[adw]

That the risk is systematically undervalued post-Series A; funding isn't magic. If you join the same company the day before a term sheet turns up, you do a lot better financially, and it's the same idea, team, market risk. If they're OK then the odds of getting funded are decent; if they're not, being funded won't save you...

[netsp]

If you buy stock the day before it goes up...

[adw]

But we're not talking about stock: we're talking about whether to take a job or not. When you invest your time in a small company, you're making the same decisions as you were the day before Series A; does the product work? Can the team I'm joining deliver? Is there a market?

VCs have more experience, so, sure, their judgement is worth considering, but I'd want to trust my own intuition too...

[akeefer]

Sure, but don't discount the fact that having the VC money is a non-trivial component of the company's success in many cases. So it's not just "is this a good team/business" but also "is this a good team/business and do they have enough runway to reach profitability?" The VC money doesn't change the first half of that equation, but it changes the second half.

In other words: would you join an awesome team that's about to run out of cash? How about joining an awesome team with an 18 month runway? The answers to those are going to be very different.

[adw]

Sure, that's absolutely true; am there, doing that, hoping for the T-shirt.

All these things get set up as dichotomies when they aren't. All I'm really meaning is that "oh, they've got funded" feels like a pretty limiting way of deciding whether you think a startup will be be a winner or not, compared to meeting with your potential colleagues and kicking the tyres yourself - and the premium you get for guessing right if you throw in with the pre-Series-A team is actually pretty big.

[netsp]

When a stock goes up in price, nothing has changed. It's still the same company. Information you get has changed, sometime just via the price.