Ask HN: Have you had trouble getting a job after a failed startup?
The article about the successful female Japanese entrepreneur got me thinking. I've been working for the man my whole life. When I was younger, I had someone turn me down for a programming job because they said my GPA was too high. I thought that particular employer was an idiot but it is their call. I'm curious if there are similar biases that are faced by failed entrepreneurs. Someone can have a bias that if you did a startup once, you will likely not be a stable employee and quit after a little while to do your next startup. I'm not worried about the major markets (Silicon Valley and New York) but about the rest.
76 comments
[ 337 ms ] story [ 582 ms ] threadIf you're worried about failing as a startup, consider that the company failing won't mean that the PRODUCT failed - you may fail with a beautiful product that people love and use that attains reach that many profitable companies can not. The only way I can see failure as a startup to be seen as a negative is if you did something unethical or built absolute crap, or perhaps didn't launch at all.
IMO regarding the startup thing, it all depends on what/who/where you are interviewing for. I've talked with hiring managers who saw it as a major asset and others who saw it as being akin to an excuse for being unemployed for a couple years. It all revolves around the manager's perception of entrepreneurship. It's not a global perspective but rather much more individual.
Interesting question, I hope it gets some traction.
I've worked for employers that have gone out of business but not as an entrepreneur. I've never worked more than 300 miles from Chicago. No one cares, no resume stain. You're going to have a lot of trouble collecting more than anecdotes.
Outside major markets, the market is smaller and subjectively better connected and personal relationships are going to be pretty important. People will know you and what you personally did and that narrative is going to be more important than the narrative in company financial papers etc.
If you built up skills that are marketable and achieved great things along the way, you'll be pleasantly surprised - I came out worth almost 2x on the market as what I did when I quit. It was incredible.
That said, being an entrepreneur will change you - you will become a maverick, you will lose your fear of authority, you will be a value creator as you're so used to the survival mentality you used to foster in your startup. This alone justifies why any company that cares about innovation would want you leading their team.
Leaves you with mixed emotions.
And to be honest I agree with the bias that ex-founder types may not be the most stable of employees.
But here's the thing. Hiring is not an exact science. There are tons of variables in play beyond simple work experience and skill set. There's a whole art to negotiating employment (from the employee side) that most programmer types just don't get at all.
Engineers want everything to be a skills test. But in reality, skills come roughly 18th in a hiring situation, way behind questions like "did this candidate tell me any amusing anecdotes?", "was this candidate tall?", and "did this candidate say anything that inadvertently made me look bad?" Somewhere further down the list you might indeed find "did this candidate try to strike out on his own and fail?", but it'll be lost in the noise.
So if you want to work on something, work on your "being a guy that a CTO would want to have a beer with" skills. That, combined with a bit of networking, will often let you skip the "previous work experience" and "resume" portions of the hiring process entirely.
Starting a startup and failing doesn't look bad in your CV, don't worry about that. But if you are looking for a job, you should definitely work on your technical skills, learn new technologies etc instead of your networking skills...
Conversely, if you're a self-motivated learner, a good team member, and able to contribute, but don't quite have the technical skills we're looking for, we'll gladly take a training hit (usually 2 to 4 weeks) to get you up to speed on language X in exchange for an engaged and valuable employee.
But that might just be my company.
But """work on your "being a guy that a CTO would want to have a beer with" skills. That, combined with a bit of networking"""
Just sounds terribly wrong.
Drinking beer with me after work or good out together in the weekend isn't one of the requirements.
Shameless plug: Any companies like this, feel free to contact me through the email address in my profile. :-)
Spent 3 years becoming an expert in technology X? Even if the whole job offer is about X, you'll have only slightly better chances than the guy who had a glimpse at X 3 years ago - the interview process simply has no way to find out how much better you are at X.
But if you were at a final round with a few other qualified candidates (maybe better qualified than you, maybe worse qualified - noone can tell, they can only tell that they're qualified) - and you're 'the grumpy one' or someone else has a good emotional contact - then that will be a decisive factor. Even if the decisionmakers deny this; and even if the decisionmakers are informed about such biases and actively try to counter them - research shows that they still do decide that way, it's simply human to do so.
Completely stupid irrelevant factors (such as being taller) do have a relationship to the offers you get and how much people are willing to pay you. That's how life works; ignoring it won't change it; denying it won't change it; saying that it's not fair (it isn't) won't change it - you may just learn about it and try to exploit it. And 'work on your "being a guy that a CTO would want to have a beer with" skill' is solid advice on how to try to exploit how reality really works.
It may be if you consider that the CTO would probably like to talk about interesting technologies, new programming language developments etc. over that beer. In other words, getting genuinely interested in your occupation will go a long way when looking for a job.
I wouldn't recommend trying to mould yourself to a particular "culture", just make sure your skills are on par and you're not a dick, and you'll find a job. I wouldn't want to work at a place where my height or anecdotes had any bearing on my skills as a developer, because ultimately it's a job and my height isn't going to get it done.
If you're not in your 20's, don't drink alcohol everyday, don't have a degree from Stanford/MIT/UC Berkley, and want to get home to see your wife/children by 7PM then you're "not a cultural fit"
You're looking for the startup founder who is able to see beyond his own preconceptions, because he will most certainly need that skill to survive in the marketplace.
The real work is being the "person with whom the CTO can have a meaningful discussion about their current work with and then produce results on." Whether or not you as an employed want to grab a beer with your hire is a false signal.
In the UK attitudes are horrible though, there is a stigma where if you fail your first entrepreneurial enterprise, you are somehow blackmarked for life. I think that just because of this there are lots of start ups in the UK, where the founders have not killed them because they are not working. There is a point where you know something is not going to work, and you should kill it, this stigma breeds a lot of waste.
For nimbler and more clued-in companies it will likely be a positive, since they are usually happy to have someone who doesn't settle for a comfortable desk jockey position at a corporation, and can handle the turmoil of younger companies. Only thing to be aware of is if you are applying for a technical position, they usually want someone who is happy to fill that niche, i.e. not a jack-of-all-trades who can code but also wants to be a salesman and a marketer etc. (Unless you are employee number one or two or somesuch).
These are lessons learned over a decade of being a corporate consultant, a freelancer, a startup employee and a startup founder.
Great advice and something I can confirm. Worked at two smaller start ups and they loved the idea I could think outside the box and wouldn't be bothered by a fast moving, sometimes chaotic process.
Since then, I've been in the corporate world. First few interviews I was proud of the start up work I did. Didn't get either job. Was told by a recruiter to tone my start up stuff down and communicate that I'm a more of "team" player. Next interviewed with a fortune 500 corp. Played down my start up experience while highlighting some of my successes and focusing on the bigger "team" wins.
Used the same formula in the last two interviews with success as well at large corporations.
At a startup you're put into a situation where you are under major pressure and you're constantly faced with tough/unsolved problems and or all imaginable difficulties when it comes to sales. This can be an amazing growth experience, depending on how you deal with it. 7 months into my startup, I find that I've grown by leaps and bounds when compared to my former jobs, where I was already quite entrepreneurial.
As to an eventual stigma in the UK, it's only worse in other EU countries; I know it is in mine. Here, people are more valued for obedience rather than for entrepreneurial attitude.
Make sure you can answer that question when you start interviewing.
For example, when the startup I worked for ended abruptly while I was out of the country (and came back without a job), it was easy for me to talk about wanting more stability in jobs I interviewed with.
I also talked about working til 2am regularly, and hoping to scale back those hours to something more reasonable so that I could spend time with my wife.
When I knew the company I was interviewing with had better technical processes, I talked about getting overwhelmed that it was standard practice to push to production at 3am when nobody was using the service and debug things live.
Would I use the same narrative when interviewing with another startup? No. Instead I talk about loving the flexibility to work until 2am, being able to eat lunch with my wife more while working from home, and not having to jump through hoops to deploy code to production.
I spent about a week in the doldrums, but then I felt angry, and decided I wasn't going to let their decision define me. I decided to build an app to show what I could do.
I spent 2 1/2 months building an app called Dashku. It was a realtime dashboard, and when I put it on Hacker News, it went to #1 within 45 minutes, and then the server fucked up because the ulimit config on the app server (which I had set but not persisted between reboots) was 1024, and got the flak I deserved for not making sure that the ulimit config has persisted when I configured the machines.
After doing it, these things happened:
- Bechtel contacted me and asked if they could use it internally. They did.
- I had a meeting with Geckoboard. They asked if I wanted to work for them, and I offered to sell Dashku to them. No bite.
- I interviewed at Forward Labs in London. I had about 4 interviews in the space of 2-3 days, but did not get the job offer. I failed to refactor a fill detection algorithm which was functional and fully tested, but memory inefficient. I had stayed up all night to crack it, slept for 2 hours and had no food when I came in for the interview and was asked to refactor it.
ProTip: Sleep well and eat before you go for an interview, otherwise your brain suffers for it.
Eventually, I got a job in London working for webcasting company, and then open sourced Dashku. Here's what happened next:
- Ninja Blocks gave me a free Ninja Block, and asked me if I would like to work with them.
- An Indian health startup asked to integrate Dashku into their IoT robotics app.
- A BI startup basically took Dashku, slapped a coat of paint on it, and called it their own.
- Another IoT startup asked to use it.
- An energy company told me they were going to drop Geckoboard for my app.
- I discovered a professional social network (called Viadeo) had created a wonderful collection of widgets for it.
Then,
- I got an email from someone at Facebook, they said that they were evaluating it for internal use, and asked me if I would like to interview with them in California.
I had to decline as my mother has health problems and I could not move to another country.
All of this, within 14 months of being fired from a startup.
Failure feels like crap, but don't let it define who you are; you have to move on and prove to yourself and to others what you can achieve. I've done that now and found peace with that period in my life.
I should probably thank the guy who fired me.
Working in Finance shouldn't prevent you from working in a startup.
I can recommend trying to scratch your own itch(es) - are there any problems in particular that you run into on a frequent basis, for which existing solutions are poor and you feel could be done in a better way?
Another exercise I could recommend is to ask yourself what would you be doing now, if you were free to work on anything?
There you go. How would you go about this? Social network? Forums? Magazine? All of the 3 and more? What about monetization? Don't worry, just being a bit rant-ish, I know those are tough questions.
There you go.
I would recommend asking a few outdoors friends whether they feel the same, and see if bringing about this worldwide directory would be a great thing to them.
To me, it sounds like a great opportunity because you have a specific audience to interact with, and there are opportunities to turn it into a business; think of outdoors venues and outdoor equipment companies who would want to promote their products and services to that range of people.
I would recommend asking friends, and in terms of further research, I recommend 2 books: Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston, and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Go for it!
Have you thought about joining a startup? I know some of the larger ones need financial analysts (Uber comes to mind). It's always in the back of my mind.
To your point: maybe in US yes, but in Europe I have been trying 2 years almost and nothing. Startups don't have the budget to support a full finance guy and when they have, they tend to prefer locals (like good luck getting a finance job in a German startup).
That's called a lie. Similar to the it wasn't a good fit one, most of the time there's another reason, maybe you weren't not that great of a programmer, or they didn't like your editor or tools.
From 10 years of experience working for a lot of companies and starting and failing some companies I can tell you, if they like you, they'll hire you even if you're an ex-convict. At a company I worked at we hired a guy with a recent conviction (battery). Great programmer nonetheless and he said was trying to get his shit together. There was something weird about him, like he smoked crack in the morning... But hey, he wrote good code and was never a problem, in fact he was the first one in the office.
He tells me when he hires people with degrees and advanced education and stuff they tend to quit because the job is boring, as well as being poorly paid and having no career advancement opportunities.
Perhaps the job was the programming equivalent of putting things into envelopes.
We also hired a PhD and the guy couldn't write code to safe his life, he, of course, applied to the programming position.
It made me sad he complained about us using an editor and not a IDE. Real life is very different than school, very different.
It ain't all roses. You can find that it f's up your resume.
Example: maybe your startup takes 5-yrs to fail. Maybe for year 3 and the last half of year 5 you just kind of wallowed around the house, and didn't do much.
You will try to start circulating again and trying to get a job because your savings are gone. You'll find things quite different in 2019 ( do the math). There are different people in the hiring positions with different mind sets, looking for different skills.
This is just one example of how things can go bad.
But, for me, it's worth it to take the risk.
Unsurprisingly, it is a way of averaging your grades (so that the whole of your academic career is compressed to one real number).
In the American system, the grades A,B,C,D,F are mapped to the numbers 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 0.0, respectively. Your GPA is a weighted average of your grades from 0.0-4.0
Usually a 3.0+ is considered to be decent.
There are always questions of why the startup failed, what your role was, and what could have made it succeed. Your answers could save you or sink you. But most people have at least some sense of the ups and downs of startups, so it will not automatically remove you from consideration for almost anything.
They will want to see that you have learned something. They also will want to know your personal reaction to the experience, and whether that will make you a more or less stable hire. Maybe your failure made you hungry for another startup, more fired up to succeed. Maybe it burned you out on startups, and you now want a stable corporate gig for a few years. Maybe something in between.
As long as your answers, your personality, and current desires match their needs, you can get a job. Maybe you are not a match for every job out there, but nobody ever is.