History repeats! 20 years ago, some business exit plans basically boiled down to "...and then we'll get bought by Microsoft!" Not too bad, at least for the founders.

Especially if your goal is to land a nice FAANG job anyway. It's gotten to the point where interviewing is so competitive, exhausting, opaque, and ultimately random, that it might actually be easier to do a bootstrapped start-up for a year and get bought by Facebook than it is to grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit. I wish I were joking.

EDIT: Wow, no disrespect to founders, I did not intend to trivialize the work you do. Instead of "easier" I should have said something like "more controllable" or "less random".

> that it might actually be easier to do a bootstrapped start-up for a year and get bought by Facebook than it is to grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit. I wish I were joking.

If you are not joking you are delusinal, this is not even remotly true.

You may not agree with OP, but I don't think this view is delusional. Starting a company is a lot of day to day work in terms of hours, but it's more rewarding than doing interview prep. If you spend weeks or months studying for interviews and don't land a job, you get nothing. If you start a business you generally get paid or make profit the whole time, you build relationships and end up with something tangible to show for the experience.

Personally, I would much rather be running a moderately successful business than studying esoteric programming questions full time. At the least, the relative "easiness" of starting a business vs the normal FAANG interview process is personally subjective.

> If you start a business you generally get paid or make profit the whole time

What tech startup is this? Profitability is a long road & for a good chunk of the time you're relying on funding to get you through to profitability. You might get paid but how much you withdraw impacts your runway.

I agree with you that it's a way more interesting journey, but it is by no mean "easier". Especially since OP was talking about getting acquired at the end. Just keeping your business alive is hard enough, let alone being acquired by one of the FANGs.

It's not easy to get acquired by a FANG, but if you're okay with acqui-hire terms of most companies, you'll eventually get acquisition requests if the startup gets a little bit of press or has some traction. I've personally gone through this process several times already, turned down a few acqui-hire requests, and eventually accepted one. One of my startups only lived for 4 months before it was acqui-hired, which was still more enjoyable than doing 4 months of interview prep.

In hindsight, if I accepted my first acqui-hire request, I would've eventually got hired into Google because the startup that wanted to hire us was eventually folded into google, but honestly it's hard to tell from a distance which companies are going to be acquired by a FAANG.

I was part of an aquihire and got screwed every which way. As the acquired's only person in my position and required (almost! I'm not delusional) in order to transition the company, I should have driven a harder bargain when deciding to go along with it. In the future I would not go along without a significant retention bonus, like, say, a percentage of the purchase price that reflected my contribution.

I guess it depends on your previous experience. If you're familiar with actually building a software company, know good people to employ and know a problem that needs solving, it probably is easier to go that route than having to learn the whole interviewing-scam thing that is happening today, in order to just be employed.

Helps that building a company gives you real experience as well while prepping for interview just gives you that, preparation for the interview, while the real job is different than the interview.

If leetcoding and going from 0 to acquired by Facebook in a year were just as hard, we’d all be rich.

Even if it was only an order of magnitude difference, the expected value of starting that startup would be so much higher.

They aren’t even in the same ballpark

I think it really depends on your background. For people with a questionable job history, poor credentials, modest intelligence, a speech impediment, and a criminal background self funding to Raman increases in difficulty less than working directly for Facebook. However, ridding the VC train has a lot of the same dependencies as working for Facebook, but is vastly more difficult.

The same is true of networking and friends and family financing. I might look at scraping together a ~200k seed round as trivial, but that’s not true for everyone. On the other hand if 5 of your collage friends are working a FANG companies that’s also a huge leg up.

We’re not talking about bootstrapping for a year, op said selling to Facebook in a year. To pull that off means awesome traction or clubhouse level hype or deep serial founder connections, or corruption at high levels.

All of these are much more difficult to pull off, often requiring years, than simply hitting the books for a few months

The companies that FAANG acquire are usually mid sized, 50+ employees. Getting to that size, in a particular industry that will be of acquisition interested is not going to be easier than getting hired.

Might get you hired at a higher level though, but yeah delusional to think it would be easier.

OP is exaggerating, but Yahoo under Marissa Mayer wasn't far off. Nicholas Carson's 2015 book about their M&A during this era has lots of details.

what's the actual title of this book? I couldn't find it (my google-fu probably isn't very good, but "Nicholas Carson" is not a very unique patronym...)

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22608584-marissa-mayer-a...

> grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit.

Or go to a serious CS/Engineering school and just take the Algorithm class.

What are peoples opinions on whether just taking the algorithms class helps a lot? People can do it online almost as easily

Most people aren't good at self-directed study of hard things. Taking a class on algorithms at a good school is one of the best ways to learn the challenging material, period. The ability to ask a real human questions when something just doesn't "click" in your brain is invaluable.

You're going to learn novel things in an Algorithms class that you can't learn online - but the way it's taught is easier for most people to digest the material. Motivated/driven/talented individuals can absolutely learn the material themselves.

This is true, since this forum is startup oriented you'll get hate against big companies and pro for startup. Biased but, have to see the conflict of interest

This is not anywhere close to true. Have you built a bootstrapped startup from scratch and negotiated an acquisition? It's far, far harder than practicing a few leetcode Facebook problems and getting a referral.

Agree 100%. I've bootstrapped, I've been acquired, and I've gone through the FB/G/etc. interview processes. Going through those interviews took a few weeks of light prep, whereas bootstrapping to acquisition was a multi-year slog. Just the due diligence portion of the acquisition too many, many, many times the effort of job interviewing.

You don't even need the referral. Unless your CV only has farming experience or something :-)

I concur. My sparse LinkedIn profile shows decades of doing CRUD work for no name companies and I have had recruiters from most of the major tech companies reach out to me. No I couldn’t pass any DS&A tech screen without a lot of preparation.

Even now that I work at one of the Big 5 tech companies, I clearly state that my role is not officially development, I still have recruiters reach out to me from FB for development positions.

There is a big difference between getting recruited and actually getting a job offer.

The discussion was about the need for referrals. But isn’t that what I just said?

No I couldn’t pass any DS&A tech screen without a lot of preparation.

Yeah, but the discussion was about referrals. Referrals are for getting your foot in the door. You don't generally need them for FAANG. You just need a half decent CV.

The hard part is passing the interviews, but referrals don't help with that, from what I know.

An actual referral for an "industry rockstar" would catapult them past the first few rounds of interviewing.

And referrals for top management do the same. Why are we talking about something applicable to maybe 0.00001% of candidates out there?

Because far up the comment tree, referrals were confused with "some recruiter said I should interview for a job".

There was no “confusion”. The only purpose of a referral is to get the interview. If an internal recruiter reached out to you, a referral isn’t necessary.

Either way you still have to go through the same loop.

Yes, I “work for a FAANG” like many others do here.

Yep. Bootstrapping a startup is hard.

FAANG interviews are not even close.

Even just the diligence behind a potential acquisition (stated 'win' condition) is orders of magnitude more stressful than reviewing DFS, lol.

If the acquisition is mainly about talent, and in many cases, even if it's not, FAANG will expect you to interview like everyone else.

Source: founder of a company which was acquired by a non-FAANG company, but talked to a few FAANGs as part of the process.

> Especially if your goal is to land a nice FAANG job anyway.

I wouldn't just say getting acquired by a FAANG company. I work for one of the biggest health care companies in the world. Last year they acquired over 200 companies with the goal of exceeding that this year.

They literally are buying companies whose technology they would rather buy then build themselves. If you knew what my company was looking for (machine learning, AI and automation) you literally could start a company with less than ten people, focus your work on one of the three areas and have a better than decent shot of being acquired by the company I work for in a span of less than 5 years.

What would take longer? Building that company with a singular focus on a singular product my company needs or achieving a senior level knowledge of Javascript for a full stack developer role? I would say at that point its a toss up.

> It's gotten to the point where interviewing is so competitive, exhausting, opaque, and ultimately random, that it might actually be easier to do a bootstrapped start-up for a year and get bought by Facebook than it is to grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit.

Not sure about founders but sometimes you have to interview with the Big Tech Co. as well to keep the job after acquisition.

AFAIK, you're still subject to some sort of vetting process when getting acqui-hired, so you'd still be studying for that anyway.

So it is probably more work than simply studying and rolling the dice over and over.

I get what you're saying but none of those words work.

There are some people who are very well networked and can repeatedly start and sell companies by leveraging those connections as a business model in itself, but this is extremely rare.

Building a business to even be attractive enough for an acquisition is magnitudes harder than any round of interviews will ever be, but I do agree that those interview processes are a joke now compared to the talent they're designed to find.

Eh, both have proven impenetrably difficult for me. I just kind of float through life and stumble into jobs these days.

Most of this tech has strong network effects. And while the marginal cost of shipping an additional unit tends to be close to 0 (creating the incentive to grow almost boundlessly), the costs of complying with regulation in dozens or a hundred countries is quite high.

Thus, it entirely makes sense for a founder want to build great tech and a great product, but NOT want to be in the business of complying with a dizzying array of local and international regulations, in a world where they effectively have to expand globally to "win".

Big companies aren't typically nimble enough to respond to the whims of consumer tastes or catch the latest fads.

So, it's a great symbiotic relationship between "big tech" and startups.

Acquisition, cash out, bolt on regulatory and legal framework, wash, rinse, repeat.

Oh my, after all these years I finally understand in what way Google actually is like a startup :D

Google was acquihired by DoubleClick.

Its a no-brainer for most. Put in a couple years of work, cash out big, go live the dream. Every incentive aligns with this though process so why stop doing it now?

Why would you want to cash out out of something you love? These kind of businesses struggle. But when you have a rich parents, they you come up with some start up idea, hire a team of people to make it - then yes cashing out is a win. But those people don't look at it as business, as a real thing that adds value for other people, but pure selfishly as showing themselves they can pull this off. These people also often steal ideas from people who care and love what they do. Often those people become wage slaves in those rich daddy companies.

Then don't cash out. But that's usually a fantasy. Nobody is really "passionate about enterprise saas" or whatever the marketing says.

Founders are interested in control and eventual (financial) freedom, and tend to like building an organization in general. An acquisition provides that freedom while allowing them to build something else in the future with even better circumstances.

At some point in his life Larry Ellison was passionate about something as mundane as a database.

Database engines are cooler (and harder) than 95-99% of the stuff that people on HN build.

Was he? Or was it the opportunity to create a business around new tech and the eventual riches it brought? It seems his real passion is buying islands and racing boats.

Because you might love security for your family’s future more than your work. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You can always start another company.

At any given time, there are founders in the "sprint-to-buyout" camp and those in a "build to own" camp. In any given year, there are many founders who hold to their principle and those who change their minds.

People make choices. Nothing is deterministic. That said, the number of companies founded, run or exited with a buyout win condition mentality is governed by price economics. FB, Google, etc offered a very high price for Android, Instagram, etc. because those M&As were worth a lot to them. Given this, a lot of M&As are going to happen.

The interesting question, to me, is "why is the price so high?" It's silly to get all huffy about M&As and ignore the consequences of M&As.

Your comment assumes that the people buying the business and the people running the business are the same. In the 21st century, this is less & less the case, as people with capital are uninterested in hands-on management.

That's what happens when there's a flood of venture capital money whose intention with its investment is to see a specific return on capital on a specific investment horizon.

I am much further removed from the "startup frenzy" of the early 2010s, but does it seem like this model has trended downward since the start of lockdown?

As optimism about the pandemic rises, it seems like the innovation that you would expect from this kind of volatility never panned out. I suppose capital was pumped into the public market instead?

> The idea of building something neat is a lot more attractive than running a business that sells the neat thing to customers.

Doesnt Amazon bully small players to accept their offer or risk going bankrupt? I think that is what they did to diapers.com