them in the big platforms.
I personally observe that people have quite different "sensitivities" to this phenomenon. It might be true that such people exist, but at least in my "echo chamber" it's rather exactly the other way: the more dark pattern such people observe, and the more they feel "jailed" by these large platforms, the more they are willing to leave the platform - just out of spite. Thus, at least many people of my "echo chamber" show exactly the opposite behaviour from what you claim and the platforms intend.
Thus, I believe the conservatism is a different phenomenon: people become less willing to try out new things because they observed far too often that a new interesting service turned more and more into a dark jail over the years.
Such as? Can you name a few?
> Such as? Can you name a few?
Naming them would need long explanations (and a lot of my thoughts are still in an early phase), but I can give you a rough sketch of one possible way how one can find them (but note that there exists an insane amount of other possible ways to find great innovative opportunities):
Simply read sophisticated scientific literature about mathematics and related areas, in particular about insanely deep results that were (possibly) honored with high awards (which gives you a strong evidence that there is indeed something deep to find in these results). Then find cool, exciting applications of these results in an area of your choice.
Why does this simple approach work? Answer: the state of the art in mathematics is in many cases simply working with science-fiction technologies from, say, 50 years in the future already today.
Honestly, this way I find raw ideas for possibly cool, exciting opportunities basically every few days.
Unless you're a founder, you're unlikely to make any money, and predatory VC/backers using convertibles/senior debt to turn your equity into Zimbabwean dollars. Thats before any stats are calculated for lasting long enough to either IPO, make money or get bought out.
As someone who did successfully exit, the stories of multiple-millions being handed out turned out to be legends. Dodgy accounting & staff retention meant that actually you don't get fuckyou money.
The only realy reason to join a startup is that you either believe in the "mission" or that you believe it will bring you joy to work in that way.
Or the startup was a stepping stone in your career. Big Tech wouldn't hire you, b/c you have a different background, so you work at a startup to develop experience and then switch to Big Tech.
Startup: you look at something, plan, execute, learn skills as you go. Big company: here is x, do as I say. You must use these things from these teams, don't make it yourself.
Coping with the step down in responsibility is hard. Going from owning the entire stack to not even having a real decision in planning is very hard to deal with, especially if you've done that $thing before, and have to mount effectively an election campaign to change direction.
I think people with startup backgrounds in big tech tend to hustle harder in their careers than people that were “born” in that environment.
Being able to see, react and change based on changing business goals was the key to my career success. Being able to talk to decision makers and get something in place to mitigate risk/take advantage is a key thing in buisness.
Going from being able to do that, to not even knowing what the business goals are, much less getting access to any kind of decision maker is a tough change. Its like having the scope of a CTO and then going to a scope of an intern. You feel infantalised.
That said, we're also pretty analytical, and when one could warm a seat in FAANG for ~$400k/year, even many successful startups weren't outperforming that TC.
All I’m saying is engineers tend to like certainty and predictability in their personal life.
I wouldn't say I'm an old-timer by any metrics, but even back in 2012 when I first discovered and joined HN, I remember it was pretty clear in the community (and people I spoke to around me) you shouldn't go to work at a startup if you were looking for "a lot + safe" money.
Sure, you could belong to the 0.001% and work on the next Dropbox, but most likely you would end up not, so don't start at a startup to chase riches, as there are better venues for that. Do work at a startup if the environment/mission/team feels right to you, but with no expectations of a big payday-exit.
Have a moat* or get exhausted battling against other similar startups until one is the major winner.
Technology is the easy part (for most people) Winning the battle is the hard part.
TO summarize, win battle=big-payday
You don't reach for VC if you just want a lifestyle business, much like you don't reach for mafia money just to pay down your mortgage earlier. You have to know who you're getting in bed with, and what their expectations are.
I understood "lifestyle business" to be a company that tries to be adoptable to the lifestyle of the founder/owner, but maybe I understood it wrong or it changed.
- after 2008 Great Financial Crisis
- actual startup, not spinoff from larger company
- financially successful exit
- early non-founder employees made a substantial amount of money?
There were also suddenly a lot of people without a home to sleep in, and suddenly a lot of homes on the market.
Basically, right after a crash is the best time to do anything.
(Not lost in all this: over the years the tax treatment of option grants has changed! It used to be a hugely advantageous way of giving employees something of value, and that's been eroded a lot.)
Amazon had north of 100,000 employees by the time I joined in 2012. The "plucky startup" days were long gone, even if they did still tell the fable of the door desks at every orientation class
It's harder to know from acquisitions, but I'd guess that most of those with sale prices >$1b generated ~10-250 non-founders with $1m+ share packages. I think that the Qualtrics founders said that they minted 250 millionaires from their initial sale to SAP.
I mean... we all agree, it would seem, this is not the path to getting rich for most people. And it's unhealthy and stressful, so it's also not the best way to work.
So it has to come down to "the mission". You must be doing something so amazing, so innovative, a boon to mankind, that all else is secondary and you're willing to endure financial risk and a stressful job, right. Right?
But no. Most startups' products are unremarkable or banal -- with some honorable exceptions -- and mankind doesn't really care either way.
It is hard to build a successful business out of even a most mundane ideas. That alone can be a great accomplishment that many people strive for. Also to be able to set and execute initiatives is also a great motivation. Seeing the fruits of your labor can be very rewarding.
[1] And possibly contacts, or safety net, or wealthy family and/or friends.
There are always cooler heads raising alarms on these booms. What turns them into bubbles is the inflection point where there are more people coming for the dream than for the thing that motivates people who understand the risks and know the statistics.
I seem to remember 2015 or near it as that inflection point. Tech media went from worrying about the steady march of unicorns to not talking much about valuations.
Until then, naturally, it's all paper money. A bet. Maybe an investment, of your time and effort.
The majority of startups fail and the majority of startups having an IPO will not make anyone rich via stock grants.
It's definitely a safer bet to find a high paying job in a stable company.
GP comment argues correctly that there's no guarantee that employee stock options will return a profit even in the case of successful exits. Valuation multiples, senior debt, clawback options (see Skype exit [0]), fractional stocks being rounded down to zero after stock splits have all been implemented successfully by startups and VCs. I wouldn't invest my time, which is very precious compared to my capital, into any company that is managed by someone I don't know personally. I would rather earn surplus money to invest into high risk high return options. Treat startup equity as a lottery ticket and don't pay too much for one.
[0] Skype options turn out to be worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692985
Since then, I have seen similar things happen more than once to other friends. I can only imagine that as the number get larger, the problems become more complex.
Also, I have no way of knowing if the same ownership thing is going to happen again. Giving me another 0.5% of the above calculation. Sure, lots of people make millions in a startup. Way more people make millions, although over a longer time span, in tech companies and index funds.
That's the thing: there's literally no business idea in most startups beyond "sell to the highest bidder at 1B+ valuation". And the rest are hoping to coast on unlimited investor money.
That's it.
There are no business plans of, you know, building a sustainably profitable company.
Also, if you manage to get rich, you can afford more risks... in the hopes of getting even richer
I lacked the empathy to consider it from that perspective.
I guess "Even if I got rich, I would play it safe." is just my poor people scarcity mindset instead of an abundance mindset.
It wasn't my original idea either :)
lets take this bit by bit.
First, you need to have a decent % of the company. At each raise your share of the company will dilute. So you might have 1% at join, but by series d its been diluted in % as well as seniority.
You reach unicorn status,but the company isn't making money. So it might take on debt.
Eventually you then IPO. You either have your options converted to real stock (for a fee) and a covenant saying that if you leave before x, you'll have to hand back those shares. or if you are lucky you might be able to sell after say 6 months (super rare)
so after n years, you are able to sell your 10k in ordinary shares.
But in 2024 there were 21 IPOs. The chances of IPO are vanishingly small.
Liquidation preference!
I think the real value employees get is riding the rocketship in their career.
Early engineers often have first dibs on higher level roles, like CTO or director over people that join late.
Your initial grant might not be great, but being director at such a company is huge
Few people get those senior salaries, and those who do get it because of their unusual skills and experiences.
A stint at a startup is still a pretty good way to get those skills and experiences, compared to spending the same amount of time as a junior developer somewhere else. If you can make capital gains equivalent to FAANG senior salaries while doing so, even better! But if not, at least you'll have come out with a more interesting resume.
Google, Meta, Amazon & microsoft all do banding, so the base wages is mostly public (hence why its all bollocks about wage negotiation, there isn't any.) The first level of senior for most of these orgs will tip the scales at around $300k
Having worked at both startup and FAANG, I don;t think startups actually give you the skills to flourish here in corp land. Sure, you might be a good coder, but most of the time its navigating politics that actually gets you promotion (that or good luck with a successful project)
You really don't need to be a good coder to be at a FAANG. Sure there are specialisms as you point out. but most of the time its just entry level CRUD, followed by manic debugging with shitty non-documented tools.
Spend your time instead on getting more vacation from the start. If instead you ask for 25 days of vacation per year instead of the default 10 you have a deal (or maybe they bring you down to 20 days). You can't get 50 days of vacation (there is a company max they can't go beyond), but you can get a lot more time.
This has not backfired on me. It just takes 8 times more effort than getting hired at one place. I figured the benefit would compound.
Source: I am no great negotiator, but I've always negotiated my salary and got 10-15 % more than what I would have had w/o asking anything. This compounds after a few stints. And I've been a manager in startup/mid size/big tech: always negotiate.
Especially if you're a founding member or an early hire, it often has much more to do with having good insights about where technology meets business, knowing how to tackle difficult problems using limited resources (IRL, not just in a computer), and even a sprinkle of politics if your startup happens to "disrupt" the wrong kind of industry.
If your startup has a management team that can abstract away all of that stuff so that you can just code in peace, I agree that your tenure there will probably not be worth the hassle in a resume.
If I can get the same compensation working at a FAANG with less stress, better hours and more balance/control over my life, and the resume entry may be 'more interesting' in some ways, but its hard to argue with FAANG on a resume either why wouldn't I? the choice to risk all of that for only a chance at reaching that compensation is a hard sell.
The possibility of pouring your hard work into a company from the start/early on with others equally dedicated, and if it blows up you all blow up is the selling factor.
On top of that, how many startups came from employees of previous successes that turned that wealth into more innovation? Restricting that path to wealth for many and concentrating the profits to a smaller and smaller group doesn't seem to me the best economic bet to make long-term.
For me, I'm strongly moving towards the mentality that a startup I care about would at least give me outcomes I care about and an environment I can enjoy without the BS of big tech corporate and the need to prioritize stability, but its largely because I can increasingly afford to consider risks and lower income positions because my current job and income that isn't a startup.
The time/stress trade offs at big tech are increasingly diminishing vs startups (hussle culture taking over there now too), so if I'm going to have to deal with it it might as well have the least amount of BS possible... Its interesting how I prioritized stability early on in my career, and now consider less stable/risky roles that are more interesting or exciting, while you seem to be going the other direction. There are certainly a lot of different journeys through life.
Startups pay less and have to take what the can get. This probably causes a vicious cycle that makes the pay gap worse and worse.
Hours can very much depend on the big tech and startup individually, but big tech is certainly moving in the wrong direction here, and in the typically big corporation/enterprisey worst way possible (increased employee monitoring, shallow and manipulable KPI's that act more as perverse incentives than actually improve anything and that increasingly show the disconnect between upper management and engineers)
> And the work is much narrower and boring. The system is designed to make people into commodities and make you do work in the way that most benefits managers senior to yourself. Solve this narrow piece of a problem using this specific method alongside 5 other people doing other narrow pieces, versus a startup where you can just own the whole thing and iterate it faster.
I agree and its my primary complaint/dislike for my job. I would love to, and probably will change to a startup or other job with a company I actually care about and a role I find valuable, but I expect the pay to be a significant drop when I do. Until then I'm leaning on the salary to reduce the amount of time I need to work overall significantly and putting in my time so to speak.
For now big tech is winning, but if startups and employee equity start having the potential payoffs they used to then it changes the balance of the above equation by quite a bit.
Also general coding practices for large teams or multiple intersecting teams.
It's not about age, it's about what you actually had to do. Company size, company age and political complexity are strongly correlated.
A successful large company engineering director spends their day mostly doing politics across the org, while a successful small company engineering director spends a lot of their day writing code, being an architect, filling in for product management.
> Unlike engineering and the startup world, big companies want you to look the part not just know the part.
Big companies want you to know how to play the long game.
Also everyone: FAANG employees are better than everyone else!
On second thought, "irrationally preferred during hiring" gets at that idea better.
Rather: FAANG employees are pushed into startups by VCs.
Startups hire those people when they are risky and the future is unclear. Once there is traction, the VCs and insiders bring in friends for cush Director/VC posts. Quite often the people who took the real risks get left out.
Not to say that the early employee is necessarily guaranteed to be better, but at least they're a known quantity, have demonstrated loyalty, and have loads of business context that the shiny exec hire won't have.
> Your second programmer isn’t going to be as good at is as some guy who has been a director 6 years else where
If you hire smart people who learn, and who believe in the mission and team... that programmer might well be in the running to lead engineering.
Knowing tech industry a bit, I'd be at least as skeptical of directors from outside. Of course I'd have to consider them, at times. But I expect at least half of the outside candidates for leadership roles will be disingenuous halfwits.
Meanwhile, if you've got people who had the grit to help get you to that point, and demonstrated alignment and loyalty when it mattered, and who foster that trust in your company culture, then you'd be an idiot not to try to find a way to get rare goodness like that in your leadership.
If you don't want to leave where you are, a full time or side-project web startup can be started and bootstrapped with barely any prior requirements that you can't teach yourself and could be a good option.
Founders made more than I'll probably earn in a lifetime.
The rest of the money belongs to the MBAs and the bankers. It's always been their money, it will always be theirs.
If I had $1M and lost it, I would be devastated.
If I had $1B and lost $1M, it would be a rounding error.
I don't have any money, so how do I even get to $1M? And neither does my parents.
VC invests $1M in a startup, they are risking $1M. You just work at a company, get paid every month, and don't buy any stock, you are risking $0. That's all.
If the company does well and the VC makes $5M back, it probably won't mean much to them, either. But that's how the contract was written, because the company needed that $1M.
Time is the most precious resource we have. It's per-se underrated whenever it's dollarized. Unfortunately, most don't have a choice than to sell their time for money. Thus, it's even more important to spend time wisely.
Thinking, you don't risk anything because you don't spend money on a startup is wishful thinking. Or more likely: It's just a good story VCs and founders like to tell, because it's in their interest.
If the goal is economic security (FU money) then the quickest path is to get a job at a big tech company. This requires engineering skills and also the ability to play the various corporate games (ugh).
For the rest of us there's entrepreneurship and joining startups.
At big companies with lots of revenue the shenanigans can become fortresses of crazy (cough Google cough) that can go on forever.
The insiders get rich via salary, bonus, benefits, and looking for their next job while they are on startup-expensed conference tours, paid forbes articles, and company-sponsored fellowships.
Once the financiers took control and ensured they would reap the majority of the rewards, the risk/reward ratio was no longer there for many workers who gravitated towards big-tech instead.
Now big-tech is pushing burnout culture hard, and with higher interest rates limiting capital investments from VC's I wonder if we will start to see movements of people away from big-tech to more traditional startups again in the near future?
AI startups I believe are already showing this trend away from big business (and even away from their own 'big business' towards smaller startups within AI), but that probably falls more into the group that "believe in the 'mission'" as you point out.
I work at startups because I prefer the type of work generally found there. I like smaller teams, I enjoy having to learn new things, and I (usually) enjoy how quickly projects and direction can change.
For anyone considering a startup I'd say to just consider equity a lottery ticket for a decent bonus. It will probably not amount to anything, and it probably won't be worth what many expect, but it can be a nice bonus if you like the job and team regardless of an exit.
Back during the dot com days, everyone from the secretaries to the chefs to the founders were getting rich but nowadays YC teaches their founders to keep the money and stock options for themselves and for the investors. The only way employees make life changing money is if the company exits for over $10B.
In founder-matching profiles, I've started saying that I wanted to spread the wealth around with early hires, more than the convention. If founders win, the early hires also win.
Lesson learned: no matter how busy a founder is, they are no less petty than anyone else, and some will make time for a call, just to see who this hippie a--h--- is. :)
Well it turns out even that wasn’t enough and they did the same thing. I suspect VCs control too much of the financing.
I mean, the model for most companies - having a very heavy legal component when big money figures are being generated/spent - requires a great deal of bureaucracy which, somehow, inherently prohibits participation at an individual scale, in the massive profits.
It seems that a lot of it hinges on the nature of work for hire. If only there were systems in place that could make every human being a work for hire payment, even those performing CEO duties, then possibly the profits would be easier to spread.
I think a lot of startup problems exist in the Founder/CEO versus Founder/CTO versus Founder/CFO dynamic, which is what any company following the legislated structures must deal with.
VC’s exploit these dynamics, they can do it with money/financing, and they can do it without it, as well.
The crazy thing is, cases exist throughout history of three individuals getting together, building something great, and doing it without requiring any venture capital, generating through their own efforts, adventure capital.
They first told us we were in, but that we would need to adjust our cap table so that only 2 founders would have equity. They gave us a phone call, we pushed back, and later they sent us a rejection email
We were willing to compromise to some degree, and the non-founders said they would give up most equity if that meant getting into YC
But after the call, we got a rejection email saying something weird like “your cap table seems to be in flux”, thus disqualifying us
As someone who is old enough to have been working in tech since the 1990s... not really. I mean, it happened on occasion but it wasn't actually a common occurrence even during the heyday of large dot com exits.
The idea of this was massively propped up by overhyping the vanishingly few cases in which it did happen.
I'm not at all refuting your basic point that the "we're all getting lambos" fiction got increasingly disconnected from reality over time, but it was always more apocryphal than real.
Mid 90's startup: Sold company, proceeds company covered debt, basically. I learned a ton on those 2.5 years, but had to have a part time job to make ends meet (and I was not living a lavish lifestyle).
Late 90's - Mid- 00's: Partner in consultancy that made generational wealth for at least one client, worked to burnout multiple times, never able to use the consultancy to develop a product with ARR. Made good profit share and salary the years prior to dotcom bust. Company was sold for basically the debt on the line of credit.
Mid-00's - Mid twenty-teens: Joined a "startup" that was really a consultancy. Spearheaded substantial growth, Shareholders just increased the dividend amount every time company grew year over year. Unable to negotiate an equity position that aligned incentives (me giving up my life and energy to further build the business) so I left. I was forced to surrender the equity in another startup when I quit the first one. The other start up is limping along, I think losing a (manageable) amount of money annually. I never valued this equity because the shareholder group was the same as the parent company, so this one had the same issues.
So I guess in a 25 year period I had something like 2-3 exits. I worked more than full time between 1998-2015.
I'm now a firm believer in that a successful exit takes knowing the right people and getting lucky.
Dan Luu wrote about it over a decade ago: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
The math is not in favor of working at a startup, if you do it, don't do it for the money. People finally wised up to this.
Even as the founder, working at a FAANG usually works out better financially and is much less stressful. VC's do all kinds of horrible things to founders, like firing them, forcing them to sell at a price that means they get $0 (VC's get preference usually up to 2x their investment - if the sale price is lower than 2x the investment, founders and employees alike get wiped out.) People are also wising up to this.
If you're going to found a company think really hard about joining YC and/or going the VC funded route.
I think it'd be a lot more pleasant to found a company worth $10 million after 10 years, and own 100% of it, than to found a company worth $100 million after 10 years and own 10% of it.
VC is only really for when you've found real product market fit and your biggest problem every day is meeting the insane demand. Everything is just falling over and you can't scale fast enough and you're leaving piles of money on the floor because you just don't have the resources to serve those customers. Then maybe it becomes a good tradeoff.
You definitely don't have that in the beginning, and most companies never experience that.
I used to drink the koolaid, I applied to YC multiple times. I'm still trying to start stuff on the side of my day job, but I no longer apply to YC and fully intend to bootstrap a smaller but profitable software business.
Even class A shares are given in the form of options? Such that even to make it yours after a certain period (usually after leaving) you actually have to “buy” it and then pay taxes on its fictitious price difference.
I have come across ESOPs just once from an American startup (but I worked in my home country) and the whole thing just shocked me. The price used to change as if someone (Board? Banks? Founders?) woke up and just threw a dart on a number chart and that became FMV of that day! Even when there’s no funding round or so!
What is fuckyou money at this point? Take the Mega Millions lottery jackpot, it's default is $20 million nominal. You get cash payout instead of annuity, now it's about $10 million. Maybe you live in a state without income tax (I do), but the feds get their cut, now it's $5 millionish. You look for a nicer house (been living in an apartment)... and, since you don't want to lose it to property tax arrears all that quickly, you budget for that too for the next 20 years. How much house can you afford? Turns out, you're getting at most some upper middle class home in a second class city. Maybe with a nice car in the garage too. No live-in maids and chefs, no 40,000sqft mansions with indoor Olympic swimming pools and gold-plated toilets.
Hardly seems like fuckyou money at all. I think while we weren't looking, inflation snuck in and changed what fuckyou money actually was. You basically need to not just be a multimillionaire anymore, but a sub-billionaire.
That's a young man thing. Still trying to grow, to attract mates, etc. It switches (at least for those who develop correctly), to be able to provide for offspring and descendants material wealth is key.
>I don't need a giant house.
Perhaps, but we were talking about fuckyou money. Living in a crackerbox isn't an indication or test of fuckyou money... if Warren Buffet drives a beat up pickup truck, he's not interested in signalling fuckyou money. But he could also drive 31 different Ferraris, one for every day of the month right? My point was that fuckyou money has changed, and that by any measure even lottery jackpots aren't really fuckyou money anymore. Those are "yay, we get to send the kids to college without them being debt slaves" money. It's a strange world now days, that didn't used to be the case.
That said, even then, within the established tech companies there is space for innovation; if you can sell your idea within the company you work for, you have a lot more chance of success, and if you fail, you still have a job at least and / or you got paid during.
I see a lot of naivety in some of the AI startups - excited by the AI - but not really understanding the business they are trying to apply it to.
Also a lot of carnivorous sheep and grifters attracted by the money.
The product peaked, and then very quickly dropped to zero in about two years, while I tried everything to prevent going out of business.
Back at the bottom, a year or two of aimless wandering, I figured, well, I've seen the light, I know how this dance needs to be danced, I can dance it one more time.
I've since had half a dozen attempts not even produce a handful of accounts (or in the better cases, paid accounts), and it's simply not sustainable.
I was finally getting to a point where I felt ready to give up last year, and decided to try one last time or get back into a regular job. The problem being, "getting back" now means that I am 20 years older and more than likely _not a great fit_ for many of the roles out there.
So, for now, I am once again knuckle-deep in a new product, about to have a first customer this week (if they sign up) and some light on the horizon.
Yet, even if I manage to surpass all the possible stretch-goals on growth I have set this year, it will still pay considerably less than minimum wage, and that's if everything (and more) works out within this and the next year or so. On occasional consulting gigs I charge $$$, and I don't even dare to compare that to what these Saas/products bring in, is just ... sad. And I hear someone clacking on their keyboard already, responding...
The usual reaction to a post like mine will and used to be: well, you've got the wrong product, audience, or both. But all I want to say after doing this for 20 years now, is: that's the default. If you're not starting from a large-enough platform, your only way to success is to be literally "failing" upwards, in baby steps, turtle-speed, and that only results in success if you can somehow sustain doing that long enough.
The default is that nothing works out. People love to skip over this and always feel it doesn't apply to them and their idea. It will fail. The game is not to make a great product, the game is to figure out how to not go under while waiting for and/or constantly provoking your lucky break.
You can get lucky, and if you try long enough and often enough, you at least stand somehwat of a (very, very, very slim) chance. And, then, even if you do, all that luck is very brief and temporary and you'll be thirsty waiting for the next strike to stay above water. There is no "I made it" — there's only "I'm safe for a second, but what do I do next" in the very best of cases.
All that said, I believe it is totally worth the life experience. Life is short, it's a noteworthy thing to go through. But after a decade of failing, it'll quietly turn into a question of character, responsibility, psychological or social issues and general life-planning skills rather than a question of "do you want it hard enough to succeed".
Life is short.
I have had a decently long career in startups (closing in on 30 years) and never once was a founder, in part because I always wanted to make a decent salary. Being an early employee at a decently funded startup has been a great tradeoff for me and my family. Even if all the equity over the years had amounted to nothing, I’d still have had few reasons to regret this path.
Heard somewhere we are not supposed to be happy and absent minded. Staying on hard side of things shapes us and make complete.
I'm not sure if this helps, but I’ve personally stopped stressing about outcomes, "get rich quick" schemes, or being in the perfect moment.
The journey is what truly matters.
I use my own tools for consulting and eventually outsource myself as needed. If clients want to hire someone else, I don’t resist. I simply ask for two or three months’ salary for training and limited support afterward.
I’m not trying to build something worth millions to sell. I used to sell CRMs built on top of WordPress for a long time. Eventually, it evolved into a CRM I now use across several businesses. Over the years, I’ve also created numerous small tools that I’ve been using for over a decade—tools for tracking trends, education, and more.
I don’t aim to be in the top 5% of earners, just be in the middle for targeted niche is ok.
For me, freedom means working in "Pendulum mode"—six months of active client phases followed by six months of prototyping new ideas. That balance keeps me sane. No conflict of interests. Clients know I worked hard to kick off things, and productive than most other engineers in slow mode.
As for pressure of being update - I made a simple commitment to try new things 4-8 hours a week min. AI, ML, K8s, hyped programming languages. It was brutal at the beginning, and extremely joyful process now. It's getting easier and easier. The main motivation is to be connected with folks who will come after me.
I'm also trying to surround myself with builders, and be less with transactional people who simply wants salary. Helping other to overcome and internalize the essence of pain of owning code and full responsibilities make my struggles easier.
One thing I would never sacrifice for being in a creator mode - wellbeing and needs of my family. Whatever it takes to bring the food on the table. All high purposes come after.
Naval's mega episodes help me to settle things in mind really well too
wealth https://nav.al/rich
happiness https://nav.al/happiness
health https://nutritionfacts.org/daily-dozen-challenge/
The buzz from 10-15 years ago just isn't there any more.
There is only so much you can do with organizing information and entertainment through HTML and JS and make a profit of it. Maybe there will be a nice whiplash gold rush for making the web great again as this pile of garbage doesn't inspire anyone anymore.
That will happen as soon as a new business model alternative to what caused the enshittification appears. Alternatively, maybe a new tech will emerge that will offer freedoms and possibilities similar to the early days of the web.
I wonder if part of what’s happening may be a generational shift in how people in and around the startup world view work/life balance. In my limited experience, GenZ folks tend to place a premium on reasonable working hours, so it’s not surprising they would evaluate the trade offs between startups and big tech differently.
The sheer leverage that AI provides founders today is simply astounding. I have leveraged AI tools to build things I would never have been able to build just several years ago.
The case in point would be it is now extremely easy to create Chrome plugins that automate aspects of my business simply by asking Claude to do so.
Another example I can point to is the use of GPT to create documentation for government tenders. Many of these tenders need supporting documents that, quite frankly, I would not have been able to create on my own. Everything from how to create documentation around modern slavery and supply chain audits, to indigenous inclusion. This is stuff they simply don't teach you at university.
We are living in a golden age where a solo founder can create so much value on their own.
This is not to say I'm not worried for the future, I very much am. I'm worried about an economic routing of the middle class caused by AI taking white-collar jobs...
This need to be extremely efficient has caused us to do all sorts of things, like create shipping and fulfillment robots that pick products from the shelf and help our pickers and packers out[1].
I found that it's a lot harder to do things with atoms than just software. As a company, we have been able to automate a bunch of work that would have been previously done by an office admin. I believe this style of white-collar jobs is particularly vulnerable to automation.
I have two main concerns. One is that the folks with white-collar jobs that would buy our products will no longer have the economic means to do so. The second is, well, a lot of our products are STEM-based, and I'm worried that educators will no longer feel the need to teach coding and electronics, because in the future there may be the view that such work will simply be done by machines, and all what a student really needs to be able to learn to do is learn how to communicate in a clear manner using english...
1. https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/pages/the-raspberry-pi-...
Do you mean accessibly priced?
This is achieved by reducing margins, and when you reduce margins, as a business you have to do more with less.
That's what I thought, so do not say excessively since that would mean overpriced because it is excessive.
Accessively sounds like almost the same word but means something can be easily accessed, is more within reach or "not high priced".
Perhaps the best wording might be "affordable" for edu customers.
I have yet to meet a single startup billionaire but i already know at least one person who made 1B+ through scripting and several who are in 9 digit range. It's just easier there because there is no law to abide (you are anonymous by definition, and frequently a sybil of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of fake people), and no need to "sell" or be liked by anyone.
It didn't exist before ~2017 because crypto/smart contracts were not a thing yet. SEO/SEO scams existed yes, but these never brought in comparable amounts of money and traditional startups looked more attractive in comparison. Today, many people just run dozens of solana nodes, guess how much they make?
I am not entirely sure of what you refer to with 'scripting' though (I assume crypto related), pretty broad word in our tech world :P
(please explain "scripting" here, I don't think it means bash)
Scripting could be in rust of solidity for instance, but sometimes it's just python or literally bash.
Prime recent example: solana mods that improve voting. Before they stopped working (as too many people started using them), hundreds of millions were made by gaining advantage in attracting stake on staking pools by those who used them while others didn't - as they could consistently get better voting performance. And a mod was just a hundred or so lines in rust.
I suspect Hacker News is just bigger and less skewed towards Silicon Valley than it was in 2013. Maybe that changes the vibe, but I don't think anyone is (or should be) deciding whether to do a startup based on the tone of comments on an internet forum.
I didn't go for big tech but I did pick a job on a YC startup that, while demanding, allowed me to purchase my own house and work on my own stuff in the evenings.
I recently left a job at a startup where I had some options vested. It would be like 6k to exercise them. I was leaning towards leaving em, and now this thread has kinda convinced me
There’s nothing inherently wrong in the latter, but it’s super unusual, and it’s pretty safe to be wary of startups shouldn’t do unusual things with their financing / cap table.
Exercising options post departure, on the other hand, is par for the course with any option-based compensation (note that this shouldn’t apply to RSUs, since those are usually owned outright after vesting).
A similar question arises with payment of taxes for 409a elections. Can be pricey, but it doesn’t raise the same red flags as a founder asking you to pay to work there.
But it's all shares. First from being early in a marketing startup that recently closed, second from being one of the first engineers of an event ticket marketplace that's holding on for dear life, third from a tourism unicorn that paid half my salary with instant-vesting shares during Covid.
I'm in Berlin. Houses are expensive here, but still possible with a Startup salary.
Rules of thumb for the green engineers:
- Take salary/health insurance over stock in almost all cases.
- At some companies employees who are greener and greedier will fight/sabotage all their peers to get rid of them, is this the type of place you want to be at? Insider fighting is often a big part of why these companies fail.
- Never pay into start up equity. If a company "offers you the chance to buy their stock" after X months/years don't do it and if you do, don't put much in. Have an excuse so no one gets offended like "I am saving for a house" or something. If you're looking at a 5k minimum simply don't do it unless that is peanuts for you.
- Make sure anything offered is in writing and completely understood before joining. Lots of things are said at final stage interviews. If it isn't in writing you are not getting it. Ask questions be annoying.
- Negotiate. Its the only way you can actually get what you want. If the stocks mean nothing to you unless you get them quick, negotiate that. Start ups close doors extremely suddenly every single day.
For instance, if I got $5,000 worth of options when the company was “worth” 1 million, is that a safe bet to buy into?
Like surely the founder would be able to sell the company for 1 million dollars instead of crashing and burning… right?
That is absolutely not guaranteed at all! It's not even guaranteed that the next funding round will be on a better basis, or not dilute you.
The pre-IPO market for companies is illiquid and bad at price discovery.
It's not even guaranteed that there will be a funding round at all. Raising money is extremely hard, for most companies.
This generalizes to a rule of thumb, "Don't accept any deal you didn't go looking for." Same as a trapdoor firewall doesn't accept any incoming connections.
Someone on the street offers to sell you a bridge, say no. You get brightly-colored letters from your credit union selling you car insurance, recycle them. Your friend wants you to buy a bowling alley with him, refuse.
It almost always works.
Golden words to live by.
Also, if the startup gives you options/stocks without showing up the cap table, they are giving you a numerator and not a denominator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_table
Never trade real cash for imaginary money unless you have the facts
Interesting to read. Worth pondering. But with limits / caveats.
All that said, The Startup Industrial Complex is real. Plenty are being sucked in and spit out. That's going to impact Hearts & Minds, and comments shared.
That never was sustainable, I think, and effectively it became a glorified hiring process for big tech who bought the best toy companies to get to the people behind. And now even big tech figured it's cheaper to just hire the talent directly and not buy their token company for a few million first just to get the guys in.
Not saying a good company with a good idea and execution at the right time couldn't still make it big quick: there always were some lucky ones and there will always be. But the process isn't repeatably stable enough that there's a lot of wasted effort to make a few shooting stars. And everybody seems to be slowly accepting that. Go for it if the opportunity arises but if you spend 10 years trying and trying without the fish biting you're likely better off saving off from a decent salary when those years have passed.
> That never was sustainable, I think
Another aspect with this being (un)sustainable is lack of affordable healthcare. I bet many people would take more risks if they didn't have to worry about this aspect of their lives.
(I put free in quotes to avoid any reply guy "itself not actually free" blah, blah, blah)
That sounds worthy of deeper investigation, but healthcare is unlikely to be the factor?
I'm on mobile and can't search well but it's a topic that's been discussed on HN many times before.
Jokingly Swedish and Spanish colleagues have said that weather probably plays a part too - because it's so cold outside, lots of time is spent indoors - some of it with friends socialising or chilling (they even have a word for it, Fika), but not only. So you have lots of opportunities to read, think, explore, experiment.
In contrast, in Spain the weather is often nice and sunny, so you're outside more often, with friends, drinking and eating. You don't really have a lot of alone time at home to think and tinker and innovate.
It's purely anecdotal, but there might be something to it.
In my view, startups always involve rapid growth and VC money to achieve it. If the company doesn't meet that criteria, isn't that simply a regular business?
I've seen economists argue the opposite saying a startup is no different to a regular business. It depends on which definition you wish to subscribe to.
What makes you think that? Still plenty of startups being founded, many achieving success. It's long odds, of course, but what exactly is "unsustainable" about this? (And unsustainable to whom, exactly?)