Comment by Futurebot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Futurebot | Hacker News Reader

"And if you go in with this mentality, even when startups fail, you succeed. If you put five years into building a company and team, you will end up with a great network of talented and motivated people, lots of first-hand experience, and often some management experience as well. Worst case, your next step could be going into Google at the VP level it would’ve taken you 15 years to get to joining out of college to “inject some startup DNA,” and catch up on salary within a few years. Unless this internet thing is a fad, that job will always be there for you."

This advice is quite precise about where it applies. If you're at a startup that is undercapitalized, working you 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week, with poor management and no opportunities for anything but building and maintenance, you can actually wind up worse off than when you went in: no built-up network and nothing that would make you "VP at Google" material, and in the case of startups doing pay cuts (in an environment of ever-rising rents), even less money than when you started(!) He is referring to working at "decent or better" startups; problem is, you may not know you're not working at one of those until you actually work at another one.

The rest of his advice is probably worth listening to, but the above part should be considered very carefully.

So this happened to me. I believe it 100%, but it's nowhere near as straightforward as you may believe after reading this.

The reason is that if you want to work hard for a startup, you need to ditch the role mentality. You have to be all in on the company, all day. You have to think like a CEO without being a CEO, and without access to all the information that comes with it. You also don't get comped for it immediately.

My path:

- Joined a company just as they got seed funding. Wrote code for 1.5 years. Constantly fought to understand why we were building what we were and where I could cut corners while still being proud of my work.

- Company got acquired. Took as job as sales engineer. Gave 6 demos a day for 9 months.

- Asked to scale my role. Turns out that's product marketing, so hired my replacement and moved to marketing. 2 months in, we fired my VP and I started reporting directly to CEO. Did this for another 7 months.

- More marketing churn, I ended up running marketing (team of 2). 1 left, hired 4 total more over 8 months.

- Decided I was leaving, told my CEO with 6 months notice. Ran the search for a new CMO (obviously the CEO had final say, but we didn't have many significant disagreements).

At every one of these steps, I freaked out about my ability to perform. I'd be up in the middle of the night, or stressing about not understanding anything. I wasn't leveraging my skills -- I was stepping into gaps the company needed filled and backfilling the roles I was leaving.

If you can find a company that will let you do this, you come out with an AMAZING skillset. I'm 30, and I haven't tested my ability to get a VP-at-Google job, but I'm not finding anything in starting my own company that's a total surprise. The breadth and exposure I got from trying different roles at a startup every 6-12 months has been frighteningly valuable.

You can't stay heads-down and think writing code is all the your startup needs. You need to think like a founder for 5 years, without any of the upside, and you'll get a huge amount of intangible value from the experience.

I did this for several years, and it didn't give me anything near VP-at-Google skills, maybe "VP-at-so-so-company" skills. I was in charge of development, systems administration / DevOps, SEO (got multiple things to the top of Google), some management (of non-technical freelancers, because I was the only full-time technical person), and a variety of other "fill in the holes" jobs. This was after multiple stints at other small companies (but not 5 full-time people small.)

I got some things out of of it, no question, but absolutely nothing compared to what I would have gotten at a high-quality company that had reasonable hours, plenty of capital, very ambitious people (no one who worked there is anywhere near technology now - most are 9-5 or non-technical consultants), interesting technology, etc. The most important thing I got was "be incredibly careful about who you work for and what promises you choose to believe", but saying to people "don't be naive / foolish" is easier to say than it is to evaluate the intentions and capabilities of founders / companies. The second most important thing would be the ability to say "I've been through the wringer before."

The quality of companies varies wildly, and the wrong environment will do very little for you. Some wind up at ones near the bottom of the quality pile and having the ability to recognize that you're at one isn't a given.

>>I haven't tested my ability to get a VP-at-Google job

People don't generally 'apply' for a 'VP-at-BigCorp' jobs. They either enter the game through their network, or get promoted in house.

Which is why it all comes down to how much good your network after a while. No matter how good you are, which college you went to, who are your friends etc sort of stuff matters way more than what the person can actually do. If anything, the real capability of the person may not even matter, most big companies run like well oiled machines, some one at the top is needed only to prevent what might be 'obvious' mistakes.

> If you want to get rich, your best bet on a risk-adjusted basis is to join a profitable and growing public company. Google for short. Make $200-500k all-in a year, work hard and move up a level every 3-5 years, sell options as they vest (in case you joined Enron), and retire at 60, rich. This plan works every time.

I'm pretty sure that is the only part of the advice that wasn't a joke.

I thought that advice was entirely tongue in cheek...

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