Yep thanks!
12 karma · joined September 20, 2022
Having seen dozens of code bases, products, and failed startups, the number one trait a good VPE or CTO should have is to vehemently prevent over engineering and accidental complexity - via coaching the tech leads, doing design reviews as needed, and making decisions and tradeoffs.
She should have strong opinions on how code should be organized for simplicity, but she should not code. If she can enforce good naming conventions and APIs, she is gold.
Second, even if you are generally likeable, you cannot engage everyone in the audience from a stage.
Third, if you want to find be a co-founder, identify specific people with missions you care about and spend a lot of time brainstorming the problem and potential solutions and get a sense for their intelligence, energy, and integrity before you sign up for building a company with them which can take years and has a very low probability of success.
Networking without being useful is useless. Be useful.
Then reach out to engineering leaders at growth stage startups. They are always resource constrained. And generally speaking they hire for potential at the entry levels based on demonstrated passion for coding and systems design via Github and/or blogs.
And yes, fix your resume with the other tips in this thread.
It makes no sense to get a 1% equity when you are making the same sacrifices and taking the same risk as them. They may say they are able to raise money, but you are able to build the product. And unless the product reaches product-market fit, there is no business and no company.
You could be working at 100 other well-funded or established companies and learning a lot and making a lot. Do not underestimate yourself.
If you value depth, specialize. In an industry (e.g security, healthcare, finance, etc.) or field (AI, distributed systems, scaling, etc.) You'll get intellectual satisfaction, emotional satisfaction if you intrinsically care about the space (e.g healthcare), and financial upside since people value specialization.
If you value breadth and wandering, generalize. You'll still get intellectual satisfaction from knowing a variety of things, emotional satisfaction from working on things you care w/o any industry constraints, and financial upside since generalists are valuable to startups and even though their failure rate is high, being in the right company at the right time could give you the same financial upside you'd get from say being at a large company in a specialized field.
I personally chose to speciailize because I value depth and find diving deep into a field more meaningful. I know many generalists with the same amount of experience who are doing equally well and I would hire them and value them in the same way if I built a company again.