Saying you want to control your company and you want to be around 10 years and then raising VC funding is either naive or dishonest.
VCs aren’t interested in a lifestyle business throwing them maybe a small dividend and a miniscule number of companies go public. Look at YC, they have invested in thousands of companies and only around 20 have gone public and only 3 have had positive returns since going public
Why this industry has such a claustrophobic atmosphere? If he was a doctor and had a calling for the profession, I would understand. I was doing an unrelated degree (Econ), but now I am doing a tech degree and I never saw such a depressive mentality towards life among peers.
It is like these people are hell bound to the work culture, diehard workaholics. They don't know anything else outside of a computer screen.
The wild part to me isn’t 9 figures is good/bad, it’s that in year 8 the company still has a single human as the default DRI for culture, zero‑to‑one work, and existential decisions. If you’re going to turn down generational wealth, the least responsible version is keeping everything psychologically and operationally coupled to you; the grown‑up move is making yourself cheap to replace and designing a succession plan you’d actually be willing to trigger on bad news, not just a term sheet
I feel RevenueCat is on shaky ground, their market position can only get worse and worse as Apple and Google improve their complimentary offerings and they are forced into more A/B testing that directly competes with others. Recent StoreKit changes this year close a lot of the remaining gap. I would have sold. I wonder why they chose not to.
I had never heard of the company RevenueCat. It looks like a system for mobile app developers to make in app purchases. A few Internet sources say that RevenueCat has about 120 employees. I'm in a completely different field so I'm not going to claim to understand all of that but I have worked for 2 startups.
The author talks about himself and his co-founder Jacob and they went back and forth on whether to sell or not.
I am very interested in what the other 118 employees thought. Did they want the co-founders to sell? What was their equity in the company? What kind of deal would they get? Accelerated vesting? Much larger than normal RSU stock grant at the acquiring company compared to a normal new hire there? Nothing?
I post this link in many threads about startups about how the normal employees often get nothing. The author says "So we decided to raise another round" and I wonder if the co-founders share the liquidation preferences and captables with the other 118 employees.
I posted this comment in a different startup related thread last month but I really wish the CEOs of both startups would have accepted these lower offers.
I don't know what the captable was at the first startup but at the second I would have got around $300K. This would have been a large amount of money for me but the founders wanted more so they rejected the offer.
Almost every "normal" level employee thought we should have taken the deal and then we would have also gotten jobs with normal RSU grants and bonuses at the acquiring company which was a well established company.
It made me decide to never work at a startup again. I don't want a single person to be able to control my financial situation that much. I'd rather have the relatively guaranteed yearly raise, bonus, and RSU grant, and not have to drink the Kool-Aid of the founders.
> I worked at 2 startups. Both failed.
> The first had been around for about 4 years when I joined and had products that made money. They were trying to get acquired. They had partnered with 2 companies making products specifically for them. One of them offered to buy the company for $30 million but the founders thought their company was worth $300 million. They said no and then money started to run out and people started leaving. In the end the assets were sold for $2 million.
> The second startup was created by former coworkers and I joined after it had existed for 4 months. We worked like crazy for the first year and got our prototype out. We had a lot of interest but it took me a while to realize that the 3 founders already had net worths from $5 million to billionaire level. When I heard about offers in the $30 million range they just weren't interested in selling for so little. I left after 3 years and the company floundered another 2 years until they shut it down as people left.
I’d take the money, spend time with family (he mentioned toddler) and then figure out what to do next. Retiring isn’t everyone’s dream but at least having generational wealth is a big relief.
Good read. I had an offer for a mere 7 figures and that was hard enough to turn down. I couldn't imagine 9 figures! But I think I do get it, at least as much as I can get it at my level. It's hard to give up something you've poured so much of your life into -- "your baby." You lose the autonomy to continue shaping what independence looks like for yourself, or at least it felt that way to me.
Unless he's pulling a lot of cash out every year it seems unwise to not sell. He can then just go create something highly similar, bankroll it as much as he wants, but still have the back stop of vast wealth on case of failure.
I’m curious what kind of secondary sale happened? What is normal these days? Is it $5m $10m? Is that excluded from the $50m raised or comes out of that amount. Thanks!
I’m a big fan of the idea of an Office of the CTO group reporting directly to the CTO that helps with prototyping greenfield projects and exploring innovative ideas. I believe a group like this would be beneficial for larger organizations, like the one I work in. There are numerous opportunities for market disruption, but it becomes increasingly challenging to make bold bets as the company expands. If I had the power to do so, I’d set this up at my company asap.
If that group is necessary then it's a damning indictment of the product/engineering culture. The CTO's job should be to fix the broken culture, not try to side-step it.
You’re right but you’re in the wrong place to argue this. Bezos has a talk where he famously talks about instituting weblabs and A/B testing because he doesn’t want to be a decision bottleneck and wants low stakes experiments with little friction.
But HN now is full of people completely removed from any kind of entrepreneurial mindset, people who aren’t “hackers” even in the most generous sense. They will not agree.
Keyboard warriors is probably the best descriptor of HN demo now.
Nokia had exactly this kind of CTO office during the 2005 - 2012 years when they lost the entire smartphone market.
The CTO fiddled with greenfield projects that had no path to products while the house burned down.
The best that can be said about it is that inventions outside of the product helped beef up Nokia’s patent portfolio, which played a role in the company surviving the post-phone years and transforming into a pure network company. But they lost a trillion-dollar opportunity and shrunk into an average B2B enterprise.
Traditionally that was R&D and its own department.
Having a CTO pet group isn’t the best use of the CTOs time. If you want to have better architecture and explore greenfield projects, you need an organization that supports R&D through cross functional groups.
A CTO should NOT be doing greenfield projects. A CTO should be setting technical vision and strategy for the entire company.
tl;dr - delusional founder writes AI slop reflection narrative recast as “vision” and “conviction.”
Makes more sense given a. prototypical cto ego (and insecurity) amplified by b. he’s Spanish (ifyyk)
Thousands of words to justify the rejection of a nine-figure exit and he never seriously addresses what the exit would mean for employees or investors. “I’m a builder,” “I need to work with inspiring people,” “I’d be bored after two weeks.”
Hard to ignore the glaring contradictions amidst the AI slop. He sets “networking with executives” as a top annual goal, then says “networking is mostly bullshit.” He calls out two separate “biggest fires” for the year: first, reliability/support issues; later, hiring velocity.
On one hand he’s bragging about “not having to do anything,” but takes credit for every success (“my foundation-building,” “org design I set up,” etc).
Median senior engineering salaries in Spain are a fraction of those in the U.S. - you can take the founder out of spain…but you can’t…
And yet, the “nine-figure” rejection is repeated over and over. If it was such an easy, confident choice, why does it need so much explanation? Can’t wait to read more about CTO insecurity and a need for public validation. What’s Lemkin got to say?
I kind of want to be a CTO somewhere. So much bureaucratic stuff to become one though. You usually have to be someone's friend or start a company yourself.
Working 8 years to get to more than 100,000,000 $ and saying no to that...Maybe I'm just too poor to understand that.
Sure, this is hackernews, so the hustle mindset is stronger here, but the difference you could make in others people lives just with 10 % of that...
I mean, you could house, feed or educate people and you chose to...not do that ? To have more ? Is there a endgame you are not sharing with us, a special number that would make it OK to sell ?
26 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] threadVCs aren’t interested in a lifestyle business throwing them maybe a small dividend and a miniscule number of companies go public. Look at YC, they have invested in thousands of companies and only around 20 have gone public and only 3 have had positive returns since going public
https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
It is like these people are hell bound to the work culture, diehard workaholics. They don't know anything else outside of a computer screen.
Honestly disgracefully.
The author talks about himself and his co-founder Jacob and they went back and forth on whether to sell or not.
I am very interested in what the other 118 employees thought. Did they want the co-founders to sell? What was their equity in the company? What kind of deal would they get? Accelerated vesting? Much larger than normal RSU stock grant at the acquiring company compared to a normal new hire there? Nothing?
I post this link in many threads about startups about how the normal employees often get nothing. The author says "So we decided to raise another round" and I wonder if the co-founders share the liquidation preferences and captables with the other 118 employees.
https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/a8f6xz/why_didnt_...
I posted this comment in a different startup related thread last month but I really wish the CEOs of both startups would have accepted these lower offers.
I don't know what the captable was at the first startup but at the second I would have got around $300K. This would have been a large amount of money for me but the founders wanted more so they rejected the offer.
Almost every "normal" level employee thought we should have taken the deal and then we would have also gotten jobs with normal RSU grants and bonuses at the acquiring company which was a well established company.
It made me decide to never work at a startup again. I don't want a single person to be able to control my financial situation that much. I'd rather have the relatively guaranteed yearly raise, bonus, and RSU grant, and not have to drink the Kool-Aid of the founders.
> I worked at 2 startups. Both failed.
> The first had been around for about 4 years when I joined and had products that made money. They were trying to get acquired. They had partnered with 2 companies making products specifically for them. One of them offered to buy the company for $30 million but the founders thought their company was worth $300 million. They said no and then money started to run out and people started leaving. In the end the assets were sold for $2 million.
> The second startup was created by former coworkers and I joined after it had existed for 4 months. We worked like crazy for the first year and got our prototype out. We had a lot of interest but it took me a while to realize that the 3 founders already had net worths from $5 million to billionaire level. When I heard about offers in the $30 million range they just weren't interested in selling for so little. I left after 3 years and the company floundered another 2 years until they shut it down as people left.
But HN now is full of people completely removed from any kind of entrepreneurial mindset, people who aren’t “hackers” even in the most generous sense. They will not agree.
Keyboard warriors is probably the best descriptor of HN demo now.
The CTO fiddled with greenfield projects that had no path to products while the house burned down.
The best that can be said about it is that inventions outside of the product helped beef up Nokia’s patent portfolio, which played a role in the company surviving the post-phone years and transforming into a pure network company. But they lost a trillion-dollar opportunity and shrunk into an average B2B enterprise.
Having a CTO pet group isn’t the best use of the CTOs time. If you want to have better architecture and explore greenfield projects, you need an organization that supports R&D through cross functional groups.
A CTO should NOT be doing greenfield projects. A CTO should be setting technical vision and strategy for the entire company.
tl;dr - delusional founder writes AI slop reflection narrative recast as “vision” and “conviction.”
Makes more sense given a. prototypical cto ego (and insecurity) amplified by b. he’s Spanish (ifyyk)
Thousands of words to justify the rejection of a nine-figure exit and he never seriously addresses what the exit would mean for employees or investors. “I’m a builder,” “I need to work with inspiring people,” “I’d be bored after two weeks.”
Hard to ignore the glaring contradictions amidst the AI slop. He sets “networking with executives” as a top annual goal, then says “networking is mostly bullshit.” He calls out two separate “biggest fires” for the year: first, reliability/support issues; later, hiring velocity. On one hand he’s bragging about “not having to do anything,” but takes credit for every success (“my foundation-building,” “org design I set up,” etc).
Median senior engineering salaries in Spain are a fraction of those in the U.S. - you can take the founder out of spain…but you can’t…
And yet, the “nine-figure” rejection is repeated over and over. If it was such an easy, confident choice, why does it need so much explanation? Can’t wait to read more about CTO insecurity and a need for public validation. What’s Lemkin got to say?
I mean, you could house, feed or educate people and you chose to...not do that ? To have more ? Is there a endgame you are not sharing with us, a special number that would make it OK to sell ?