I think this is the crux of his argument. Of course there are outliers, but 90% of the time (I don't know the actual percentage, but I'd venture it's around there - if we're only talking about money I'd say 99.9%) someone will be happier if they go to a more established company.

And people are often disillusioned when their equity becomes worthless, because for years they were told that would be worth millions and they accepted low salaries because of it.

Of course sometimes it does work out great, and I'm happy that it did for you! But statistically, you are incredibly lucky.

Of the high-growth tech startups we're looking at, here's an analysis pointing towards 92% failure rate - https://s3.amazonaws.com/startupcompass-public/StartupGenome... - I suspect the real number is actually much higher if we're including seed stage companies.

Beyond that though, it's mostly me piecing together anecdotal evidence of disgruntled startup employees who left for larger companies and regret not joining immediately after college. There are of course plenty of people who join for the experience, for the smaller team sizes, the autonomy, etcetera. But I think my argument is largely driven by equity. Unless you'd happily except the job offer without the equity it's pretty hard to refute that people join startups because they want equity. And that equity is almost never worth it. If you aren't a single digit employee number at a company with a 10 digit exit, and this is still assuming you didn't get fucked by dilution because of asshole investors, the math just doesn't add up.

The odds of being in that cohort is much less than 1/1000, probably closer to 1/10000. It would take me a bit of effort to find a hard number on it (looking at total number of employees at large exits, find large companies that failed, approximate number of employees at various other startups) - but I actually know people that were employee #X at a company with a 10 digit exit who didn't get screwed by investors and they still would've been better off going to Google in terms of financial compensation.

Also I think a lot of it is ignorance. Many people at startups don't realize how much better it could be at a FAANG company because they've never worked there.

What's the amount of your salary? What's the value of your equity compensation? How much time do you get off?

(your benefits may not be as good as you think)

The concept here is closer to "firing your investors" or "buying back your equity", but they haven't necessarily done that yet.

valid: you want a sense of ownership and responsibility. if you don’t perform, there is a noticeable effect on the company.

valid: you want to be in an environment where others are just as committed as you to the success of the company. you want to treat your work as an endeavor, not as a means to a paycheck.

Are there big investors? Welcome to big company politics.

> valid: you want a sense of ownership and responsibility. if you don’t perform, there is a noticeable effect on the company.

Responsibility? Sure. Ownership? Unless you're a founder or a big investor, haha, no. Unless you mean the corpo-speak "ownership," which is just another word for responsibility.

Responsibility might make the work more emotionally rewarding, but it also makes the work more stressful, so I won't sell it for free.

> valid: you want to be in an environment where others are just as committed as you to the success of the company.

They may measure the "success" in terms wildly different from you, the employee, though.

> you want to treat your work as an endeavor, not as a means to a paycheck.

Actually while I might want something more, endeavour doesn't pay rent.

i don't mean it in a legal/financial sense, and i am not referring to any extrinsic reward, eg financial upside.

Five-year-old well-funded-and-profitable companies with 50 employees, where you as employee #50 are just there to toil away writing some dumb CRUD backoffice code—are still referred to as "start-ups."

And, in fact, since the other kind of startup dies more often than it succeeds and grows into this kind, most startups that are hiring at any given moment are this kind of startup.

I don't know how else to get the kind of experience you get at a startup. A big company will give you depth, but a startup will give you breadth.

Also, if you ever plan to be a founder yourself, working at a big company might not give you any useful experience at all.

Alternatively, from experience, while big company might not give you valuable experience it can give you some good people to have in your network. Even if its to ask your former company accountant for advice choosing a billing partner.

To add to this. The title of "early member of <insert famous startup company>" holds a lot of weight in SV circles. Whether or not you legitimately helped those companies in the early days, it's a strong signal that you are valuable. And those <insert famous startup company> doesn't have to be a company that necessarily had a huge exit or has a strong economic reputation. For example - early engineer of Yahoo? Ya, people probably think you're worth one's salt.

IMHO - I think this is the main driver people join startups. It's taboo, but vanity feels much more tangible than equity.

Benefits - very bad.

Both of these are valid reasons to work at a startup, if you have a family to feed and care for.

Sometimes any job is a good job, even if it's only temporary while you try to find the perfect gig.

Edit to add:

I've been in exactly this position. I took a dev job with a startup I knew was a complete loser, run by scam artists. But I had to put food on the table. Fortunately, I was only there about eight months before I landed a real job with a real company.

The dodgy company imploded, exactly as I expected it to.

You see guys working late at their little startup and maybe thing you should tell them it’s not going to happen. Because honestly for most of them it’s not.

But... I want to make the case that it's OK.

Even if it’s never happening they may be happy. If one stops viewing startups as $$$ opportunities and starts viewing them as rehab from the soulless corporate jobs full of soul-wilting mediocrity, politics, legacy, same old shit over and over, and backstabbing, then it might make a kind of sense to work at a startup instead. Take a pay cut and "try some different shit out" with a tightly-knit team.

It’s a chance to work with things that are greenfield and/or new/different/experiment. Maybe it works. It’s a chance to not be bored. You aren’t wedded to it and don’t need to do it forever. Stay up late and code for awhile. Have pizza. Debug. Try. Care.

The gotcha is if people focus on the IMGONNARICH including the management (where it translates to UNDERMARKETYOURCOMP, though maybe one doesn’t care). That’s poisonous but I think there are lots of options where this isn’t true.

The more people I talk to outside the Bay Area, the more I encounter who I think are doing it right. A lot of them are not crazy, they don’t really think IMGONNARICH. They don’t end up in the FEELINGSWILLBECRUSHED state after it doesn't work (because, honestly, it doesn't).

I like people and being around them. I love the feeling of a team pulling together and exploring the dark corners of a problem. So when a break is in order, the answer might be startup rehab. It's cheaper and better for your career than a full-on year off.

The title bump rarely moves your career forwards.

These questions have always guided me well.

1. I never graduated from university (life came up, and I couldn't afford to keep going); but, also,

2. I don't live in the US (I'm Canadian.)

Any of the US bigcorps that want to hire programmers, expect them to get a visa and move to the US.

You know what you need, to get a work visa as a programmer coming to the US?

A college degree!

So, my employer pool was instantly limited to non-US companies. Mostly local Canadian companies. Most of those are very conservative and also expect a college degree. The only ones that aren't, are startups. So that's what I had to do.

The really annoying thing is, I ended up doing work for these Canadian startups that would netted me a $300k USD salary if I had been doing it for a US bigcorp. But, because Canadian salaries are lower, and startup salaries are lower, I was only getting ~$60k.

After years of doing that, I'm a Canadian startup founder... and still only making (i.e. paying myself) $60k.

I guess I'm an object lesson in the value of a college degree!

Disagree with this one - yes you will need to self-learn, but learning to self-learn is an invaluable tool in itself. You will learn to be extremely non-reliant on other people, and you will probably need to learn about parts of the stack you did not know about before, and fast. You might learn about project management or giving sales pitches. If you are thinking about starting your own company, you will learn a huge amount about how this happens, and what that means (I learned that I didn't want to do it for example!)

I have learned a huge deal from my startup experience, probably double the rate I was learning at the bigger company I was working at before.

Because I would add "chaos" to the list of negatives. The odds are likely you're going to get a C-suite or board that has ADHD-like tendencies, especially when chasing large customers and/or funding rounds.

You will continually be dropping or delaying long-term work for short-term projects to help the company achieve other goals.

Sounds terrible