[tmp_anon_22]

I agree with your conclusion and want to expand on a few points.

> early 30s without dependents

Its my observation that co-founders usually fall into this group for better or for worse. A natural consequence of this is that they often have less experience, a smaller network, and an entirely different risk profile that favors, go figure, high risk ventures. I believe this also makes many in this founder demographic easy prey for VCs and others with the ability to doll out predatory contracts - and makes the role largely unappealing.

> a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate

So this has obvious consequences, but you also don't need to bake "good" software this early on. You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on. This validates your idea and allows you to hire the "good" engineers to build the """good""" software, or at least more scalable version, going forward. The real hit is on the CTO or VPE or technical lead who has to break their back making the in-experienced team work. That's a lot of stress that more often then not leads to huge amounts of burnout.

> bad advice from her SV peers

Yeah this sucks, everyone has advice to give and almost nobody takes responsibility for its fall-out. But being a SV founder is generally lucrative enough (even if its just in networking) that I have little sympathy for those who fall into the trappings of "greedy" bad SV advice (like underpaying your workers!). That's not just on the people giving advice, that's on the founder too. Distancing yourself from such behavior is a no-brainer.

[FanaHOVA]

Sorry that your experience has been influenced by people that are obviously not good at their jobs (both on the founder and VC side). What you describe definitely happens, but is not what the best founders and VCs actually do.

If you're raising money from a good fund today you're definitely not subject to "predatory contracts". People are raising a lot of capital for pretty low dilution, and there's plenty of secondaries availability.

I also don't know what you mean by founders having a smaller network or less experience; if you really spend time with good founders you'll see that a lot of them 1) have expertise in their area of focus 2) are pretty well connected.

I'm worried about too much of this narrative being repeated on here; just like with any other job, some people have only be exposed to bad managers / co-workers. That doesn't mean the whole industry is like that.

[tmp_anon_22]

Fair points - there is a large dose of cynicism in my comment and cynicism is rarely an accurate reflection of reality.

> I also don't know what you mean by founders having a smaller network or less experience

I'm insinuating that if founder demographics skew young they will have less experience and smaller social circles.

[andrew_]

> So this has obvious consequences, but you also don't need to bake "good" software this early on. You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on.

This is an excellent point that I should have made. Ironically, I've spent much of my career unrolling and re-working/writing code for companies that have done this. The amount of money spent on this after the fact continues to shock me. Personally, I don't think I could lead a team writing "bad" code, knowing it was bad, to race to a KPI or some such. It's just not who I am, and maybe that's a bad limitation for a tech cofounder. I do still think her idea could have been done "the right way" first, given the clients, early adopters, and contacts she already had lined up based on her wireframes.

But yes, excellent point.

[pavel_lishin]

> You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on. This validates your idea and allows you to hire the "good" engineers to build the """good""" software, or at least more scalable version, going forward.

In my decade and a half of software engineering experience, this has happened exactly once - we cobbled together something to validate a concept, then completely fucking scrapped it and built it from scratch.

I honestly don't know if it'll ever happen to me in my lifetime, and I wouldn't bet on it. Supporting the "shit software" for the lifetime of the business isn't something I'd want to do.

[tomnipotent]

I've seen just as many examples of well-written software failing to meet the needs of the business as I have of "shit software" that couldn't be cleaned up. This is doubly true in growth startups, where your programmer headcount grows fast enough that by year three you're producing more software in a quarter (or month) than you did in your first year.