Sometimes you just need to make your own mistakes to learn, even if you read / hear from others that you shouldn't do that thing.
C'est la vie.
I got lucky, and spent only a few months while not working that hard.
But at the same time, this quote hits home:
>I was doing a startup. I was executing, and for the first time in my professional life I wasn’t insulated from the results. I didn’t achieve my destiny of great things, but I’d built something.
My whole career was jumpstarted by my second startup (we only got to preseed but it was a great two years) and there's no way I'd have been as good a fit without this experience
>> I hope that by reading this story, I can protect some of you from 11 months of pain.
That's not how experience works. What you really did was get an 11 month business education. And again, you can tell your story, but you can't pass on that education.
I'm glad you moved on to better things. And I think you're saying that this experience prepared you for that, and you were a better overall entrepreneur because of it.
Thats how experience works.
- 3 non-technical cofounders
- Flurry of activity for everything other than acquiring customers
- Attempt to outsource development followed by disappointment
- Relentless scope creep
- Zero go to market plan, just an incessant belief that more features in the app will solve all problems
There is also one less obvious point that is buried in the article:
> Simultaneously, my underpaid mid-level consultancy role passed me up for promotion again. I wanted out, double-time.
I did volunteer mentoring for a while. Few people went all-in on unpaid startup jobs as their primary role, but many were tempted to do it as side projects. They always believe it’s less risky. The risk they don’t see is that it distracts them from their main job, either slowing career growth or risking a PIP or layoff.
The common thread I kept coming back to was this: Ignore the side projects. Focus on career growth at your day job. Put your primary energy into growing your career or finding a job where you can.
Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.
The only exception were juniors who could rise to a senior. But senior to staff, or whatever you want to call it is almost unheard of unless you jump ship.
That said, I have only moved jobs 2x in 9 years (my second startup failing doesn't count)
The article mentions being an early career junior in the first few sentences.
Many of these promotions were out of cycle (because there was no cycle) and now that I’m at a bigger company I see how this would be much more difficult. There seems to be little interest in really retaining and growing engineering talent and all promotions are at the mercy of an entrenched HR org that doesn’t understand the work that anyone is doing. On top of that budgets are generally much tighter now than I’ve ever seen during my career.
It may still be possible to do this at smaller companies, with the obvious caveat that there’s always the danger of title inflation, though now that I’m at a bigger company I feel like I see more title inflation around me than I ever did at the smaller company. There are also entrenched structures of power that are obviously working against the success of the company and are causing good people to leave.
I do wonder if more companies embraced promotions it would lead to a healthier organizational culture in general since you’d have more people around who were involved in creating it.
Familiarity begets being taken for granted, and undervaluation, which hurts one's promotion case.
Unpaid job is an oxymoron. If they can't or won't pay you, it's either volunteer work, or a hobby. Why do charity work for a business that thinks it's going to be big; there's plenty of funding out there, let them find it and then they can pay you, and you can do work for them.
If you want to do an hour or a day or maybe even a week of work for free, ok. Maybe that's fun and interesting and you get something out of that, but after that if you're not getting anything, why would you keep doing it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24285305
(edit: totally fine to still jump into a startup role if you're not optimizing for quality of life and economics; I did because I enjoyed the work and the team)
Edit: just realised that made it sound like she died. She’s fine! We just had baby #2! But we could have spent lockdown making bread and playing RuneScape instead of me grinding
And even then, I had a few friends that had to go for another few months of unpaid job (not internship) later on. Because nobody would hire them without experience, and some companies don't consider internship to be one.
Side projects help finding a better job, or at the very least work on getting certifications or self-development to find a better job.
Having a physical business and operating it on PTO and weekends is the cleanest way to keep it separate from work.
The tech side hustle mistake is to get a tech job, then think you'll do some more tech work as a side hustle. Some people can keep a clean separation, but more commonly people slide into blurring the lines between day job and side job. Trying to build a startup MVP while working a consulting job is basically doing two tech jobs at the same time, with predictable outcomes for both.
In 16 years on HN this is one of the best pieces of startup advice I've seen.
Default should be 10% of time on MVP and landing page, 90% on distribution until you smell PMF.
Fight violently against any suggestion you invest more heavily in product until somebody is in tears about keeping up with demand for your MVP.
Sample size of 1
- Side hustle #1 funded my toy habit for a long time and gave me the confidence "I can build & support something from start to finish".
- Got to C Level working for 'the man' (aka the board). But regardless of level you're never in control of your destiny, especially with the eventuality of PE. For some that's okay, for others that's not...
- Which lead to Side Hustle #2. Left my day job 3 years ago....
Now have some of the best in our wee niche using our product, a number of team members, gradually growing it in bootstrapped fashion.
No investors, no funding rounds, no chasing growth targets. As "pure" as it can get - adding features, capturing more market, getting positive word of mouth, picking up new countries, finding new edge cases, adding new package upgrades. I think we're around 40% of new clients are referrals/word of mouth.....
In the first 6 months of turning billing on you're going "what the heck am I doing...." now I'm "oh I wouldn't give this up..." immensely rewarding bringing other new people into the business, and seeing that flow through to the finished product for our clients.
At least in NZ, side hustles are the genesis of a lot of tech companies.
> Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.
Side projects are a way to assert control. The siren song is that you can build your own way out of corporate hell and have a shot at growth (be that financial/personal/etc) without needing 10 randos and 3 committee meetings from your company to sign off on a promotion. In that light, I think it is a very reasonable response.
I think it's a symptom of how crappy and ambiguous leveling feels over the long-term. You're told that nothing's definite, just work hard and deliver results, and you'll make it.
Oh my... I concur. I've been in the very exact same stupid play about 10 years ago. 3 cofounders, not one to understand tech, 1 hired me as a consultant, then invited me with a few shares and a salaried CTO role to build the solution, and it's been the exact same scenario.
Do not, ever, associate (figuratively or contractually) yourself with people you wouldn't go hiking with in the wild for one full week, and coming back from it craving for the next time.
Even if you can't stand being in the same car for one hour, don't work with them at all.
This is one of the best use cases for LLMs by the way - they can often explain contracts to you, or find flaws in contracts. Try pasting one of those long-winded click-through contracts from Apple etc. into any LLM and see if they can help you decipher the terms - then do this with your startup's hiring contract. Also, watch 'The Social Network' and pay attention to things like stock-split clauses and so on.
Some claim the world is split between those who understand compound interest and those who don't but I think it's understanding contract law that matters more.
> but I think it's understanding contract law that matters more
It's best to just pay a real attorney instead of trying to learn something from a TV show or fact-check the hallucinations of an LLM.
I've even worked at bigger places with very scummy equity contracts, like a lawyer drafted it specifically to obfuscate how badly it was screwing you over. Not there anymore lol.
I respectfully disagree. Just hire a lawyer. You don’t want your understanding of your contract colored by the opinions of an LLM. The lawyer carries liability insurance if he gives you bad advice. If you don’t have a few hundred dollars to spend on independent legal advice, you might want to reconsider if you are in a position to be starting a business in the first place. The amount of money you could potentially save is nothing compared to what it could cost you in the future if something goes wrong.
There might be great value in LLMs fine-tuned to deal with contractual law, regulatory law, and legislative interpretative dance. At present I'd be sure to run the legal contract through multiple different LLMS at the very least, and analyzing it paragraph by paragraph in debate club manner (LLM A: tell me why this is a good contract, LLM B: tell me why this is a bad contract, LLM C: analyze the flaws in the arguments of LLM A and LLM B, etc.) Doesn't replace a good contract law specialist human, certainly, but at least you can then talk to your lawyer in a semi-informed manner.
LLMs are like compilers in that unqualified faith in their initial output is never a good idea.
If I find another startup whose product is an app, and they can't find a local developer to write that app, I'm running. Why outsource your core product!?
They're investing in people, not some singular half-baked idea that very likely goes nowhere.
In this case it sounds like both the idea was bad, and the team was bad.
Bitches, owning something is doing the hard part !
There are of course some fantastic startups launched out of the UK and Europe. Spotify, Deepmind and Raspberry Pi come to mind. But, as a rule on the investment side, I'm always super skeptical. Inevitably cap tables are worse, investors have a very different view of their roles than they do in US or Asia, and there's so much less startup infrastructure than in SV or say Singapore or Shanghai that it's a very different world. Ironically, it's self-feeding -- investors think startups are shitty business, they charge more, high quality founders head for greener pastures -- rinse and repeat.
At the other end of my career and looking back it becomes possible to see things that you missed on the journey, the role of luck, the difference between talking hard and working hard, and the critical importance of the people involved. A million monkeys with a million typewriters won't eventually create Shakespeare's works, they will waste a lot of resources and create a bunch trash. I also discovered that there are people who, when they speak, you really want to believe what they are saying. Being able to step back and say "what's the foundation here? Why should I believe this?" can be very difficult.
The problem is selection bias. A startup is 3 monkeys tops, so the chances of that are appropriately low and if the product looks dumb and unconvincing, it probably is ("...but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.")
I can make it funnier!
MY MAN!
If you thought the idea was great, there was an obvious golden opportunity for you, none of the people there are going to make this into a product, but you can. If the idea was bad, getting paid in equity means getting paid in something worthless.
The only situation where it is reasonable to deal with such a totally defunct organization is if they pay you a lot of money. And if there is a single missed payment you stop any work until you are paid.
I could talk anybody to death with all of my ideas. I only get to work on very few of them. I can’t imagine how sad a life it would be to only have one. It’s great for mentoring though because there’s always something shiny on the shelf and I can let them window shop for one they like.
That gave me enough info to know I'd prefer working for a big company
Don't you remember before inflation when we were able to focus on climate change!
But you totally got us there, the startup failed because we were a vitamin (and because our on-the-fence seed round was scuppered by Putin cooling some feet)
Get the fuck outta here. I couldn't read past that. I'm done. Thanks for the writeup. Godspeed.
So all he would tell me is that it was “the next Twitter”, and from what I could gather, he would retain the majority of the equity and I would do all of the work, while he lobbed ideas at me from on high.
I passed on it, but only because the red flags were extremely obvious. I could certainly see a situation where I might have been sucked into something more subtly exploitative.
Success stories I’ve seen always involved extremely active customer. They become part of the team, helping devs to build good product. Also it always took much more time and money. If you think you can build marketable product with fix-cost-scope contract - think twice.
That's good advice to not lose your HEAD.
I wonder how many outsourcing firms are going to be replaced by vibe coding. This response is pretty on par with many of the horror stories responses I've seen over the decades...
cortesoft•3h ago
jakey_bakey•3h ago