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The commitment point is very true, and extends to employees and clients if you're in certain spaces and want to maintain a clean record in civil or moral court. The rest of these arguments seem like bad framing. From a certain school of thought, entire point of a startup is to leverage your risk taking ability relative to incumbents in the market and your economic peers. Working at a startup forces you to learn more, faster; and you're challenged by real market factors, not artificial incentive structures created by a large org or academic institution. You also wear a ton of hats that you have no access to early in your career at larger orgs or in academia. Hiring, management, sales, accounting, taxes, finance, product ideation and refinement, etc - early years at FAANG or medium sized orgs will not expose you to all of these. Even an experimental team that lets you play with cool technological toys. "Not being at school" is an silly way to describe, "4 years of school is sometimes a poor choice of use of the best risk-taking opportunities of a person's life". "Your VC is not the one at risk here" is a reason to avoid VC, subvert some of the incentives that VCs give you, or ignore a subset of the advice they they give you, not a reason to avoid risky ventures. It's important to note that the author here is an 18 year old and has no significant real-life perspective on either running a company or being part of a larger org. Nothing about that affects their ability to accurately pontificate on the pros and cons of running a startup, but there also isn't a lot of skin in the game or experience to back up that perspective. The bayesian prior here is negative. If you're partway through a uni degree or similar learning program, or an incumbent engineer at a small or large org, then you should look at starting or joining an early-stage startup as a great way to take risks that you will be less able to every year (because of increasing costs of living, commitments to a new generation of your family if you marry and have children, incentives to purchase real estate, etc). The payoff will hopefully be huge and will be distributed across potential exits, experience, and personal growth. |