[bob1029]

Let me be a voice of reason from within the dark forest.

I work at a 9 (soon to be 10!) person startup. The amount of challenge is unlimited. The sense of purpose virtually unbounded. I feel like I could grab on hard to anything and take it to the moon right now.

That said, this takes energy out of you like you would not believe. I don’t have enough left over for things like games, netflix, shopping, and social events. Keeping the startup alive is 90% of my life right now. The other 10% is keeping myself alive. HN accounts for most of my free time these days.

It does feel exhilarating some days, but there are also some where you desperately crave the sort of quiet and stability you’d get at a place like Microsoft.

I’ll probably wind up marginally better off than if I had gone into FANG, but I don’t think this is a gamble worth taking if your life depends on it.