996

If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles, and you're willing to work 996, be just a little bit smarter and found your own startup and take all the upside.

> and take all the upside

And all of the risk.

Encouraging anyone to start their own company is deeply irresponsible. Most startups fail. If you're needing encouragement to do it - if you're not already fully deluded that you're the special snowflake unique genius who will succeed where all others have failed - you shouldn't be doing it.

First: regular employees are already taking the risk of being jobless some time in the future when joining startups.

Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.

> Most startups fail.

So, where's the risk? You still just were working anyway, pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years. And now you have "Founder" or "Founding Engineer" or "CEO" or "CTO" on your resume. So you didn't have a good exit. So what?

Well, sure, if you can raise capital then go for it. But if I'm burning savings trying to bootstrap that is just riskier than enjoying a salary with some risk of job loss.

>> Most startups fail.

so how is it different being a salaried employee at one of these companies? You say they're likely to fail; shouldn't you get the bigger lottery ticket then?

> just a little bit smarter and found your own startup

does that work? how do you convince investors to give you money if you don't have a network/didn't go to stanford?

It is different because you collect a salary the whole time and build your resume. Its not like you file an LLC and then receive a check in the mail for two years of whatever you want.

For a CEO founder, 996 is necessary to even have a shot at building and fundraising, and even then you're likely to quickly fail. Instead an IC banks on joining a founder who has funding and can get more while you build and collect a reasonable salary, and save for rainy day.

Counterpoint: is that because to become a CEO one most first obtain money to fund themselves and others?

An employee has the opposite arrangement, they find a job to receive money. A CEO finds money to have a job.

That's the fun part: If you find investors, then they're taking the actual risk while you pay yourself a nice salary.

If you're a founder and not paying yourself a salary, you're one of the class of dumb canon fodder founders that VCs have indoctrinated to create a steady supply of cheap assets they can acquire and cheap engineers trained and vetted for their real investments.

Not all startups are venture-backed.

> If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles

I think your framing is backwards.

Getting hired as a random employee, going in expecting 9-9-6, with the sort of comp these companies manage to pay, means there is a smartness ceiling, not floor.

Or nobody could take the upside.

Imagine if ownership of a company was divided according to the amount and skill level of work.

A co-op or a partnership? But how will the non-productive class make money from it?

From what I’ve heard the startups nowadays are only interested in people who already have a resume.

> If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles

s/smart/stupid/g

Yep as the corporate job is super stable nowadays. /s

I speculate that most people here, have come under the receiving end of what "At Will" contact.

There's a lot of people on HN that are not from the USA: at-will doesn't exist in many other wealthy countries.

E.g. I'm from New Zealand, and at-will contracts are not legal for employees. A company can use contracts (employing a contractor) but contracts are effectively restricted to professional specialists. A company can use temping agencies but the agency takes a big commission on top of wages. A company that has to sack someone can often get hit with financial penalties through the employee rights protection laws.

Funny that you say that because at some point I started dividing people in my head into what I call builders and redistributors:

- Builders produce food, mine resources, build houses/machines, do research, provide essential services, etc.

- Redistributors take a cut from builders, by providing a non-essential service like salesmen or assistants who call themselves managers, by getting themselves into a position of power where they have many builders work "under" them or simply by holding and "renting" limited resources like housing

I feel like this division is at the core of inequality (money per unit of work only as long as you work vs money for no work in perpetuity). Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.

most of those aren't startups, they're lifestyle businesses. (no shade to ppl who want to do that)

> this division is at the core of inequality

Of course it is. You are limited to 168 hours in a week that you can do work.

But there is no limit to the hours that other people can work for you.

> Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.

That's not just false but very often false.

Now the question is how to get the message out and change how it works.

Because this can't be that hard to understand even for the average person.

> If you find investors

It's a big if. Few can get funding especially without connections. In that case, the odds are heavily against you.

I'm not sure what is being argued here - if you have connections, can get the money and the opportunity is clear, go for it. However, you should be clear with the above before you put your assets at risk - a job, property, savings or whatever.

It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling. That seems obvious, but what do I know.

> by providing a non-essential service like salesmen...

Sorry to break this to you but if you think Sales is non-essential, you don't know anything about startups.

Depends what you want to define startups as, "lifestyle" businesses are often just a derogatory term that VCs use that don't mean anything in real life.

I don't think you answered the question. I'm pretty sure everyone knows this. But I think most people also know that it can be very difficult to pitch investors and that this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.

This sounds nice on paper but difficult to implement. I'd love to hear how you'd go about this. But I'm also pretty confident that if you show me a metric I can show you 10 ways to hack it.

Well sed

> It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling.

Don't get me wrong, I agree. I'm just pointing out that for those who do manage to get funding (however fickle and/or unfair the process may be) all the natural risks of true entrepreneurship are moot.

Er, we're posting this on a website run by a VC firm that routinely gives out investments to huge numbers of tiny teams from around the world. Literally anyone can apply. And we're supposedly in an AI bubble caused by investors ploughing hundreds of millions into any company with .ai in the name. It can't be true that getting investment is hard and requires connections.

You didn't understand what I wrote.

Of course you need to sell your product but as a builder you can do it yourself. It's not your specialty so you likely will be worse at it than a dedicated person and will have less time for actual building.

The key is that builders can exist without salesmen. But salesmen without builders have nothing to sell.

Do you think this is some revolutionary insight you've stumbled upon? Most people already know this, and yet the system is still the way it is.

> this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.

This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.

In civilizations, people used to primarily be farmers but as food production increased, this gave rise to the specialization or division of labor. In the nature of an evolutionary competition of companies, those that specialize into builders and sellers will do better than builders that try to do both, therefore the former paradigm will win out.

> Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.

You might be missing a whole paradigm that was written about in the 19th century and implemented in the 20th century, to deleterious effects.

> pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years

We have a difference of understanding of what "startup" and "failure" mean. I'm not just saying "most startups don't have an exit event" - I'm saying "most startups make negligible money (either through revenue or investment), so the founders are taking a loss the whole time they're working".

If that's not correct, then a) I need to update my mental model of the whole situation, and b) thank you for bringing it to my attention!

> regular employees are already taking the risk of being jobless some time in the future when joining startups.

Never said they weren't. But they're taking _less_ risk because they are at least taking a salary the whole time.

> paying yourself a salary

From what?

Ah well we must just know different folks. Every startup I've been aware of in my personal life was a weekend project amongst people who kept their day job, until they could get into yc or something, and then get to a seed round. The only self funded quit your day job startup I know of in my personal life is the restaurant I opened and closed within a span of a year. Learned my lesson!

Its not so much that.

Without pedigree, you get a pitch if you have something real and are lucky

With pedigree, you can pitch science fiction and get funded.

Yeah, this is the big problem I see. There's some startups I see that in their pitches have some big red flag like needing to violate the laws of physics. Yet, I see these funded.

It is extremely rare that I've seen such grotesque errors and this not have founding members from the MIT/Standford-esque crowd. A notable example is Rabbit R1, who clearly pitched science fiction, but then again Jesse Lyu has connections to Y-Combinator. On a side note, I lost a lot of respect for several researchers when I saw them promoting or talking about how impressive the R1 was after the announcement. I don't expect the public to be able to tell what's Sci-Fi (though there were clear signs of demo faking), but researchers (being one myself) should have clearly known such claims required orders of magnitude more advanced tech than what was currently available.

Genuinely astonishing - and I mean that literally, not pejoratively. Thanks for this perspective. I do know myself to be very risk-averse and pessimistic, and undoing that mindset is a personal project at the moment. Thanks for these anecdata, it's helpful to be reminded that real people can and do succeed there.