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 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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..
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
Tech lost its glitter. It is now just another arm of rentier capitalism, not too dissimilar from banks and finance.
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.)
Well I'm still here but I've gotten a lot older. And you have, too!
> 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...
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™
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+.
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.
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?)
> 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.
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.
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).
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 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
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.
Talkers hate doers and those who dare to think of doing something.
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.
- Massive consolidation in tech: Large tech companies can easily acquire and neutralize potential competitors by offering founders a few million dollars, leading to fewer truly groundbreaking success stories.
- The evolving role of accelerators and VCs: They’ve turned startups into something akin to product management roles within their own agendas. Whether it’s cloud, AI, or the next big trend, founders often end up building what investors want rather than pursuing their own unique visions.
- A lack of truly groundbreaking ideas: We don’t see as many revolutionary concepts anymore—the kind that once gave birth to companies like Google or Amazon. This is likely tied to the investor-driven focus mentioned above.
- A shift in cultural expectations: Perhaps we—or at least the HN audience—are becoming more like Europe, with an increasing expectation that governments will take care of us, whether through healthcare or other social services. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does shift the mindset around risk and entrepreneurship.
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!
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?
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.
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-...
1) I am an investor in startups, and I have slowed my investments to a trickle since the beginning of Covid. I have noted that this has been generally true of other investors like myself.
2) There are still tons of problems to solve through technology applications; but there needs to be a moat between your solution and what AI will likely disrupt in the next few years. So, think about solving problems in the physical world.
3) Many startups create a pool of equity at around 10-15% of total shares for awarding to key employees. If your startup doesn't have this, then that is a red flag.
4) When assessing a startup, consider two things first: are the founders experienced in the industry and market they are attacking? Is the value of the solution obvious? i.e. people will likely willingly pay well to have the solution?
5) startups are still thriving at universities that support entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.
6) financial stability of startups, especially technical startups, is greatly affected by non-dilutive grants and contracts, e.g. SBIR awards. Investors look for this.
"The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find."
It is a repeating pattern in history that people think technology and science have reached a dead end. Michelsen (falsely attributed to Kelvin) declared principles of physics were already established before quantum mechanics. Watson said there was demand for maybe five computers in the world. These inevitably tend to be wrong because they misunderstand the dynamics of progress. Because technology is fractal, every invention spawns several others. The explosion of web was built on top of a lot of technology, and has supported a lot of technology too. Being an app or website has lots some of its initial novelty, but really this novelty was lost many years ago. Web itself has spawned many other frontiers - like innumerable frameworks, databases, languages etc. Those will spawn their own, etc.
The world will continue to have interesting problems. Whether those will have much intersection with writing software is less certain.
This is not to say that software is not evolving but most startups don't have an issue with building software but with business development (e.g. selling).
I don't particularly understand why (some) people say X technology has stagnated, like web or apps. There's a ton of innovation going on - off the top of my head, WebGPU and WASM will unlock huge amounts of performance for web apps, creating a lot of possibilities like much more powerful web game engines. There seems to be widespread beliefs that the market is "saturated" or "well developed". This always struck me like saying automotive startups won't work because rubber tyre technology has stagnated. Webs and apps are just the delivery mechanism for software.
I think there's two flawed reasons people think this. One is that they only perceive the change in people using it. So they think anything which has a lot of people already using it means it's saturated. Two, they as consumers don't perceive the vast, complex systems used to deliver those services. So a website is a website to most people, but they don't understand the massive changes it has undergone over the decades.
The only technology that really dies is very specific ones competing with others in a narrow field. For example vacuum tubes lost to the transistor.
When I said “no way” I meant the chances are close to epsilon. In the past, there was more room for improvement and breakthroughs in these fields. This doesn’t mean you can’t create a successful startup based on AI, but its success will likely stem more from the business development side than the software itself. The secret lies in bizdev.
Not me personally because most of what you listed requires deep expertise and founder fit. But certainly a lot of people are. It was always unlikely a startup would succeed, but from a technological perspective, the opportunities have just blown up because of AI. For example compiler/programming language startups like Mojo are back in vogue (the last major one being Java) because of the increased demands of AI/heterogenous hardware. There's many hardware startups like Cerebras. There's people trying to find use cases for AI - education, healthcare, automation, etc. Several incredibly successful games were startups recently - Genshin Impact, Black Myth Wukong.
Yes you're unlikely to make an impact in a very specific field - like going head to head against OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthrophic etc on SOTA models. But there's these hundred other innovation opportunities opening up precisely because these models do so well. Historically the greatest errors in thinking about innovation have been thinking about it like a linear progression of increasing the supply of a commodity to meet demand, like if you have enough computers that's going to be it. It's really like a tree, with an exponential explosion of the surface area of innovation opportunities. If you want a forward looking model, you need to think this technology X has gotten huge, what other technologies will this lead to?
Between double dipping for investors, accelerated vesting for the c-suite, and taxation intricacies, employees make out much less than they'll think even in good scenarios.
Everyone makes 10X less than their head in the food chain: investors -> c-level -> VPs -> directors -> senior staff.
For HN case, initial cohort either become too busy with life and success and left forum or become jaded and skeptical about startups by experiencing it by themselves. The second group is still very active here, driving a lot of sentiment in discussion. HN also changed audience to be more general techy forum that startup forum. There are more people that want to discuss politics instead of technology (see deepseek, UK hardware talent to AMA with Peter Roberts). Any post about hiring is full of people whining about leetscode. Posts about process are full of agile haters. Even product lunches are full of open-source zealots, discussion of unrelated stuff like rust or useless feedback about website working slowing on 10 years old android phone with JS disabled. There is very little content for aspiring founders.
Finally, there is value in HN for discovery, just not for startup. You can learn more about startup/VC from Y Combinator YouTube channel, Saastr or even Harry Stebbings podcast.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 worked in Big Tech before doing consulting at some startups and it appeared to me that startups were often these cultish tribes where the willingness to accept a small percentage of equity was a strong signal that the employee really did believe the future of the company. They don't really want people around with realistic expectations as it'll hurt moral and the illusion that they have to keep going as they raise for subsequent rounds.
If you stay too long and the company does grow, but your salary doesn't keep up, and you decide to leave you now have to either abandon your options or buy them and pay taxes on an overinflated FMV (if I can't sell them then the FMV is 0 to me). You are now left with options that are, at best, worthless for a long time or most likely worthless forever. Meanwhile founders have gotten money from internal raises to keep them going and have some ability to make sure their shares have value when an exit happens. Staying means you watch year after year as your options continue to not be worth anything and your share of the company continues to be cut as rounds of funding happen all the while watching as people at a FANG are making 50% more than you.
The only strategy that has a chance at any value is leaving early and leaving often or coming in very late to have a real salary and a chance at a minor boost on your options when an exit happens. If you are an early employee (20 or less, and your options are valued at ~0.10 or less) AND you think there is some chance the company will 'make it' then buy a few k of your options as soon as they vest and leave after 1-1.5 years to go to the next place. This avoids taxes on worthless options and gives you some shot at maybe having one give you some value back. If you are any later than that then don't buy your options and make sure you get a salary that is competitive and still leave after 2-3 years if the company hasn't made it. The options are probably going to be worthless but now you are using them to grow in ability and salary.
Options as compensation is a lie and that is the core problem.
There's a ton of big, real problems with our world at the moment, and I don't see the startup scene attacking any of those.
> 3. The VC model's limitations have become apparent. The focus on hypergrowth and exits has left many founders [[engineers]] feeling trapped between authentic business building and investor [[founders]] expectations.
Damn me! I’ve be naive to trust the (marketing) promise of the last startup I worked for, as an authentic promise from the founders. A few weeks into and I understood the real goal was to grow and get market shares, whatever the means. I felt betrayed but stayed because I liked my peer and the day to day job, and economic insecurity feeling.
Fast forward 2 years: burnout and quit.
Probably some of the 3 founders did kind of trust in the marketing promise at first and after so many speechs and work they confirmed it via some IKEA effect and confirmation bias [0]. But I felt we were actually building fancy CRUDs (forbidden idea there!) not disturbing anything at all.
0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
You don’t have to build a unicorn.
Business has to be sustainable; profit has to be higher than expenses.
Plus I think in 2025 people might be too negative and less likely to break the mold socially than in 2012. However I think that’s also an exploitable situation ‘cause it means less smart people trying to compete against you?
/bestcomments is a great place to discover these types of comments, in case someone has missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
With the passage of time I’m not who they want in the big end of that funnel anymore anyway, so maybe I just don’t see it. But the founder class back then had an appeal that they don’t today to me. I’m sure it’s naïveté but I believed people wanted to change the world back then (while making money) and it was inspiring. Now I only believe people are in it for money, which is the opposite of inspiring
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Also general coding practices for large teams or multiple intersecting teams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
- 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?
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.
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.
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
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Liquidation preference!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Given the failure rate I think it's always been hard to justify for the vast majority of people.
The public got wise.
I sort of disagree with this. While clearly the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked, I still see a ton of good ideas! This might come off as rude, but if you’re the type of person who follows the standard track of graduate with a cs degree then work at big tech for 5 years with your main hobby being socializing or working out, then yeah good ideas will hard to come up with. For those of us interested in tech but with highly non-linear career paths, startup ideas basically fall out of the sky.
The only validation a startup should seek is paying customers or revenue. Everything else is a vanity metric.
What HN comments say is irrelevant, whether positive or negative.
I shouldn't be speaking for you guys because I'm genZ... but it's probably to do with the new responsibilities and the increased risk aversion that comes with them.
The buzz from 10-15 years ago just isn't there any more.
I'm currently working on a startup, completely bootstrapped and taking no VC funds. I know what my odds are and I know that the company will most likely fail, but I still do it. That's what makes startup founders "crazy", because you have to realize how low your odds are and at the same time say "fuck it" and keep going.
IMO there will always be startup founders because there will always be folks that want to scratch that itch.
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
Not like it makes the ecosystem and startup math more reasonable, though...
Startup pay usually beats what random business pay for SWE work.
Probably there's some kind of third track, but it's less obvious to me.
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.
I wonder how old the author is. I started working in 1997 at the height of the dot com boom. I knew people at multiple startups that got bought. People that were millionaires at age 25-30. I would get about 5 phone calls a week on my office phone from recruiters thinking I should leave.
In 2001 I saw all the layoffs and we had a reorg. The job and coworkers I loved turned into something I hated. No recruiters, no openings, it took me 10 months to find something new.
Since then I tried 2 startups and both were failures. In the first I don't regret it as my old job was not great. At the second I know that I made a mistake both professionally and financially. That was 5 years ago and if a recruiter contacts me for a startup I don't even reply. Not interested at all in the chaos and failed promises that was my startup experiences.
Also, you don't need to come up with something totally new that has never existed before. You can also build something that is already proven to have use for. Much easier to sell a little better or a little cheaper product to markets that exists instead of trying to create markets for something no-one has ever used before.
Tried this quite a few times to know that competition is a good thing to have. The screen is a blank canvas, but the real world isn't.
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.
If your goal is to make a good salary at a stable company, I don't think a startup is a good choice. Doing a startup is like trying to become a rock star (though chances of success are probably 10X better).
I get the sense that they’ve been dramatically ramping up volume which inevitably has an impact on quality
Furthermore, according to statistics, 1 out of 10 startups succeed on average or 90% startups fail within the first 10 years of launch.
So, we can say that startup is actually a winter game from the beginning.
> The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.
There's still lots of low hanging fruit. But so much of this is hard to implement in a way that won't be immediately replicated by a major player. So good luck displacing them.
* COL in most areas has skyrocketed, housing and healthcare have both ballooned in cost massively. This has meant I'm much less likely to take risks that would put either of these at risk.
* My ideas aren't unique. I'm 99.9995% sure that the ideas I have floating around in my head for a startup are already covered by someone much more capable than I to execute them. Given that the main reason startups fail is a lack of market, and I'm definitely not the sort of person that can just make a market appear overnight... Yeah definitely not feeling like taking a risk on something likely either already served or which needs someone who can communicate to prospective customers why such a market should exist.
* I'm not interested in cashing out. My goal if I'm growing a business is to have something I enjoy and cherish. Not just to sell and cash out. (I say this now naively )
TLDR: The risk reward ratio in my estimation only favors the ultra wealthy, or unicorn engineers right now. I'm smart but I'm not that smart. My goal right now is to get enough money I can retire and work on projects I want to. If that means one of them becomes a startup, I'm good with that. But, I'm also not expecting to IPO or get VC backing if that happens.
I’ve worked for 10 startups, 3 with successful exits, but only 1 of which made me a tangible financial boost; in true startup fashion this last success has more than paid for the rest. 2 of these startups were bootstrapped with cofounders that I later had a falling out with. This was a deeply horrible experience, at a time when I had no financial safety net. This made my self-esteem during key strategic decisions disorienting low. I had peers also founding startups during this time I was regularly in touch with, and they managed to be so much more level-headed than me, while I kept taking crazy risks or being too risk-averse. Years later, I realized most of the the "peer" cofounders I was comparing myself to had generational wealth. To them, founding a startup was more like a gap year. This was the roughest period of my life, and I actually have more spotty memory of this time than before or afterwards; literal brain damage.
I’ve ended up in startups so often because they enable you to tackle interesting problems holistically. I’m happier and more useful in this mode of work, rather than at an established company where you end up having to use existing, out-of-date models in team roles that are relatively silo'd. As an early startup employee, you can get an incredible amount of latitude you wouldn't otherwise. Founders should be leaning into this as part of the employment offer - you can't pay as much as a big company, but if your employee wants every Wednesday off because they do a weekly silent yoga retreat, you can say yes to that, while a big company wouldn't. The worst times I've had working for founders are when:
1. They treat the startup like their baby, and try to micromanage it like it's still only 2-3 people when the team has grown to a few dozen.
2. They think of the startup like it's their gap year, and don't actually care about product success. They want to continue with their original on-a-pedestal hypothesis for 2-3 years without attempting pivoting into potential traction. They run out of investor's money, and then get upper-level management jobs at large companies. I'm not offended at the waste of VC money, but rather the waste of human effort; we could have potentially found user value. If we aren't going to do aggressively pursue that, at least let me mess around with my own nonsense instead of insisting I stick to the product roadmap we all know isn't going to go anywhere useful.
Our primary model for creating new value is VC-backed startups, where the payoff is huge if you win, but unsustainable and demoralizing for anything else. This incentivizes startups and their investors to shoot for the moon and miss rather than seek lifestyle businesses which could have been a great contribution to the infrastructure of society. I wish the other R&D models got more attention: think tanks, government grant-based orgs, etc. I've done R&D work in academia, but I've found unfortunately that people are so ephemeral, so while most of the work is intelligent, it's quality is fragile and isn't reusable engineering. One exception would be some of the university-backed open data institutions https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/us-state-level-conservati...
All that being said, I am currently bootstrapping a startup now! This time, I have a long personal runway, and I am quite happy. I am working with 1 part-time contractor, and at the stage where I'm discussing a raise with a few angels to hire a full-time team. However, if this raise doesn't work out, the path forward for the next ~2 years is the same, just more gradual.
Is there a statistical analysis which backs this claim?
I can totally understand why folks like working at FANG and it’s wonderful that software engineers can get paid proper large salaries with that lifestyle. It wasn’t always true, Google was the pioneer.
I took 5 years off to travel in 2013, and I’m starting a new company now without taking even a week off after Formlogic (my last startup) ran out of runway.
Understand what’s best for you and follow it. Happy to discuss early stage entrepreneurship with anyone wrestling with the question
1) Big corporations continue to struggle with doing in house innovation. Hiring more people doesn't seem to work. Just look at the infamously long and ever growing list of failed Google stuff. They are spending billions on this stuff. And most of it fails. Most large companies struggle with doing big new things in house.
2) There continue to be successful startups challenging/disrupting those big companies and occasionally scaring them into action (like acquisitions). And some of these startups are well funded.
3) Most Big Tech companies have been downsizing over the last few years. Job security maybe isn't that amazing if layoff rounds are a regular thing. And bigger salaries also means more scrutiny when layoffs happen. Also see #1: if projects aren't working out, layoffs are quick way to cut the losses. Getting caught up in one of these doomed corporate innovation things is maybe not great as a job security plan.
Also, post covid, the notion of physically locating development teams close to San Francisco is no longer that much of an automatic thing. I see a lot of startups here in Berlin that only have a token presence in the US (not necessarily Silicon Valley) and do all/most of their tech in Europe. It used to be that startups would physically move to the Valley after raising money. That seems to happen much less these days. Mostly, US presence for such companies is limited to sales and marketing.
And there are also lots of US startups setting up teams abroad. Why pay a premium for commodity development teams? Especially if you just raised a few million, you are on the spot to deliver. Going on a spending spree in the Valley maybe isn't the best way to do that.
For example, while (1) is totally correct, you need ten of thousands of startups to have a few ones that are acquired by big companies. The need of big corps doesn't estimulate the creation of startups if incentives are not aligned.
That's not really the case. A lot of value gets created outside these companies. And every time that happens, their default mode seems to panic, do a lot of hiring and ramp up some big R&D effort. Failure seems common for these projects. And typically more expensive than doing it via startups. Just look at all the spending on AI in big tech companies. Most of it seems rushed and not really that effective. And they are all responding to each other; and to some well funded startups that are succeeding where they are failing.
> you need ten of thousands of startups
Just do the math. That's a few tens of billions in funding. Well within range of the R&D budgets of these large companies (individually even). And of course a lot of the investment burden and risk is shared with a wider community of investors. Their main issue is absorbing this R&D and value back into their companies. Acquisitions and acquihires aren't that effective mostly.
Employing a large ineffective workforce at premium rates also isn't free and hardly a guarantee for value creation. That's why layoffs are a thing.
5. 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.
I’ve seen numerous Eternal Septembers. Each culture thinks they won’t have it and unless they’re a pay-for service they will.
New founders have less wool over their eyes, and increasingly run the numbers and say, "wait a second, that's the expected success rate? That's the pressure I'll have to grow grow grow? Those are the terms? Nah, I can work 40 somewhere, get paid more, and put in fewer hours."
We've stopped romanticizing killing oneself for the hustle too.
I'm currently working on building my own startup in the billing industry which has a massive barrier to entry just on functionality and then marketing spend and whatnot. If I was in my 20s all this work wouldn't be that much of a big deal. In my 30s it's rougher. And in 40s it would be even rougher.
That's not to mention other issues like funding becoming harder to get.
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.
But I think this is more reflective of a shift in the makeup of HN commenters than of society as a whole. The people I work with today don’t seem any different, on average, than the people I worked with 20 years ago.
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.
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?
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?
(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 am not entirely sure of what you refer to with 'scripting' though (I assume crypto related), pretty broad word in our tech world :P
Add to that, that every tech advance gives birth to horrible destructive potential that is realized- you have growing despair.
it's a bit like psychology that, despite being true and insanely valuable, is bad for crowd control, to put it in slightly conspiratorial ( cooperative portfolio ) terms.
and there's of course the issue of the variety of engineers they grew and research fields they expanded. the narrowing of the playing field, in general.
but hey, let's read some PG article that distracts us with fake honey & not really milk, produced in shlobbering portfolio communist environments that spread back doors into teen minds to use perverted live telemetry to build poofy, roofie-craving consumers
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.
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