[throwawaytime]

If you put in 5 years at Google, Apple, etc. you will find it to be much easier to start (or to get hired at) a start-up than if you had joined a start-up right away.

Like Zuck? Drew Houston? It's easy to rattle off a dozen names who wouldn't have started their company if they'd worked at a big company for 5 years.

The correct answer is "figure out what works for you." And stop being cynical. It's really crummy to see Sam Altman, one of the nicest and most genuine people, dumped on here just because nobody here knows him.

I know him. Or I did, once. He's not the type of person you describe. Just the opposite: what sets Sam apart is how much he believes in you. You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world. It's rare for your own parents to believe in you in the way Sam does. So why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities? And yes, you're right, you can spend years climbing the modern equivalent of the corporate ladder in order to get people to believe in you and let you take a risk. But:

in my experience nothing opens doors for you like having solid experience at a well known and well respected company.

Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it.

Sam is saying, "If you want to do a startup, here's what works on average." Nothing more.

[rjdagost]

Sam isn’t getting dumped on. It’s a simple fact that his best interests don’t necessarily coincide with your typical college student’s best interests. In my experience, on average you will be better off working at Google for 5 years than by starting a startup with overwhelmingly low odds of success. At BigCo you will make more money, get better benefits, and you’ll probably have more free time as well. After a few years you will probably have more financial security and more name-brand recognition than if you had spent a few years in the trenches at a start-up (which in all likelihood won’t even exist at the end of this 5 year window). That doesn’t mean that everyone should try to work at a big company but your typical software engineer will be better off in the process.

As far as Zuckerberg, Drew Houston, and other big winners in the startup game, well, you might as well interview lottery winners for their secrets of success. No doubt these guys are very smart and hardworking, but so are the far more numerous legions of startups that fail.

[hnnewguy]

>Like Zuck? Drew Houston? It's easy to rattle off a dozen names who wouldn't have started their company if they'd worked at a big company for 5 years.

Outliers. It's all well and good to strive to do the same, but it isn't going to happen for the vast majority of people. And how can you presume what they would've done after going to work?

>Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it.

The business world is much, much larger than those 1000 alum. They are a drop in the bucket.

Where is all your data on the failures?

I have no qualms with the incubator industry, but I think most people have it backwards: the best path for most people is getting work experience first. For a few driven people with good ideas, head to start up world.

[nostrademons]

"Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it."

Like Instacart (Amazon), Parse (Google), or Zenter (Amazon & GoDaddy)?

Or going beyond YC, Twitter (Google), FourSquare (Google), Instagram (Google), Quora (Facebook), Asana (Facebook), Cloudera (Google, Yahoo, Facebook), YouTube (PayPal), Yelp (PayPal), Palantir (PayPal), SpaceX (PayPal), Tesla (PayPal), WhatsApp (Yahoo), StackOverflow (Microsoft), Android (Apple), EBay (Apple), NeXT (Apple), Nest (Apple), Amazon (D.E. Shaw), Oracle (Ampex), and Apple (Hewlett-Packard)?

Empirically, having a "brand name" on your resume isn't necessary to found a great company, but it helps a lot. The companies above comprise almost all of the modern tech industry. The ones missing are almost all founded by founders recently out of a brand-name college or grad school: Google (Stanford), Microsoft (Harvard), Facebook (Harvard), Viaweb/YC (Harvard), DropBox (MIT), SnapChat (Stanford).

[gaius]

Like Zuck? Drew Houston? It's easy to rattle off a dozen names who wouldn't have started their company if they'd worked at a big company for 5 years.

I'm sure Zuck is a smart guy who works hard, but he also happened to be in the right place at the right time. If he had started Facebook a year earlier or a year later, no-one would have heard of it, or him. You could be the next Zuck but you're more likely to get rich playing the lottery.

You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world

Every salesman, has a lot of charisma. So?

[baby]

> Like Zuck? Drew Houston? It's easy to rattle off a dozen names who wouldn't have started their company if they'd worked at a big company for 5 years.

A dozen is not a lot. If you understand statistics. I'm not saying you are wrong but you don't have a convincing point.

[Alex3917]

> It's really crummy to see Sam Altman, one of the nicest and most genuine people, dumped on here just because nobody here knows him.

Agree completely on Sam. Wanted to add though that assuming most people on HN have done a startup at one point and 90% of them have failed, then at this point a significant portion of the community may see themselves as having been burned by YC's advice. Or it may just be the fact that the majority of the community no longer grew up reading Slashdot, or at least no longer identifies with that set of values and beliefs. Or maybe the commenters just aren't representative of everyone else.

I'm not sure what's actually the case, but clearly ten years ago the idea that working for large corporation sucked was kind of the raison d'etre of the community, whereas judging by the comments that seems to no longer be the case. Similarly, one of the most upvoted submissions this weekend was a talk making fun of pg & lisp.

Regardless of what exactly is going on, it seems like there is a mismatch between YC's messaging and the community that has been revealing itself over the last several months.

[snowwrestler]

> So why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities?

Do you think that big companies really don't believe in their employees? Is there some "don't believe" switch that gets triggered after the head count gets above a certain level? How do you think big companies come up with new products or services, or improve existing ones?

Does this sound like a company that does not believe in its employees?

http://www.wired.com/2013/06/facebook-hhvm-saga/

[pen2l]

> what sets Sam apart is how much he believes in you. You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world. It's rare for your own parents to really believe in you in the way Sam does.

What does this mean? And why are you emphasizing it so much? Sam is an investor, he believes in people who he thinks will succeed. By definition, he's not going to believe in a very large set of people. But he will believe in people who seem promising... it really is very useless to point out that he 'believes' in people.

> Why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities?

Because there's greater security in working for a big company, generally speaking, than starting a startup. Though as others have mentioned, the audience here were a self-selected group of MIT students... it's not as outrageous for Sam to have said what he has said there. I do have a problem with him abusing his platform when he starts generalizing this kind of advice (previously he's said it's better to start a startup than work for a company to a more general audience -- it's just a bad thing for him to say, but that's a topic for another day).