Why would anyone want to work for your startup when they can get much higher salaries working for larger companies?

Stock options used to be that differentiator for startups... now it's just an empty promise in most places.

> Why would anyone want to work for your startup when they can get much higher salaries working for larger companies?

As much as I agree with the "lottery ticket" mentality, this line of thinking has been popular to parrot on HN for at least 5-10 years. And as far as I'm aware, startups don't have much trouble attracting senior talent. So until that changes significantly, they are going to continue offering lower salaries and bigger lottery tickets for as long as they can. Why would they do otherwise?

> And as far as I'm aware, startups don't have much trouble attracting senior talent

That seems like a pretty broad assessment to make on a hunch.

Admittedly I'm just speaking from conversations within my own network, but if hiring this kind of talent was significantly difficult then I'd expect to see broad, industry-level changes to how startup compensation was done. Companies can't survive if they can't hire people, and yet the same ISO practices remain aside from a few recent trend setters. So it seems most of the eligible candidate pool is still accepting this form of compensation.

Personally for me it has always been faster personal growth from wider responsibilities. This makes a lot of sense in some stages of your career and your career goals but hardly for everyone.

I’ve never heard of any startups where you can obtain faster skill or personal growth. “Wear many hats” means you must be whatever type of firefighting janitor the company needs this week, which often causes skill atrophy not skill growth.

Larger companies not only offer better compensation, but usually offer much better career development, responsibility growth, training and “learn by doing” opportunities.

The startup will promise you won’t be blocked by bureaucracy and as an early hire you can lead the design. Total lies. The bureaucracy and dysfunction will be even worse and probably involve a bunch of immature egos and “the design” will be endlessly compromised to get each successive round of diluting funding that yokes you to more and more traditional management bureaucracy through VCs.

After experiencing the special hell of unrestrained founders who don’t know what they are doing and nepotism hires all through middle management, most people quickly realize it’s an insane trap and wish for the comfort of large firm bureaucracy, where at least there’s some minimal policy protection against sexual harassment or cultivating alcoholism as a company value or generally grinding unwitting young people into the ground with 80 hour weeks.

The variation in startups will be much greater than in corporate America, so some startups will be well run, but some will be more badly run than any large company and by some truly vile people. It’s definitely a gamble. Unfortunately, people just out of school lack the experience to judge, so some get lucky and some get taken advantage of. My advice is to treat options like a lottery ticket, make sure you get paid well in cash, and then startups can be a heck of a lot of fun. They won’t pay a google compensation, but enough to be comfortable, and hey, maybe you get lucky!

Early non-founder employees do tend to get screwed relative to the business vultures who show up later, the CTO getting $10 million/year brought on after the company has gone public but did nothing to get it there is just wasteful corporate cronyism.

I think it's more that if you're already the kind of person well-suited to float to the top at a startup, that's what you'll get out of it. But a startup will rarely develop you into that kind of person.

My own experience with after 8 years at various London startups is one of career stagnation because (for various personal reasons) I don't have a personality that lets me thrive in these environments.

This does not match my experience.

Then you have an extremely rare experience.

It’s like a professor who did happen to get tenure listening to all the post docs talking about how awful academia is. I’m happy for that one lottery winner but their experience doesn’t count for anything.

Totally the opposite.

Most startups are dynamic, most big corporations are not. They are 'big' because they are sitting on a value chain monopoly.

The same chocolate bars have been in my grocery aisle for 20 years. Variations on the same soap.

Some startups are very poorly run, but most are not led by 'unrestrained jerks'.

No, it’s not like this. Most startups promise to be dynamic as a tactic to pay people less and swindle them on poor options deals, then they bait and switch you, the work experience is not as advertised.

Startups are by definition 'dynamic'.

If you are going to a startup and doing a very rote, repetitive thing, then you're not very lucky, but most startup jobs are definitely not that.

The risk is that there is 'too much dynamism' and people and up spinning their wheels, over pivoting, crashing. But that's definitely 'dynamic'.

Lol, have you considered it might be you who had the extremely rare experience?

If it weren’t for all the ubiquitous articles talking about bait and switch startup jobs, poor startup compensation, cheating founders, controlling VCs, slave driver mentality, rip off stock options, and the poor survivability of companies, you might have a point.

Big corporations will give you more opportunity to “learn by doing” than a startup? Hard to take your comment seriously when you say something like that.

I can tell you haven’t worked in many startups. The work quality is poor - you are basically firefighting all the time. You’re certainly not building new systems or learning how to scale, etc.

If you work at a startup the trick is you have to take the 5% of your work that’s interesting and try to make it seem like that was the 95%, when in reality the 95% is doing all the grunt work because the company cannot scale staffing to distribute that work evenly or according to specialization.

"but usually offer much better career development, responsibility growth, training and “learn by doing” opportunities."

Usually the opposite.

At many large companies, people are frozen in operating jobs, and almost 'do' nothing.

Bell Canada (like Verizon), massive organization full of staff graft.

Companies that have a lock on revenue, fat monopolies, are where people park themselves.

Directories with large teams that do almost nothing. Years to make the smallest change in customer service inquiries etc..

The 'real' advantage at working at a startup, in my view - is that you actually get to 'do stuff'.

I work with startups because of the array of possibilities - none of them monetary. I've never cared about shares, and mentor folks to do the same. If you do what you love you never work a day in your life. But if you chase the pot of gold, you have to hope there's always sunshine after the rain.

So if people enjoy there work we don't have to compensate them competitively?

I don't see how what I wrote led to this assumption. It's just that I don't value the shares in a startup - ever. I value the salary side, and enjoy the interesting work.

Work at a startup in a field you love with coworkers who also pour their blood sweat and tears into the company, only to have the founders fail upwards and employees left with nothing. Then you might feel differently.

Founders shouldn't be exiting with massive rewards when the risk they took was only marginally higher than early employees.

Yeah, I enjoyed my time there and I learned a lot. But a mismanaged company shouldn't reward the management and leave employees with nothing after all is said and done.

Been there, done that several times. Everything has risks, I've optimized for the ones I'm comfortable with.

To many people who value $$$ to get other important things in their life, shares are a meaningful factor in their expected value from devoting their life to a job.

So when you say you don't work at a startup for monetary reasons, and that you don't care about shares, which has an expected value of real money despite the uncertain outcome, it's natural to wonder if you don't care about compensation aka money.

The compensation has to cover the needs/expectstions. See Maslow's hierarchy as a simple model.

Pay me a million for something I don't care about in a bad environment and I won't do good work.

Pay me 50k (I make more, but 50k is a good value for a good living here in the region) and let me do something I like in a fun environment and I get things done.

Why are we talking about good work? Whether the work is good isn't the employee's problem. I'd love to get $1m/yr for bad work, so I can put that money to good use.

See gaming industry.

Abusive work practices, regular crunch time and underpays for talent?

Yeah, thanks to everyone wanting to work making games.

You need to pay taxes on RSAs when granted so they mainly make sense when the share price is really low on paper.

Once the valuation is higher, RSUs can shield employees from paying taxes until a liquidity event.

> I am unclear what would motivate the founding team or investors in a start-up to act otherwise

RSAs and RSUs are far less liquid than equity. They can typically only be sold into a company-wide liquidity event.

RSAs for early employees (everything before an investment) isnt uncommon.