But if you are an early employee with equity, you are not just an engineer. You are, figuratively, a shareholder. One of the reasons they give you stock options as opposed to actual shares is that shareholders have a ton of rights against companies, and can e.g. sue for investor fraud, vote the board out, get quarterly reports with financial & performance statements therein backed by federal law and the threat of investor fraud lawsuits. You, on the other hand, are given the financial exposure to the company's performance without any of the attached rights. And they will happily lie to you in order to keep you happy & get you to project enough positivity to hide flaws & keep outside investment flowing until it all collapses.

So as an employee, you should be trying to claw back some of what being a shareholder would get you, given you are so heavily exposed. I've worked at companies where there is a monthly meeting, nearly everyone present, where the entire company's business position, prospects and challenges are discussed openly. The employees (largely) didn't even have equity. Any cracks (like an imminent complete collapse in the next three days) would show very early on, but there were none, because the employees were empowered to do something about any challenges.

So, yes, there are warning signs, and your response isn't a binary choice between staying and leaving. I would like people to come away with a better model of this than "if they are hiring exclusively from big tech, that's a red flag, get out of there". You can demand more transparency if you know what transparency looks like. If you are content to sit at your desk and happily churn out React components, satisfied with management sending enough emojis at you via slack, then you can't protect yourself at all.

You want to be at the company where the CFO gets up at the monthly all hands and goes over the numbers in gory detail and doesn't hold anything back. You do not want to be at the cargo cult company where they get up and cheerlead and never talk about numbers. It took me a shockingly long time to figure this out.

In the end the stock gains have all been in the periods where I didn't work at startups but instead worked at public companies. Go figure.

"Toxic positivity" and ISOs/rights:

ISOs nominally give you "ownership" in the company, an extra incentive to make sure it succeeds. But you lose them within some time period after you leave (say, are fired), and there's no way to sell them during that time unless the company has gone public. So this thing that's supposed to make you an "owner" just makes you a hostage. It does not motivate you to take risks on behalf of the company, and it does not motivate you to speak the truth.

If they couldn't take it from you, then you'd speak the truth.

Double-trigger RSUs are AFAIK just a way to avoid paying taxes on illiquid assets. The reason to shift from options to RSUs at all is (I think) that once the company's FMV gets high enough, the strike price and taxes due for the options will be so high that employees won't be able to afford paying them if they leave the company.

I thought it was common knowledge that fb started the double trigger thing to avoid this limit, and I heard something similar when a startup I was in converted options to RSUs.

HR would tell us we were extraordinary, we would have world-class catering for lunch every day, and yet we had no customers, no contracts, and no money except the investors'.

It was a sobering realisation on the damage that can happen when you are submerged in toxic positivity. You forget that companies still need to earn actual money, that it's not a party every day.

I'd like to point out that this is not the case for every Silicon Valley start-up: the three start-ups I worked at (CollabNet, Aeluros, Ardatech) were incredibly frugal with money (exception: salaries were competitive).

At one of the companies, the CEO and I took a trip to Safeway to buy soft drinks for customers. When we got back, I walked around the office telling everyone the soft drinks were _not_ for them, only for customers.

At another company, I had to make a compelling presentation to the CTO to buy a $1.5k printer. "The Linux workstations need a PostScript printer!" We bought the printer, but he didn't like parting with the money.

Being frugal doesn't guarantee success: my CollabNet stock was washed out in later rounds, Aeluros had a fair-to-middling exit to Broadcom, and Ardatech had a good exit to Google. But it's good to keep an eye on the money.

The lesson should be buy whatever the hell people want, just stop buying people until you need them. They're the expensive bit.

3 great devs can do about the same work as like 30 average ones. People massively underestimate communication overhead. As soon as you lose the 'startup feel', you lose the speed, and it's gone for good. The transition is probably inevitable, but there's a threshold of revenue you have to reach before you make it. If you don't reach it, you're cactus.

150 devs and 50 sales people to generate $600k yearly revenue is laughable.

Absolutely. We were frugal, but not to the point of self-sabotage. Our biggest expense was payroll, followed by the Cadence/Synopsys EDA software licenses.

So, for example, no catered lunches or breakfasts, but if there was a customer or investor dinner, it would be expensed.

We had good health insurance, but we didn't have gym memberships or (gasp!) an onsite gym.

The workstations were powerful, but we shaved costs by buying "gamer rigs" instead of the more expensive "engineer workstations". We bought prosumer equipment (Netgear) instead of enterprise equipment (Cisco).

If someone needed, say, a Wacom tablet to accommodate a wrist injury, we made that happen.

We had a well-stocked lab, but some of the electrostatic benches we got at a good price secondhand.

Our office was near the train station to accommodate the engineers who commuted from the city, but it wasn't expensive space (all glass & chrome); it was a "B" office. We shared a bathroom with the other tenants. It was a little run-down, but it was clean.

We didn't have offices or cubes, just desks, and the CEO & President sat next to each other in the big room we all shared.

If only they could be bought that easy right when you'd need them. At least in a corporation, the HR will tell you "50 engineers? That's going to take X monts, judging from the hiring rate we had so far."

Fast pitched itself as taking the prudent path compared with e.g. Bolt. The latter went for big clients first. Fast started with small businesses.

There were clearly other issues. But the closing era of cheap capital favoured the bold, and Bolt’s seizure of the fertile low grounds cut off Fast from its growth. Despite Fast taking the orthodox path.

Fast did great job hyping the company on Twitter, likely the founder also was a good storyteller. The old adage is that you raise with a story, team or traction. Sometimes the story actually pans out, like with YC Airbnb is often an example of company that struggled for a long time in the beginning and no-one could really predict how big they could become.

Who? (Also, given an open market, as was the case when the Amazon patent expired in 2017, the company fundraises to scale will beat its more timid competitor. This is basic strategy.)

If you were in a different industry…great execution in the wrong industry is as good as a Ferrari in a swamp.

> all that matters is knowing people

Sounds like you’ve been through some shit. I’m sorry for that.

The point I was making, summarily, is that Bolt ate Fast’s lunch. It went straight for the big customers. Fast wanted to grow towards them incrementally. In this story, if anyone had a fundraising connections advantage, it was Fast—they were Stripe backed. Bolt outmanoeuvred them (and was lucky).

This is unorthodox strategy. Fast played it conservatively. Bolt swung for the fences. Curiously, Bolt landed the home run.

Fast made what was manifestly the wrong decision, both in hindsight and in foresight (I'm happy to post my WhatsApp screencaps from a year and a half ago when I was exploring starting a co in that space). It's not possible to build a hands-off 'platform' like Stripe in that space - integrations are complex, and so integrating a large number of small clients predictably bogged them down till they ran out of money.

(That's not the only reason, I'm sure. It was also a shitty implementation of one-click checkout: most saliently, it wasn't one click. Anyone who actually tried Fast at the time - and I & my prospective cofounder shared the few tiny client websites either of us found like they were rare gems - could see that it was a terrible implementation, in a space where UX is literally the entire game. Many actually did, e.g. this guy from back then: https://chrisfrantz.com/checking-in-on-fast/)

maybe Bolt knew a couple of things Fast did not.

We failed to raise money exactly because we had a bunch of small clients and not enough revenue. It was a prudent decision for the potential investors - but the main failure on our side was not to network enough with our current investors in order to get another friendly round of investment.

We had a competitor that was doing exactly the same thing (with worse metrics) that raised several millions a few months later, so it wasn't too far fetched.

VCs invest in a lot of baseless crap - sometimes the crap turns into gold and sometimes in order to be the chosen crap you need to know the right people.

I detailed a case where a recent deploy I had done had resulted in elevated error rates for some of our clients and how I had solved it with a quick follow up push to prod. The interviewer asked why it wasn't caught in staging and I mentioned that it could have been but as a small company we have to make velocity vs bug tradeoffs and in general it feels like we are currently at a sweet spot. The interviewer was unwilling to explore that space at all, or the concept that different companies might want to land in different places.

Later I was given feedback that I did exceptionally well in the technical interviews but the company didn't want any cowboys on their team. All of that is probably just a long way of confirming the other anecdotes in this thread that from the outside fast seemed somewhere between delivery hostile and overly cautious.

But to be deemed as a cowboy - utterly hilarious, given where they ended up. Pretty cowboy with the investor money instead I reckon?

Fun fact: The 2011 article Cowboys and Pit Crews (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cowboys-and-pit-cre...) points out that modern cowboys actually spend a lot of time on communication and checklists.

That’s a gross generalization, but gives you the flavor. I couldn’t do what they do (huge budget, low incrementalism) and would hate the environment. But they can’t do what I do, and when hired to do so, typically fail. Not because they are dumb, or lazy, or foolish, or anything negative — typically they are none of those things. Just haven’t experienced the startup environment.

There's a big difference between the product strategy side (v0 of N different chat products) and the tech side which is that all those products are made of many of the same components arranged differently.

i'd say that if you plan on scaling, you need a bit of both. a lot of tricky scale/process/architecture questions have effectively been "solved" in big orgs, it's useful to have people who can bring this experience

to take a completely random examples: setting up a performance improvement plan, performing incident post-mortems, organising oncall rotas, branching strategies when you have a mix of small customers on standard product and big accounts with customisations etc

Quite likely to happen of the founders / existing hiring managers have no idea themselves how big corp solved these problems.

Meanwhile, good startup engineers are used to learning new technologies quick, can work across the full stack, can own all aspects of their app/feature, work without much direction, never mind a formal spec, and generally are used to solve problems over shipping code.

Often, the key drawback with startup engineers who are available after working at one or two startups, is that they pick bad companies and do not really understand the business end of the equation. However they are still excellent problem solvers.

This is from my experience as a hiring manager who has worked at multiple startups and now works for a large public tech company.

There aren't many good startup engineers with experience at successful startups who are floating around, especially from when the company in question was actually a startup.

edit: i re-read, my comment "failed startup engineer" may have read differently to what i intended. I meant they worked at a failed startup, not that they were a failure. It's largely unfair, but people do seem to think people who worked at a successful company are better than those who worked at a failed company.

For example, a pattern I noticed among the pool of BigTech engineers recruiters would pitch to me was the following. The engineer would join a startup with an immediate promotion in title, and then 18 months after the fact, they would jump back to BigTech to a higher level than the one they had when they left. When you asked what they delivered at the startup, it was clear that they didn't do much or often couldn't correlate the impact of their features to the ROI of the business. Nevertheless, the title upgrade in their resume helped them game the recruiter search and the BigTech ladder.

https://www.teamblind.com/ is full of recommendation for similar strategies that BigTech engineers use to climb the ladder.

Also, the good startup engineers aren't floating around, but you can still poach them. You'll have to give them a big signing bonus to cover the purchase of their options, but it isn't a risk to me when they are sure bets; a recommendation from my network for example.

There seems to be a significant number of tech industry employees still floating around that are convinced that instant financial independence is available for all.

This is a stupid view of motivation and competence.

First, it implies people are only motivated by money. At the first startup I worked at, one of the senior engineers had been through 4 successful exits and was in the business to build things.

Second, competence of the engineering org and individual engineers is orthogonal to successful exits. An engineer can successfully ship many iterations of a product that are just a bad market fit and the company will fail. I’d still take that engineer any day over the typical FAANG cog who’s big project was a 2 year tax billing database migration.

It's a fund raising and public marketing trick.