Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> I realised that gambling on other peoples' success wasn't the best long-term option for me.

Gambling on your own success is also not always a good idea. See many startups.

No, but at least you hold the reigns. Failure is your own, not someone else's. Taking a bet on yourself is an honest gamble. Taking a bet on someone else is a huge unknown.

If you're gonna take a bet, you might as well hold all the cards.

The problem is that you are still betting on your customers buying your product.

In the case of someone else's startup, you're also betting on the ability of the rest of the team that the founder(s) hired. E.g. if they hired a lousy sales team and they can't make effective sales.

That doesn't sound like a straight up gamble. It is if you have no idea if your customers want to pay for your product but there are ways to remove this unknown i.e knowing that people are willing to pay before building anything that costs a significant amount.

How many startups are actually researching this beforehand? Did Google even research this for e.g. Wave and Glass?

In any case, I think you are making it sound more easy than it actually is.

I never said it was easy. That and most businesses don't create new technology. There are industries out there that could use tech that already exists but either they don't know about it, it hasn't been shaped to their needs or both. There is also the possibility the market leader is offering a crap solution (I've seen this a few times in the healthcare space).

Wave and Glass aren't great examples of how to run new product design.

Usually, the way to handle this is to build a really cheap, quick & dirty prototype and put that in front of users. Etherpad did this for collaborative editing, then got bought by Google, with the functionality folded into Google Docs. Google Cardboard did this effectively for augmented reality, and I'd bet that they're taking the learning from it right now for Google's 2nd-gen AR/VR products.

> If you're gonna take a bet, you might as well hold all the cards.

Is it inconceivable that you might think a bet on someone else is better, at least in the current time?

I'd certainly value equity in a startup founded by a successful entrepreneur with previous huge exits over equity in a startup which I don't even have a good idea for.

Of course, you should still demand a good salary. Particularly because the companies with the most valuable equity are also the ones who can pay you well. The startups paying peanuts are also, in general, useless.

"Is it inconceivable that you might think a bet on someone else is better, at least in the current time?"

You might think it is, but that's probably before you realize that, even if the company does work out, you're going to get fucked by the founders and VCs.

It's certainly conceivable, and can often be pretty lucrative. I folded up my first startup and joined Google because they knew what they were doing and I didn't, and ended up making a lot more money than many of my peers in the startup world.

The thing is - if this is actually the situation, it'll usually be pretty apparent. You'll get super excited just interviewing with them. If you feel like you're "taking a bet" on working with someone, you probably are, and it isn't likely to be a good bet.

Good point. The best "bets" don't even feel like bets.

But even then are you really holding all the cards? Are all factors of success really in your control?

> Failure is your own, not someone else's.

That's not really true. Businesses fail for lots of reasons which are not related to the founders doing something wrong.

The difference there is that the education you get from trying and failing at a start up will rival most business Master's programs.

Actually it's not usually a good idea, they more often than not fail. But that's the point of startups, to try to play the lottery. But if you are going to play the lottery then play to win it, otherwise what's the point? Who cares if you make a few thousand more. If you are going to play, play to make millions for yourself, or don't play at all.

Everyone has their own risk profile. For some people "$50k + moderate chance of $100k" would be better than either "$80k" or "small chance of $1m".

But it depends what you want. VC-backed startup and all the BS that comes with funding for about 11 years? Or bootstrap a relatively profitable business that wouldn't interest VCs but can keep a couple of employees well paid for near lifetime?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com