[e9]

Founding engineer 8 times. 5 exits(2 sold shares back to investors, 2 acquihires, 1 acquisition). Never really made any significant money. I would make 10x more if I spent same time at big tech. Milage may vary but my 2 cents if you want to be entrepreneur or work for a startup:

1. Enjoy the process (You can push harder and longer if you enjoy what you do and at the end it won't matter if money doesn't come because any time spent enjoying what you do is already a win)

2. Work with people you like (For founders: don't be single founder, 90% of the times single founders either don't know how to share or no one wants to work with them)

[spking]

Nothing wrong with being a solo founder and I doubt the two “90%” reasons you cited are true the majority of the time.

https://solofounders.com/

[e9]

World is large and I only get to see and experience slice of it. Thanks for sharing the link.

[asdev]

Why didn't you found yourself at any point? I understand gaining experience as a founding engineer, but after a certain point, you need to work as hard as the technical founder, take the same career risk, for way less payout

[e9]

I founded 2 of the companies above (1 acquihire, 1 sold big portion of my shares back to investors when I left).

Yes I agree founding is much better than being first engineer. Reason I kept joining as first engineer is because I found product market fit for my self (it's funny to say that haha). I was able to pitch myself as first engineer that builds first product and first teams. Someone super technical who likes to grow code and grow people is actually pretty rare in startup world so I was able to ask for high comp and choose to work on interesting projects.