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by jashmenn 2216 days ago
Even though a lot of engineers want to raise VC (or work for companies that have) the incentives are weird and it can influence your work/job in ways you might not expect.

When you take VC, you're given millions of dollars to build something huge, but it's also a Faustian bargain because you're limiting your range of outcomes.

You might grow a nice, profitable business, but if you can't 100x (or 1000x) their investment, your investors will be unhappy.

shameless self-plug: I just interviewed Sumukh Sridhara (AngelList Engineer, @vcstarterkit on Twitter) about VC from a programmers perspective on our podcast [1] and he's really, really good. If you're a dev looking to learn more about this, give it a listen.

[1]: https://podcast.newline.co/episodes/a-software-engineers-gui...

1 comments

The return profile depends a lot on the stage of VC you're at - while a 100x return might be plausible for an early angel investor (who also expects 90% of their investments to go to zero), lots of later stage VC's will be quite happy with the more consistent 5x outcome.