+1 to being angry all the time. I wasn't angry per se but I was certainly edgy. I loved my product but when I was on my first startup I really hated myself for giving up the potential to advance in my career and I desperately feared going nowhere and trying to explain to some clueless HR person the gap in my resume. Fortunately it worked out but that sucked :)
After my first startup went down in a burst of flames I spent years angry at everyone and everything like a big black tumor carried inside my heart. It sounds dramatic but that doesn't make it untrue. I learned a lot but I lost a lot more.
I'm in the same boat. Fortunate to have worked at startups that exited succefully and now in cushy corporate job. If I went out and did interviews I would just make enemies.
I wasn't angry. I was resigned. That's why I phrased what I said the way I did. After so many cycles of doing YC, I know a certain percentage of the startups in each batch are doomed. Some people just aren't meant to start startups, but there's no way for them to know that for sure without trying it.
So when a startup seems determined to stay on the wrong path, I won't keep fighting them forever. Eventually I give up. And occasionally when I do I tell them so, because sometimes that wakes them up.
I left a startup that eventually exited prior to my first year. vesting. The manager I had was one of those that was a smart guy, but didn't know his limits and between checking in broken code, aggressively (to the point of insult) insisting people work insane hours, and pushing for outsourcing more and more to a firm that was incompetent, I had enough. Being lead engineer and stuck with a launch that had no prep or IT people in place didn't help.
My favorite two stories were:
1) Disappearing on a weekend (well before launch) for my wife's birthday down to Big Sur. I had told people, but apparently it didn't register. I was at work Monday and lectured despite a 70 hour week the week before.
2) Getting yelled had for whiffing and underhand toss of a pen to a colleague (and friend) of mine during a meeting where we went up to write what we were doing on the whiteboard. Said manager thought I was annoyed and chewed me out. I pointed out, I had just pulled an all nighter and was fucking beat.
When I walked, I told the management team straight up he was the reason I was leaving.
A colleague/friend (he was the UI lead) had hoped to stick it out awhile, he lasted a month after I did.
I went through the frenzy of bubble one, had fun. I'm usually pretty darn dedicated, but that startup showed me my breaking point and I've avoided such situations since.
Having an entire product rest on your shoulders sucks and emotionally drains you rather quickly. In my case it was a startup with a technology I created on the side that became the main business and eventually became the sole earner for a company whose other business had already been dwindling.
At the time there were maybe half a dozen people in the country that even worked in this particular niche. If I left the company it would likely go down, and the CEO kept telling me how many people would lose work if I left. And the pressure and responsibility kept growing and growing. And the sales people, who made up half of the staff, kept getting more and more antagonistic, as I couldn't meet their constantly larger expectations, which were often technically impossible (like sci-fi movie level). This situation lasted for over a year, culminating in a huge blowout between the CEO and I when I left.
I became a Rick real fast. I still feel like shit for being a Rick, and it's taken years for me to move that experience out of my "work baggage".
This, yes, a thousand times. Building a startup is gruelling and I wouldn't be doing it at all if I hadn't had such an urge to fix a problem I actually faced/was angry about and saw that no one else was fixing it.
My cynical side remembers doing all the grunt work for 18 months at my first startup and then getting sacked to free up my unvested stock for the hopeless flotilla of "key hires" who proceeded to sink the company.
Everyone's different, but I've been doing this particular startup for 2 1/2 years and don't resent anyone yet. I've had times where I felt like burnout was coming, and when that happens I just take a few days "off" from working on the startup.
I've been that guy before, at my first serious early-stage, well-funded startup.
The founders and executive team completely fucked it up. They kept hiring crappy/unmotivated people, prioritizing growing the team in quantity over quality, and with every added mediocre head it only amplified the morale drag when I'd be delivering huge progress after multi-day sleepless sprints while everyone else was barely getting anything done in the 9-5 office productivity theatre of standups and meetings.
I started absolutely dreading coming to the office after completing one of my kamikaze sprints. The VP of Eng had established this twisted pattern of holding a standup the moment I leisurely walked in the door at whatever hour I happened to make it in after not being seen for days, which for over a year was the weekly norm. Everyone in engineering would have little to nothing to say about their progress, and I'd drop another mother lode. It just made everyone else feel inferior, and I started to increasingly abhor their lack of progress and feel like I was the only person actually taking the opportunity seriously enough to make an effort.
It culminated in my abrupt departure three years in. And for years afterwards they failed to deliver any major new features successfully. Burned through many more millions of dollars, before eventually going bankrupt.
My mistake was not leaving earlier. That experience left such an awful taste in my mouth I've basically never made that level of sacrifice of my own life/time at another company since.
Edit:
To clarify, the hard lesson I learned at this job was that no amount of individual contribution can save a sinking ship. This particular experience was 15 years ago, and I've worked at numerous startups since, some with successful exits. I haven't seen any correlation between the amount of my contribution and the likelihood of a successful exit, absolutely none. Surely this is different for founders, but I haven't gone down that road yet. What I have seen however is some companies are far more dysfunctional than others, and the best thing you can do is learn to identify them quickly and RUN, the opportunity cost is too great.
That was where my jaw dropped. I'd start looking for new work the second I got home. How could you possibly do good work once it got that hostile? How could you still believe the startup had a chance?
I wouldn't say toxic relations - it's just that.... I don't really know. I just want a "good fit" there! I felt very dissatisfied working there, felt like I'm not going anywhere professionally. The general feeling of being under-utilised. When I discussed this with my manager - his solution was more work :/ That didn't help at all. Used to have anxiety pangs and the like. So saved up enough to quit.
> you started a startup?
I wouldn't say it's a start up as such, more of a side project to recover from the burn out. It's hard to explain - at that point it was like I really wanted nothing to do with life. Now I feel a lot better. Hopefully in the next couple of months I'll have a decent product out the door! (Something else I'm currently working on)
Reading your post, I feel like you're me, except I haven't worked at startups. Addressing your first two points:
* If I don't like a situation, I will leave it. After all, the easiest way to change your environment is to escape it.
I feel conflicted with this one. While what you say is true I can't help but feel, when I try to apply to certain situations in life, like I'm quitting... or that I'd beat myself up for "being a quitter who didn't try hard enough to make things better" at a particular job or relationship or something of the sort. There's something to be said about the potential payoff relative to the amount of effort involved in making things better, of course.
Your second point is something I've been personally stuck in for awhile, mostly given the economic downturn and seeing friends go unemployed for quite a long time. Still, I probably have to make that jump sooner or later.
I have worked on my startup for over a year. I hired someone in India as my developer as I did/do the web design and business stuff....
Through my experience and something I recommend all startuppers have is a thick skin and a crazy, insane drive! If little things piss you off now, how would you handle negative comments made about the work you have slaved over? The negative actually should be viewed as constructive criticism, though also learn to decipher the vicious with the constructive!
When I want to get away from my work I will go and hang out with friends.
> P.S. I think your experience is a pretty good example of what drives many people to build startups.
Yea, this place drives me more and more mad. I have dabbled in my own side projects, but I am thinking more and more that the time to leave the mega-corporation will have to come soon, for my own sanity at least!
When I first started my career everything was great - I did some internships at small local companies and got terrific feedback. I loved computers and would identify problems and dive into solving them enthusiastically. In hindsight a lot of the stuff I did was basically prototyping that never made it into production, but it felt great and my bosses loved it.
After a couple years I hit the big time and got a job at a tech startup that was blowing up. There was one really successful project I worked on, and otherwise I didn't really accomplish much - the whole organization I was in was very dysfunctional and we churned through management and new projects really quickly, but nothing really landed. During this time our stock price went crazy, and I sold all my stock to make a down payment on a house and max out my retirement savings. Eventually the mismanagement got to me - every project seemed doomed to fail, and I was paralyzed with indecision daily. They promoted me to the level where I was supposed to propose and run projects, and I hated it.
To try and get back to building things, I joined a small startup around the time the pandemic started. Everyone there gave me great feedback, but there was no product focus, very little management, and ultimately it still felt like the things I was working on didn't matter or lead to anything. The product itself was hard to use and had so many problems that I couldn't imagine trying to untangle them all, so I left after a year.
At this point I was terrified that I just couldn't work in tech anymore. I had developed medical problems from stress, and took months of time off to try and recover. There was nothing else I wanted to do for work, but the thought of sitting down and building anything was terrible.
Fast-forward to today - I applied for and got my dream job, working at another very successful startup that has a lot of high-performing people. They get things done, and the product is great. It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing. Not a single PR merged. I came in with all the momentum from my unemployment, all the enthusiasm and energy I could muster, and proposed a bunch of projects. Nothing landed. My manager left a few weeks after I started, my onboarding buddy has been absent, and the fear has started creeping in again that I'm alone and can't hack it in this high performing team. If I can't work in the tech industry it would completely upend my entire life.
Does anyone have any advice from a similar situation? I think I need more support and guidance but my experience has been that tech companies don't really offer that, and also that everyone seems happy and successful regardless.
I've worked on a few projects over the years and finally had one that I was proud to call a startup. We got into a top incubator program and busted our butts for a really long time. We had a set of willing investors, a rock solid MVP evolving to a real product and a launch event that was the talk of the town. We did everything right, asked good questions and were personable as hell. And in the end, I departed from the venture due to team fit issues. No matter how much I want to point fingers, I know I was also another source of the problems. I guess what I learned from this situation is -- deal with your shit early. I knew there were problems, but our team swept these issues under the "I'm going to work hard and sleep on the floor" rug and by the time we were ready to talk about them, they were at an unforgivable stage. Startups are intense and I was OK with that.. but the minute I stopped having fun, I stopped being productive. I also started to sacrifice my own activities to make the startup work and when I eventually did get burned out, I was feeling pretty bummed overall. A better balance and celebrating more team wins could have definitely helped.
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