It usually takes 2-3 years before a typical founder can get seed funding and even think about hiring employees. During that time period, they are funding the company themselves, and doing all the work themselves. Yes, they usually draw a small salary once the company is VC-funded. By that point, ~95% of founders have been flushed out of the market and failed.

There are a small minority of people who can raise VC on just an idea because they're white, wealthy, and went to Stanford or because they're roommates with a VC's daughter or because they're an unusually slick salesman who can swindle lots of people. I would highly recommend not working for these people - or really, any founding team who did not build and sell the initial version of the product themself - because they generally do not know what they're doing, and these startups become a miserable experience for the employees. But they are, I'll reiterate, a very small minority of founders. They are a somewhat larger minority of the founders who can hire employees, because getting VC investment automatically puts you in the pool of startups that is looking to hire. That's an information distortion between the viewpoint of employees (who only see the startups who have gotten at least to the first funding round) and founders (who see all startups, including the ones that struggle for years to get their first revenue).

Really? Does white people baiting have to become totally normalised? It’s not like East and South Asians aren’t over represented in VC land.

(Exception: if you are Chinese and your investor is Chinese and you have a personal connection to that investor you can sometimes raise money on "Hi I have an idea and trust me." This is a recent development and comes from the massive amount of Chinese capital floating around these days, and is sometimes not actually the best move for your startup.)

I know YC is a relatively small part of the VC ecosystem but it’s pretty influential. If the VC ecosystem is as racist as you say there should be plenty of opportunity to make better returns out there for some enterprising VC.

There are a few other VC firms that similarly work hard to avoid missing promising founders of minority backgrounds, but they are still the exception rather than the rule. Over time, the "rich, dumb, and prejudiced" folks will get flushed out of the market, but that's over a lot of time. Besides, they'll probably just get replaced by a different set of prejudices - nobody can be 100% unbiased, you can only hope to replace biases that are useless and arbitrary with ones that are somewhat more useful.

This is an exaggeration at best. For the vast majority of employees there is a lead time to begin employment at most places. Typically this will be a minimum of one month (interviews + decision + org readiness to onboard).

By the way, it applies equally to founders as you describe (anecdotally I've seen a number of founders get regular jobs while they wound down a business).

"Left with nothing" except social connections and, exactly like the employees they had to fire when the business failed, a need to generate income from another source.

Founder lionization is absurd.

What social connections do you think founders get that employees somehow dont? And what is this worth? So founding a company and losing everything is fine because you make some friends? If you talk to any entrepreneurs, you'll quickly realize you'll lose more friends and connections than you gain, precisely because of lack of time and ability to relate. It's a very lonely road, not some glamorous jet-setting adventure.

What's absurd is thinking that starting a company is just some hobby that is no different than any normal job. Until you actually do it, it's easy to overlook the incredible personal investment and stress it takes to put something together from nothing. Most companies fail, and many do not raise capital or have some quick meteoric rise but rather suffer through years of trying to make it work. The upside for founders is incredibly rare while the downsides are very common. Employees get paid either way.

Maybe if they stopped treating themselves like some anointed class and shared the equity with their employees instead of viewing them like lower-class citizens it wouldn't be so hard to find comrades.

That's a fine view to take! But don't come rattling the cup around going "but poor founders, so lonely, nobody to talk to" when they've made that choice.

Nobody is complaining really, certainly not the founders who chose what they do. In fact it seems like people who aren't founders that are complaining about the supposed benefits and lack of work without actually understanding what it entails.