[mikl]

> Over the next few years, Mapbox tried to find success in a variety of industries: journalism, social media, travel, ect. We never hit numbers that were big enough for our investors. In the process, we abandoned our focus on Open Source and Open data. Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad.

I wish people better understood what taking VC money means: trading control for money. While employees might _feel_ the company is still theirs, that’s only true to the extent that they hold majority control of the board of directors.

It’s certainly possible to take VC money and keep your original vision intact. But only if your original vision works well enough to keep your shareholders happy. Failing that, the board will push management to compromise with the ideals as much as needed to get a return on investment.

[joecot]

Once a company takes VC funding or a buyout, or makes an IPO, any ethical promise they've ever made is null and void. Later when choices are made outside of their control, they wash their hands and say it's not their fault. But the founders break those promises at the time they take that money, when they willingly gave up their control. And the point of VC funding is always a buyout later, where all founder control will be lost anyway.

Once you take VC, the goal of the company is never to make the world better or empower their employees. The goal is now solely to make money, by any means it can. The funders will allow you to do that ethically, at first. When you're not making their return as fast as they'd like, which you never will, the ethics go out the window.

[skybrian]

You're making a big assumption that making the world better isn't about helping paying customers.

[Aeolun]

> where all founder control will be lost anyway

Unless you are Facebook, Tesla or SpaceX?

[M2Ys4U]

Let's be real, the likelihood of that is, for all intents and purposes, zero.

[brailsafe]

Employees should never feel like the company is theirs. Unless you have a real seat at the table, you should assume you have no influence over the business. That's what being an employee is (with no actual shares). You give up the risk by being an employee, and your only negotiating power is leaving.

[ClumsyPilot]

"give up the risk by being an employee"

I have observed many folks join startups as employees, take on risk without understanding it and without a clear benefit.

[grishka]

> Employees should never feel like the company is theirs.

Imagine you've put your soul into it, and some years later they tell you that you can no longer pursue your vision and respect your users, and you're now a mere executor. Your opinion no longer matters, and the fact that you have one at all is a nuisance for the new management.

I personally don't work for the money, for me the money is very much a side effect of making the world a better place.

[brailsafe]

> Imagine you've put your soul into it, and some years later they tell you that you can no longer pursue your vision and respect your users, and you're now a mere executor. Your opinion no longer matters, and the fact that you have one at all is a nuisance for the new management.

Ya, my argument is that people are absolutely naive to do this, for the reasons I mentioned.

> For me the money is very much a side effect of making the world a better place.

That's what they want you to believe. People sure as hell weren't clanging pots and pans for the software developers who instead of writing code all day in their ivory tower in downtown SF, only to leave and walk past human feces, needles, and suffering, instead got to go home and write that code from their $5k 1bdr apartment. If you can try to choose your industry more carefully, that's great, but don't lie and tell me you're paid so well because of your noble contribution to the human race.

People should try and be good to others, and if they can afford it, work for companies on products that don't actively harm people, but when they can't pay you or their stakeholders decide that's irrelevant, you can leave.

[grishka]

I'm non-US, and English isn't my native language either. But I have been to SF and have walked around the downtown. That stark contrast of there being so many homeless people just across the street from the building where Google I/O was held, where some of the best IT workers from all around the world gathered, that was something very unusual to me. Something of a culture shock. It's definitely not the norm where I'm from for people to not be able to afford a place to live.

[mch82]

> You give up the risk by being an employee

This is not true. Employees carry salary risk. For most people, unplanned loss of salary is catastrophic in the short-term.

[brailsafe]

In the U.S and maybe Canada, that's true, so you have to be cautious about which company you join. I'm actually facing this right now, but I'm a contractor, and by accepting that the risk of technically running my own business, I can also just stop providing my services if they won't be paid for. Employees can also do this though.

[roguecoder]

That sounds like you feel pretty helpless. Personally, I find that I have numerous avenues of negotiating power, even without unionization:

1. Do I recommend the company to my network? I can make it a lot cheaper or more expensive to hire.

2. How do I spend my time? All my technical choices will make certain changes easier down the line, and others harder. I work hard to understand the business context & help those choices serve our shared goals, but the emphasis there can be on "shared".

3. How much do I streamline my own work? I can work efficiently, or I can wait for that build to finish and that PR to be approved and merged before I move on to the next thing. This can be a particularly effective way to incentive investment in a platform team & build tools, if I'm not allowed to just fix them myself.

4. What do I collaborate on with my coworkers? We can pick priorities we care about, and negotiate together for specific improvements. I've gotten more vacation time, better computers, bigger screens, paid on-calls and time to fix bugs all just by talking with people about what's hard about our work.

5. Insisting on pushing improvements to open source software upstream if we are going to use the libraries at all. The company could decide it wants to write everything entirely in house, but as long as we are using open source software I personally only make changes to it that we are going to push back to the community.

And I am sure there are more: those are just the ones I've used recently.

[ClumsyPilot]

Yhose are all nice when negotiating working from home or something similarly minor - but when it comes to foundamental business model, these things are unlikely to move the needle.

[brailsafe]

That's pretty much what I was thinking while reading it. The difference between doing your work, and doing your work better than you're expected, is often unrewarded with any measurable security, probably because they're non-functional requirements and it's hard for some manager to sell their boss on the RoI. It's similarly hard to measure, if they'd even let you in on that data, how much of a minor influence you had on the business financially. Sales people meanwhile can just say "I sold this company on a $2m contract for services over the next 2 years"

[secondcoming]

It also means getting your monthly payslip. Not a minor thing.

[julianeon]

I sort of disagree - and I think most VC's would too.

The point of VC funding is not to pay salaries, really. If you squint it seems close enough, but it sets a terrible precedent that most VC's wouldn't want: looking at venture funding as how the company pays its bills. That's a natural way to read your statement - but also counterproductive & undesirable.

The point of VC funding is to take a profitable business and allow it to scale. Ideally the company could turn $1 into $1.25, before funding; that is, ideally it's making money. It should be able to pay some bills.

The VC funding is helping it to make more money, faster, and shortening the loop from sales -> payment -> expansion. It's helping it to leapfrog its competitors. That's what that money should be doing.

But what if it hasn't found product-market fit? Well, it's still not good to look at the VC's as "where our money comes from." That source is supposed to be customers, and you never want the focus to stray too far from there.

[blowski]

> The point of VC funding is to take a profitable business and allow it to scale.

There’s a heck of a lot of VC money funding only the dream of a profitable business.