[kbutler]

By working at twenty of them, expecting 15 to fail, 4 to not completely fail, and one to go big?

[kelp]

This is about my career. 8 startups, earlish employee at 6. 1 mediocre IPO, and 1 very successful IPO.

The rest basically failures or zombies that made me no extra money.

Probably a little more lucky than most.

[dabockster]

Tons more lucky than most. My last startup job misclassified me when funds got tight. A friend of mine who joined later never got paid (good luck filing a wage claim in WA state if L&I’s system still thinks you’re a contractor).

[kelp]

Perhaps also luck, but I’ve managed to have a spidy sense for when things are going the wrong way, and got out / moved on before it got that bad.

[freedomben]

What are some of the signs/symptoms that trigger your spidy sense?

[dabockster]

The big one for me was realizing that my boss had lied about knowing how to code. Other red flags include code and documentation quality, how the business sells itself to potential customers (does it greatly oversell it’s abilities), the expiration date of the coffee/tea in the break room (I got food poisoning when I drank the startup’s three year expired tea - the founders were still wondering why they felt like crap all the time when I left), etc.

It’s really a bunch of little things that, when seen as off all at once, will trip your spidey sense to jump ship.

[kelp]

Mostly it's business growth stalling with no clear plan to fix it.

If you don't have visibility into that, there are other warnings signs, like various spending cuts. No straight answers to questions about that stuff.

Not providing visibility into the business is also a warning sign, in my opinion.

I've also left companies when they started making pretty weird business bets that I dind't think would pan out.