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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I've certainly seen first-hand how resource constraints can lead to incredible focus, creativity and a cohesive end product. I've also seen how hypergrowth at scale can lead tons of waste and net-negative activity. The ideal is efficient growth, which requires different tricks at different stages, and becomes harder and harder as you grow.

I dislike the VC model because there is huge pressure to keep growing even when it doesn't make sense or sells out potentially bigger but non-monetary ambitions. For example Twitter received incredible pressure to be as big as Facebook which turned it into a generic walled-garden ad-selling media app, away from the potential to be message-plumbing for the Internet.

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Targeting an efficient number of teammates is tricky because it's difficult to know and test when fewer people can achieve more. Too many constraints kill growth, and not too much also kill growth...

A fact often ignored is that big startup success didn't raise a lot of money. Before their IPO, Shopify raised only $122.3M, Google raised $36.1M, Linkedin $103M, King $43M, Datadog $147M, Tableau $30M, and ServiceNow $83M. They all built massive businesses without a lot of cash infusion.

I'm a little taken aback at 100M+ qualifying as "not a lot of cash" in comparison to, say, YC's usual funding level for brand new companies?

I think it might be restating the obvious to say that a company pulling in 100M+ is no longer a startup, it's an established (even if relatively new) company in aggressive growth mode.

Are you saying that raising $100M makes a company ipso facto no longer a startup, or that some transformation that makes it a startup has almost always happened by then?

I joined my last company about a year before they raised a Series C that brought total funding to $95M, and I think that by almost any other definition it was a startup before and afterwards.

(And it was enough of a startup to do a "hard pivot" to something largely unrelated when the pandemic destroyed its core business model, instead of shutting down.)

Competitive Senior Eng packages in this market are ~$350-500k (incl equity), and the fully loaded cost to hire is probably something closer to $1m per engineer.

Yes $100M is a lot in absolute terms, but depending on what you're trying to achieve, how many people you need to achieve it, and what your timeline is, $100M might not be so crazy in context.

look at companies like dataminr or plenty - they have taken over a billion dollars in funding afaik. That level of cash is pretty rare for successful companies from what I see. 100M is a lot too though - i don't disagree.

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