[ditonal]

Respectfully this is awful advice, as someone who’s worked at FAANG and early stage startups. The idea that working for early stage startups will help you start your own is a myth propagated intentionally by founders/VCs to recruit SWEs with lowball offers.

FAANG is actually way better to meet cofounders. At Google you can have lunch with a talented person every day (there’s internal apps to network like this), plus countless other opportunities to network both formally and informally.

In contrast, at an early stage startup you’ll mostly work with the same people every day and your network will stagnate.

Furthermore, early stage startups tend to have a ton of work that needs to be done that they hire there engineers to do. Unless you get CTO title, you’re probably not going to get exposed much to the BD side or get investor access.

Finally, being able to work full time on your startup to get demo ready to pitch is super helpful. A nest egg from FAANG RSUs is key here, startup ISOs are probably worth nothing and will reduce your cushioning.

If you want to do a startup, go to networking events, apply to YC, etc but leaving FAANG to be an early stage employee w goal, not closer, especially if you don’t at least get CTO title.

[jameshush]

I have to agree with ditonal. Going from a FAANG company to a startup for anything less than a CTO role is a bad idea. I know this because I did this. While it all worked out in the end (I wanted to move to Los Angeles to do heavy metal stuff with my heavy metal friends anyway) there's definitely a hard ceiling at a startup.

Stay at the cushy high paying job and network on nights and weekends. Even better, make a point to ask a person out to lunch every week at the FAANG job once the pandemic is over.

"Networking" for me has just been hanging out with my music and YouTuber buddies. Turns out if you know how to SPELL PHP or HTML you can provide HUGE value to non-technical friends. Doing something as simple as fixing a typo in some JavaScript tracking code for friend's websites makes me look like I've shown them fire for the first time. Find a hobby you like that's non-technical (for me it's learning Chinese, salsa dancing, and metal), show up, have a good time, and within a year or two you'll have a high quality network of non-technical partners.

[selfinvariant]

I have to agree that this advice is awful too, unfortunately.

As an engineer for an early-stage startup you daily work and value add - shipping things and invest into deep engineering work, would not be very well aligned with networking and relationship building that would be beneficial to start on your own.

Another interesting idea to consider - as a FAANG engineer you would be able to angel invest already (or fairly soon). That would be a productive (quite expensive though) way to meet more people interested in the same things as you do.

[robot]

I agree it is awful advice. Early stage startup will be similar to FAANG except a lot more work and much less compensation.

[ilikebits]

YMMV. I've been in the same FAANG-to-early-stage position, and I found:

1. It was easy to find people interested in startups at Google, but the quality of those interactions tended to be pretty low. The vast majority of people really did not have any experience with how startups actually functioned, and most people I talked to were more taken with the prestige and fantasy of being a founder than with actually seriously thinking about running a startup. I'm sure there are great and experienced operators at Google who are very competent and pragmatic startup folks - but those were generally not the people you found at internal events geared towards "people interested in startups".

2. I learned a lot cross-functionally when I joined my current team (which was < 5 people at the time). I was talking to customers in sales and support calls, helping to think about product and market strategy, and generally helping out on a variety of interesting things. You're definitely right that I wasn't talking to investors (at least, not on a regular basis - as an early employee, sometimes investors still want to chat to learn more about how things are on the ground) nor was I spending my days prospecting and finding BD partnerships, but I did learn a surprising amount about deal dynamics, selling B2B, and thinking about markets and customers in general. That said, this may have been because of the extraordinarily open and competent sales folks I worked with.

When I look on my list of "people I would co-found with", the vast majority of those people are the incredibly intense and competent folks I met working at the (now no longer early stage) startup I moved to. In general, I think about finding a co-founder less as "cast a wide net to find your one true partner" and more as "work alongside the most aggressively competent people you can find, and hopefully some of those people will mesh with you well enough that you would consider co-founding with them" (with the corollary that, if you find yourself in a job where you feel like you're mostly coasting, this is probably not a good environment for finding co-founders (although it certainly may be a good environment for you for other reasons)).

As usual, grain of salt - I was basically a new grad when I joined Google, and I expect the experience would be very different if I had a strong, senior network there. I also come from a position of unusual privilege - my parents are both engineers and I have lots of friends in engineering and I'm good at what I do, so I am unusually risk tolerant because "running out of money" or "being unable to easily find a job" is just not a thing I worry about.