| >You may have heard something along the lines of “Most >startups fail, so just join a team you like and enjoy
> wherever it goes.” or “The equity is just a bonus in case >something comes of it.” These assume you are incapable of >assessing a startup’s potential, which is an incorrect
> assumption. Really? Yes, as the article points out, SOME VCs do actually manage to correctly assess startup's potential. But that is literally their entire job - 40+ hours/week. And a breathtaking amount of VCs fail at that. What hope do you have, as a prospective employee? Do you think the VCs limit themselves to those quick questions? No. They get full financials, projections etc. And still get it hella wrong. The article fails to mention ALL the engineers who went to work for startups that failed, thinking that they had evaluated it correctly. I bet the failure rate here is significantly worse than for VCs, who at least can demand much more detail than can a job candidate and spend (paid, working) hours assessing those details! Does that mean you shouldn't ask good questions? Of course not. Ask ALL the questions you can get away with. Ask the hard ones. You should ask good questions of any prospective job, and these are particularly well suited to a startup. You should ask a lot more than that. You want to make sure that not only is the company not completely unlikely to succeed, but ALSO a decent working culture, good people to work with etc. Gates, Zuckerberg and Kalanick revealed themselves pretty early on to be horrible people. IF you're going to work with/for someone like that, and you're saying to yourself - this will work out because I'll get hella rich and retire in a few years... well, how much worse will it be in the MORE likely outcome that the company fails AND you invested years working with someone like that? If anything, this article reinforces my belief that equity should be treated and viewed as a bonus in the form of a lottery ticket. Get yourself paid a reasonable, if not above market salary for the risk and opportunity cost, not to mention the extra work you expect to put in at a startup. Surely a reasonably skilled engineer has options these days. So yeah - ALSO don't go work for a startup whose product/service you don't believe in - either economically OR morally. But don't delude yourself that your belief in the product/service gives it anything like a higher chance of succeeding, even as a skilled "in the industry" person. Remember all those engineers who believed in all those failed startups. |