| > A good technical founder is forgoing It's easy to make this SWAG on the opportunity cost , but I'm not sure it's true. I've known a lot of technical founders, and probably more than half of them were psychologically incapable of staying in a cushy mid-six comp position at a big company, even when they had the chops. It's part of what drove them to do something else. Others were more driven than technically talented, and sometimes that works well. The "why be a founder when you can get rich at a FAANG" narrative is a bit too reductive, and misses out that people do these things for a broader range of reasons that EV. Similarly, I've met technical people who are far stronger than the median FAANG engineer, but would never work there, because they can't self-identify as someone who would take that job. You can just as easily say: "why do you work at save-the-world-little-co for peanuts when you could be making 700k at BigTechCo?" Sometimes people do these things mostly because that's who they are, or who they see themselves. If you are in a relationship with someone like that, it's part of the package. Totally agree you should have a clear understanding of what that means, going into such a venture. |
This is an incredibly good point. I, myself, left BigCo to launch aforementioned startup, and mentally, I was accepting that if went to zero (it did) at least I was spending the prime of my career doing what felt like the most meaningful thing I could be doing. I did not, however, create my recommended operating agreement or get the buy-in of my wife.