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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Statistically, the last reason you should join a startup is to get rich. Most fail and even those that “succeed” most only do so for the VCs.

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Yeah, startup bros typically plan on exploiting the fuck out of a few naive coders to get rich quick. That's why all the real startups have programmers as central figures, they can actually produce and stopped themselves from getting scammed.

If you're reading this and thinking about working for an early startup, don't. Best case, you make some douchey boss a few million dollars and worst case you lose years of your life making vaporware. Find a real job with stability.

I keep getting “offers” of 10% equity to literally program the whole product that doesn’t even exist yet. Startup bros want 90% to send emails. The crazy thing is people do take those offers.

The only programmers taking these offers are at the bottom of the barrel in either skill or self-confidence, I’m afraid.

Ironically, the programming is the easy part. It’s figuring out what to program that is hard.

The business bros offering 10% to their CTO are probably also lousy product managers too, and know very little about what to build anyway.

> Startup bros want 90% to send emails.

While 10% is obviously low for what amounts to being a cofounder, I invite you to start a startup with just a product and see how far it goes. You might change your mind on the “just sending email” part.

Yes that is a bad take. Biz dev, product management and fundraising are arguably more important than engineering in a startup - except in a few edge cases, the latter is the most commoditized function, as critical as it is.

I think 10% could be a decent share for a CTO even at ~seed if the CEO brings great access to capital and users, and outstanding product management instincts. The problem is that this is seldom the case. What I see most often at pre-seed is a CEO that brings a product idea that is all in their own head (and not in the users’), zero idea or instincts on real product management and little else.

I donno I made a bunch of money off an early startup, totally depends on the team

Statistically there is almost no chance of becoming a professional athlete, but it is much easier to measure if someone should go down that road because athleticism is easy to measure.

How do you measure if you are good at ideation, coding, architecture, and the myriad other skills required to run a startup? Unless you are implying that a startups success has little to do with the founders.

All indications are that a startups success has to do a lot with pattern matching (does the founder look like Zuckerberg) and VCs don’t have a good track record of picking successes. They can lose money on nine out of 10 investments. They are well diversified. As an employee, you can waste years of your life at one of the other ten.

And coding and architecture has little to do with a startups success - and I say this as a “coder” for 25+ years and an “architect” who gets paid decent money at BigTech working with other companies helping them design their cloud architecture.

I agree that most startups fail. Only a small handful of companies at a given moment are the "breakouts" that are clearly working, and those are the most derisked to join (although not risk free for certain).

I think the entire industry forgot about startup risk during COVID, and unfortunately it is coming rushing back now with the changing environment....

Which startups are “clearly working” if you define “clearly working” as “making a sustainable profit”.

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