That was my take as well. It seems he wants that long-term, corporate job, but it's just not there for the taking. The startups seemed to be the step-up from the Craigslist gigs.
That's true and I told the guy that he has to make a choice. Either he has to be willing to "settle" with being a corporate drone and enjoy a nice work life balance or come up with a great idea and go all in and execute. Very few if any of the well known startups get successful by doing it "on the side".
Uh... major red flag imo. I recommend your friend stays put and finds a way to slowly tiptoe into startuplandia. The job offer he got sounds like it isn't a good fit in a lot of ways.
Some companies are crazier than others... a lot crazier.
I think I found the last early stage startup I worked at through Craigslist. This was usually my stomping grounds to find some occasional part time or contract job and we had a very informal process from first phone call to job offer.
This guy seemed to have his head on straight, and having both degrees in law and computer science, felt like a slam dunk combo to run a SaaS business without getting into hot water. However, sales tanked in my second year of worked there, and was eventually laid off. Three years later, they're still around doing buisiness, but I don't know if they're coming or going. You can sometimes never tell from the outside, when they're not making news headlines and feels like they could be spinning their wheels.
I live in Chicago, where a lot of startups are B2B more than B2C and don't really spam hunt most places anymore, because it's hard to find a lot of information about them.
Good point, forgot about that one. I know people in that situation - not sure if they're looking to do a startup, but if they did it would be hard for them to leave their current company.
Quite a few statements made here with little personal experience to back them up. I'm a startup founder for the last four years and would not trade it in for anything - even the difficult experience of taking my company through Techstars and then having a split with my co-founder right after.
Startups aren't for everyone but what you learn about yourself, doing business, customers, markets, etc... should not be ignored.
Corporate jobs are also not for everyone but there are many this you learn on that environment that is invaluable too.
I say fuck the odds, keep your job and build something, and sell it. If you can't sell enough of it then figure out why and what's next.
In many ways, with his level of recognition and technical success working at a company is far preferred. He likely gets to work what he wants to work on, gets paid well, and gets to focus 100% on technical issues.
If you do a startup, you spend a LOT of time thinking about managing and hiring people -- at least after the jump.
Startup are great places to potentially make a lot of money. After doing a few myself, including some pretty decent deals -- I don't think I'll do another unless I simply have some Google-like breakthough.
Yep, After reading detail and checking their site - I am tempted to apply for this job but I won't because still I am not at a stage to decide between own startup vs joining startup.
His LinkedIn states that he graduated last year and worked for a startup for a grand total of 3 months... nothing against the author, but he seems to be too young and inexperienced to fully understand the big picture of something as complex as boom & bust cycles in the startup ecosystem. I certainly don't understand them. Too bad that his startup-experience seems to have been a bad one. For some(most?) people a big company is just a better fit. Life is too short to be wasting it on something you're not passionate about.
Maybe it's me but it feels like it should take some initiative to find work with a startup. Startups are (usually) more demanding than regular corporate jobs and require a higher degree of self sufficiency and initiative. You can end up at a corporate job and sort of realize over 6 - 12 months it's not for you and the whole experience and moving on is pretty soft. You'll know in about 4 - 6 weeks if the startup live is not for you and it'll be intense and emotional. So better it's not handed to you on a plate lest you make the mistake of signing up without enough critical thinking.
It's a personal decision that's hard to come up with hard and fast rules for. I know for me, every time I've found myself suddenly without income, I've been able to bounce back faster than if I'd been in the position of having to juggle a job hunt with my job.
I would probably be much more willing to leave a startup at the drop of a hat over a safer and more stable corporate job like the one I'm at now. A corporate job has a history and a set culture that's predictable and not quite as subject to the whims and emotions of those at the top. A startup can get real hellish real quickly.
I feel like any startup I could found wouldn't be one I'd find interesting to work at. My former boss was a PhD with decades of expertise in his field. Working for him was an experience I couldn't have made happen myself.
Agreed. Something seems off about this post. Having worked at Google and also having founded multiple startups, I understand the allure of startups. However, I have to say that in my experience, no one leaves a job that they are perfectly happy with in order to found a startup.
The decision to found a startup comes from a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. Either because there is a problem you are so passionate about solving that you are willing to drop everything, or because you are dissatisfied with your existing work environment, and want to try to create your own.
This. I think there are elements of fantasy of what it's like to work at a big corporate vs. working 'for' investors.
Also, I can't help thinking you'd learn a huge amount at YCombinator even if at the end of it you said, you know what, this isn't for me, you'd be doing it from a position of having actual experience that tells you that.
She also mentions she'd prefer to work for a well founded early stage start up - I wonder where you can find those?
Here's the problem: he wants to work at a startup. A startup, if successful, that's at ramen profitability - meaning, there isn't any cash for you even if they wanted to pay.
If you've got a VC-backed startup with cash, they're recruiting interns through the traditional processes anyway, where this guy is going to have trouble standing out.
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