If you live with your parent in a double wide in a trailer park and need to work at the local Target every night since high school to make enough money to help pay for groceries for the family, you might have a harder time working 100 hour weeks on the off chance that you'll raise a round and start a company. You probably also don't know many VC's or live too close to where they hang out.
Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.
If you're venture based and were expecting another round sometime soon. With higher interest rates there were more compelling alternatives for LPs than to invest in Venture, causing a trickle down chilling of the fund raising environment for venture backed companies and requiring them to come up with accelerated plans to reach profitability - including cutting staff and optimizing for survival over growth.
To :+1: this, even if it's a book - there is a central thesis - a headline and a sentence that tells you whether you want to read more. "Your pet could save your life" - The six surprising reasons that people with pets live longer than others.
Then each chapter has the same: "Getting in touch" - why stroking your cat soothes your body. Etc
You may even have sections within the chapters and each can follow the same format.
Thousands of years ago it was enough just to write down stuff you've learned, call it "Meditations" and hope people would still be reading it in the distant future.
Now if it's just "stuff I've learned about coding" or "things that make me happy" you're going to need an extremely strong hook to tie that together and build an audience.
So start with a single thesis and decompose from there. Inverted pyramids all the way down :)
He's right, but having failed a number of times, after you've put all your savings into the business, fired all your team, notified and disappointed all of your investors and customers, helped your team find new gigs, filed all the dissolution paperwork, handled all the taxes, disposed responsibly of all of the assets and you now find yourself out of work and often out of cash, occasionally you'll forget to jump through all the hoops to close down all of the SaaS accounts before you stop paying the bill personally to host the email accounts.
Of course perfect world you shut down earlier and in a more orderly fashion, but there are so many cases of companies almost failing and then not, it's hard to shutter a company when there is a chance you may go out of business - especially when you feel you're getting close to another raise or becoming default alive :(
If it stays private, not only do your existing shares appreciate (which would also happen if it was public), but as an existing investor if you have pro rata rights, you can buy more shares (vs them being sold in a public offering) increasing the number of shares you have that will appreciate.
As mentioned by someone else, estimating how much of the company you have depends on seeing the complete cap table (redacted for names is fine) along with a copy of all of the major financing documents to validate liquidation preferences, participation mechanisms, sweeteners for i-bankers and various other instruments. Good luck getting that information as a dev.
Given that, I tend to join the group that value options in an early stage private company as "worthless". If the cash comp doesn't work for me, it's unlikely the options will move the needle as I'll probably need to be there 5-9 years to actually see a positive event and I'll need to do that 5-10 times to have a solid chance of a couple of meaningful wins. Of course, some of the failures you can drop out after a year or two, but it's still many decades to have a reasonable possibility of a return from options.
It's hard enough for VCs who do this for a living and can make 10-50 simultaneous bets to come out well ahead - and the good ones have access to insane deal flow and all the docs during due diligence. Good luck being confident that you will beat that serially with limited deal flow and limited due diligence access.
To be clear, a certain proportion of people here DID beat that and are doing great with stock options, but the odds are not in your favor . . .
The challenge with substantial take home tests is that they have the potential skew your applicant pool in a number of ways that are not ideal for your business.
Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops, so immediately you're filtering out the very best applicants. As a business owner, that's not something I want to do.
Secondly, and equally importantly, you are likely to get more, young financially stable people with less outside of work commitments (including families which naturally correlate with age which in turn correlates with experience).
If you want to over-index on people with less experience and at the same time reduce the number of applications from people for whom the time commitment is problematic (including but not limited to females who statistically take on a disproportionate percentage of child care responsibilities and some members of traditionally under represented minorities) all you do is reduce the likely diversity of talent you might otherwise get to pick from for your dev team.
>...the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops...
I think that this applies for the best anything but, conversely, companies still want them to jump through the hoops. You need to convince the company you're a worthwhile hire and the company, in all of it's arrogance and self-righteous glory, spends little to no effort convincing you its a worthwhile place to work[0].
You see this in questions like, "So, why do you want to work here?" If we're pointedly blunt, we could just say, "You're hiring for 'x', I can do 'x'; also, I like having money versus not having it," but that would be taken as arrogant and/or "not be a team player" or "not very interested in the company or the role".
Let's face it: The world is filling itself with the "drink the kool-aid" types and, so, companies use that as a gatekeeper, so to speak. "A good company fit." "We just want to see if you're a fit for the company."
An experienced <x> is probably far less concerned with the pointless fact 'y' of your company versus, say, the company's culture or if you have matching contributions. If they've put in the time to make themselves an industry expert in something, then - of course - they're going to be a good company fit, at the end of the day. You're just looking for people who will be acquiescent and/or will jump through the hoops. ...but why...? For an entry-level position, I can understand it. For someone who's dev'ed for the last 10 years at 'zed' company, what function does that hurdle hope to accomplish, if not the aforementioned?
[0]-Not really true for Europe, though, so thank feck for that, but have seen it in the states.
> You see this in questions like, "So, why do you want to work here?" If we're pointedly blunt, we could just say, "You're hiring for 'x', I can do 'x'; also, I like having money versus not having it," but that would be taken as arrogant and/or "not be a team player" or "not very interested in the company or the role".
I've never failed in taking the latter approach in any interview I've ever faced. (I've been rejected; that's different).
I tend to think this is more about whether you're... 'politically risk-averse', for lack of better terminology.
Almost all of the companies that have found a "real" response to that sort of question bad (e.g. given me the gasp or whatever) have been drone-shops. To some extent it was a sort of 'soft-reject' on my side. A minority in any case.
Maybe one day it'll hurt me. I'm not sure. I think it's a pretty good filter against working with dickheads.
I am in Europe, mind. For a month or so at least. ;)
Adding value. Lets say there is something in your life that you care about and costs you $100 a month. If I find a way to provide you with the same value for $20 a month and manage to do it at a cost of $10 a month, if I can persuade you to do business with me, you get the same value for $80 a month less and I get $10 a month in profits. If I manage to convince 100,000 people to also save $80 a month, I get $10 * $100,000 or $1m a month - not by taking away from others, but by saving them money.
Of course, plenty of people get money in ways that doesn't align with this ideal, but as an entrepreneur, that's the way I think about things and I have no problem with receiving $1m a month if I do so by saving others money and/or providing them with goods or services that they choose to purchase and that makes them happy.
Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.
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