To be fair, most start ups are epic failures. It's impossible to see the future and guess which ones will be wildly successful and which ones will never make it out of the starting gate. Roughly 90% of start ups fail within five years. That's not good odds at all for a cold contact on a job from a company nobody heard of before.
For most people, it would be incredibly foolish to give up a good paying job for a company that barely exists for a fraction of the pay. It would be financial suicide for the vast majority of people. My salary is higher than your entire company's value? With a 90% failure rate, I would probably turn down the offer, too.
also a startup '...increasing access to healthcare by making it more affordable...' means another middleman company predating on people. He deserved what they get
The only contracts related to single payer systems are the ones to murder anyone who begins to make any meaningful progress towards a single payer system.
Unfortunately, I'm willing to bet that a concierge style service that negotiates on someone's behalf would save the average American money while still turning profit. For example, my previous company went with a middleman company that had a proprietary formula for rating doctors. My employer would reimburse the cost of any out-of-pocket medical care that wasn't covered by insurance as long as the doctor was approved by this middleman company. This was in addition to the premiums of the insurance plan.
That where the concierge comes in. Instead of paying over $1000 or even $2500 a month for coverage that you can't dictate, the concierge hears you out, picks a plan, and then negotiates any out-of-pocket costs down for you on your behalf. Or even forgo insurance and just negotiate everything down based on your ability to pay. The healthcare marketplace gave people basically unprecedented access to a choice of plans that weren't tied to a specific employer. The plan's costs and coverage were available in full. Depending on subsidies and medicaid, people were potentially able to get better insurance than what an employer could offer while still paying less. The problem is that it's tough to assess the risk of choosing a given plan over another.
I don't think this will ever work in practice unless it's done on a per state basis. It requires diligent research and deeper knowledge than what a call center script can offer. You can't just skim off the top building a house of cards, because it becomes readily apparent when someone is or isn't saving money.
I live in a country where it's mandatory to get insurance when you own a car (to cover potential damages to other people's vehicles). The law defines a minimum coverage that is more than plenty for my needs, so I literally only needed "minimum coverage of this mandatory insurance."
Wrote to 5 different companies that were listed as the cheapest on some comparison website. All came back with offers notably higher than listed on said website, but still on the cheap side (when comparing with friends).
A friend suggested some insurance facilitator. I had little hopes, but since they take their cut from the insurance company, I gave it a shot anyway.
They came back with an offer that was a decent chunk lower than the best I got, from one of the companies I had written to (which didn't even get close to being the best offer I got directly). No idea how adding another middleman could possibly reduce consumer costs, but... apparently it can. I guess, I might have gotten a similar offer if I did some smart negotiating, but still... They got me that offer and got their own salary out of the insurance.
Definitely feels like a market failure, when ultimately the insurance company could have locked me down as a customer without paying an external facilitator, simply by sending me that exact offer in the first place... But that's how it went.
I actually have the answer to this. A lot of insurance (at least in the US) is not sold on a direct to consumer basis. I don't have all of the details, but I built accounting systems for a major commercial and specialty insurer.
When you go to a company like Geico, Liberty Mutual, or State Farm, you're getting their direct to consumer rate with a very specific set of underwriting rules that can qualify someone from the general public. Brokers will have access to a dozen or so companies that have a separate set of underwriting rules handled by a broker. Auto insurance is complicated behind the scenes. The cost of your premium all manifests according to which rules your specific situation triggers.
Insurance companies wouldn't call it a market failure, because they aren't losing money on sales per se. They treat brokers as a business expense that takes a small commission on sales. The general public that gets their rate from direct sales will typically fall under a specific subsidiary while the policies written by a broker likely fall under another. Customers just see it as Progressive or All State.
I won the startup lottery. Even if I knew it was going to pay off, I wouldn't do it again.
Get a job at a big corp, make enough money to live a decent life and enjoy it. Startup culture is beyond fucking toxic and the small chance of it paying out makes it a terrible value proposition.
In my late 20s/early 30s, I did the 70-90 hour weeks for almost two years before that pivoted to being on the road 270+ days/year with a 7 figure stake on paper with a startup as Employee #3 that went tits up in a matter of 10 weeks.
They've done studies on the link between money and happiness. While the actual thresholds vary based on the region (and the bias of the study), all studies found the same thing - there is a certain point where giving a person more money doesn't make them measurably more happy. And there are usually two thresholds - the point where a lack of money is no longer a source of problems, and the point where a supply of money becomes a solution to other problems. When you no longer have to juggle which bills get paid each month, that's a huge source of stress that goes away. When you can afford to hire a professional to do certain jobs that you don't want to, that's a huge source of stress that goes away.
Your comment really nails it. If you're in a career that can fetch an upper-middle class lifestyle with a regular 9-to-5 schedule, why would you gamble all that away for the possibility of millions on a 7-to-7 schedule? You won't be measurably happier with the extra money, but you will be miserable with the working conditions.
My brother made it rich on a company’s ipo that he and a friend from work started. His partner, or boss really, quit his job where they worked and my brother kept his job. My brother’s job for the startup was to code through the night, get about an hour or two of sleep, and then goto his full time job. Some pretty advanced coding, but ultimately just coding. His friend on the other hand was a certified genius, had already done most of the hard work, and got the name out there because of his credentials. Their company was some kind of network security. Anyways- for about a year my brother kept this routine up with no guarantee of anything. But the company succeeded and was to be sold to a friendly foreign nation country for like $250 million (my brother owned about 12% of company after multiple rounds of financing) or something up there. Unfortunately the US government stepped in and stopped the sale on grounds the sale posed a national security risk. They did wind up doing an IPO, (no idea what he cleared selling his shares) but he made nowhere near the amount he’d made if the sale went through. He was suicidal for a while after the sale was stopped.
Point of story - imo, if you’re going to go to a startup you gotta have another source of income, if you are not getting paid much (or at all) and for when the company fails.
Having wealth also creates a lot of problems and expectations. Ended up moving because of it and living very low key now. Some people here know I have money but they have no idea how much. It's nice just being "normal".
Having done it and lost in the USA, I would love to see how other countries handle small businesses like that. It was fun being bleeding edge, but like you said, it turns toxic immediately.
I get why they're chasing it but I feel like friends/family should be the primary place we look to for fulfillment. Careers aren't a bad place either but finding a place that's doing something new/exciting and it isn't for 80 hours a week is about as likely as finding a unicorn. If they've found that, I really hope that place keeps that mindset locked in stone for the rest of your acquaintances career.
This wasn't really the most tactful way it could have been phrased for strictly refusing the job, but it was a reasonably tactful way of pointing out to the guy that he was aiming too high in his recruitment attempts.
I honestly can't think of many more tactful ways of letting the owner of a start up know that he's never going to get the kind of talent he apparently wants at such alow pay rate without spending a lot of time on the effort. And I have no reason to put half a day into composing a letter to make sure a new business owner's feelings don't get hurt. Owning a business is brutal. If he can't handle blunt criticism, he's never going to succeed.
In this particular case, he managed it fine, and eventually built a successful business. Those who would get too butthurt to function after a rejection like this likely wouldn't be able to handle the rigors of owning a business. The response was pretty tame, all things considered.
I don't know who this dude is; I googled it and I don't know what Arrow is either. I'm not American, so a healthcare payment system doesn't mean anything to me, I guess.
But, coming in blind, I read it like he's still embarrassed about this, like he made the wrong move, not her. In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with you/the comment above, lol.
I think she told him no in a firm, and even kind of funny way. I can see how it could come across as hostile or demeaning, but it just seems very self-assured to me.
Maybe he thinks about it and how he won in the end, but that wasn't the impression I got. Again, I'm ignorant on all this though, lol.
pointing out to the guy that he was aiming too high in his recruitment attempts
Software developers understand when joining a startup you're trading salary for equity, with the potential to make millions of dollars if the startup succeeds. If the guy has a great idea, an MVP (minimum viable product) and/or solid track record, he should be aiming high.
'Thank you for your interest, unfortunately from what I have researched you are unlikely to be able to offer me a competitive package at the moment to meet my financial commitments. I would love to be able to revisit this in the future so please keep me in mind if your launch goes as planned. Bw.'
The amount of shit you get on LinkedIn is honestly insane if you work in anything remotely IT related.
I work in a very niche branch of sat comm, specifically formal messaging and integration of legacy serial systems
I've had offers to be a senior java developer, juniper firewall SME and netapp storage specialist. I'm about a qualified at them as a random person off the street
I kind of personally just want to accept one of those jobs and try to fake until I make it or last until I get fired. Not my fault they went out seeking under qualified people.
To be fair if someone asked you to give up your job and instead work for a basically not existent company with about three times the actual workload and a tenth the pay I have a feeling you’d probably be pretty insulted. I know I sure as hell would be. Glad it seems to have worked out for whoever the fuck this Roshan dude is but frankly I wouldn’t have expected anything less out of this kind of interaction.
I dont know that I would be insulted. But I probably would have responded the same way. Its a good sanity check. "The amount of money you have raised is not enough to hire engineers at the level you are asking. You need to increase your cash reserves or lower your expectations."
This is not being a dick. This is being realistic. Pre-seed funding is typically the money it takes to actually make a working prototype of your idea. It's personal financial contributions to the product (or money borrowed from friends, family, etc.)
This person is looking to hire a software engineer that they do not have the funds to pay. They have no revenue. They don't have anything they could show a bank to get a business loan/line of credit that would allow them to pay a salary. They do not have a means to pay this person.
This post is just a rehash of the classic "Hey bro, I hear you're a programmer. I have a cool idea for an app. Do you wanna be 50/50? I'll handle the business side of things and you do the computer stuff."
It's also the way startups operate that would make a lot of people hesitate, especially if you've been in the position before and now work for a more mature company. Basically, working with a startup usually means much longer hours, being expected to pick up the slack across multiple job roles including ones you're not comfortable with or knowledgeable about, not being able to take vacation time or sometimes even weekends. All on the promise that some day the work will pay off after a few years if the management is both competent and willing to hold up their end of the bargain.
Larger and longer running companies have many problems of their own, but they're usually at least steady and solvent. To be asked to leave that for a company that couldn't afford you if you were the only employee at your current salary? That's a big ask even if there were somehow a guarantee that a much larger funding round was going to complete soon.
A lot of us need a full-time steady job for the paycheck. But if you have some leeway, a working spouse or a pretty good cushion saved up or a particularly cheap living situation or some combination, you can afford to take a risk.
In which case, you would want to evaluate the startup and the people starting it up, and your place in it.
Is the thing they’re planning to do something that’s a good idea? Are they the right people to start doing it? Is it something that can make money for the people doing it? Are the startup people capable of starting a company, running a company, expanding a company, making money from a company?
What does this opportunity get you? The chance to make a difference? The chance to start and run a department? The chance to be a founding partner in something that you could help make important? that you could help make valuable? Is there a chance it could pay you a salary in the future that would make you happier? Is there a chance it could be a valuable enterprise in the future that could be sold to someone and give you a payout?
Most startups are epic failures, but some do okay long term and some do very well long term, and occasionally you find one that does spectacularly. And even the “does okay long term” ones can be pretty nice to work with. It depends on who is starting them, and why, and what they want out of it, and what part you get to play in it.
Exactly... and also not every is suited for start-ups. It's a different type of thinking, less political, needs more motivations, more risky also, and requires skills across the board. Most head of engineering for instance in start-ups would be expected to code, while in big firms they'd be mostly managing. Different skills.
I recently had a recruiter reach out on a Saturday about a contract position. I was at Lowe’s in the middle of ordering paint when I saw the message and assumed it was spam bc who’s hitting me up at 2pm on a Saturday?
So when she asked my rate I gave her a crazy big number assuming it was a bullshit position and went on with my day.
Turns out it was a Fortune 500 co and they matched my ridiculous rate request 😄 fun little money grab before the holidays. Never hurts to passively play along!
I mean, what was impolite about it? It was matter of factly, I don’t think it was impolite. He took his shot and she told him exactly why she wouldn’t take it.
People significantly overestimate the reward though. You dont get preferred shares. They dilute significantly. When you quit, you have to exercise and pay AMT. The opportunity cost of printing money and investing it from a regular job is gone. Joining a startup as an employee is a bad idea.
Been part of 2 startups that exited and got nothing. First one was setup so that the cost to exercise my shares was exactly equal to their value so it would be a null transfer.
Second was acquired by a bigger company, but they bought it with shares instead of cash. My stock options in old company were worthless, and only the actual investor shareholders recieved stock in the new company
To me the reward is also less micro management, more involvement in product and company direction. Working with motivated people who are compensated by the success of the company. Generally just a more enjoyable employment experience
I've gotten a low seven figure payoff from a startup and I paid less than 40k to exercise, did it over several years so no amt for me 🤷♂️.
If you enjoy it sure. Im sure woodworking is enjoyment too. Seven figure payouts are a 1/10 probability and thats being generous. The opportunity cost of having worked at meta or Nvidia during the same time and made millions anyway is too much to recommend otherwise.
Of course I agree it can be more fun for many (including me). I continue to work at a startup. They let me work from anywhere in the world and I have guaranteed job security. But its not about money.
People who can land a job at Nvidia aren’t going to risk that going to a preseed/seed startup unless they know they will make more money in that startup.
Eh. People want to work on what they want to work on. Lots of smart people view the big companies in a negative light. I definitely wouldn’t say that the best stay away from startups
Yeah I mean I have friends who work at the infrastructure titans (Microsoft/Amazon/Uber/Google) and could probably land a job through them, but I've seen the hours they work vs the extreme flexibility I get at my small business software company and the flexibility and moderately high salary is worth more than the extra high salary and no flexibility I'd get going to Microsoft. Some people value the work/life balance at a lower salary point, I'll have to work until actual retirement age but I can do all my hobbies and such while I'm young-ish, some people want front-load their career stress, get paid a ton now, lose all their hair, and retire before 50. Both are valid strategies.
Heh. There’s also people who like the big companies because they can slack off more (me). Really depends on where you end up. They are pretty big after all
Likewise. Both of my SWE jobs have been for massive companies, and both have been exceptionally chill & remote.
I sure it's much easier to slip through the cracks at larger companies than it is at a start-up where they'll be expecting everyone to pull their weight plus some.
I work at a startup and regularly recruit people out of big tech where the startup needs to 5x+ to break even for them. I took a 50% cut on salary to join.
There's so much that can wear you down working at those big companies. A really good startup work culture is insanely energizing and you'll get opportunities to have way more responsibility very quickly. I have fewer people rolling up to me than comparable big tech directors or VPs but when I tell them the stuff I'm personally involved in they say they'd never get to do that at their company.
I'm at a large corporation with a pension, bonuses, and salary escalating higher than inflation and CoL combined. I could make more at a start-up, but I could also flare out. I've been at two startups, one post-startup, and one boutique company. I'll take the security over the startup any day, and I know several people who ARE startup IC millionaires.
Nah 1/10 is realistic, as long as you dont consider some company that starts outside sf or ny a startup lol. I was in a ds boot camp and we keep in touch a batch of folks, and many have made some bank doing startups.
I don't know any chill startups. My husband's high school buddy works at a startup and people are constantly getting fired for not meeting the CEOs vision. Lots of late nights and work weeks are rarely 40 hours.
Sounds like you lucked out, but that's not the usual startup experience for people.
And most startups that give you options don't go up in value, so when you exercise them they're worth less than if you'd just got a cash bonus originally
People on Reddit just talk out of their ass and get upvoted. So you’re telling me the literal highest educated people in the world from the best schools choose to work at startups because they don’t understand the compensation? Each startup has a different compensation structure, some are good, some are bad. There are many very wealthy early employees that are laughing right now.
There’s also a bunch of former early startup employees who have it as an episode on their resume with nothing to show for it because the startup failed into bankruptcy.
Also just because someone is a really good software engineer doesn’t mean they understand the way that being compensated in stock (or stock options) works or how to read the legal documents that are part of compensation agreements. That’s typically a finance guy and lawyer’s specialty respectively.
I worked at a start up for a few years and it went bankrupt. But I was well compensated and I learned a ton. Obviously didn't make out like a bandit with shares but it wasn't a waste of those years.
This has been my situation. My first startup failed, but it gave me a ton of experience and I easily shaved 5 years off the corporate ladder grind. My current startup I came in at a much higher level and have been well compensated. We now have a new medicine in clinical trials. We're fairly diluted so it may not be a huge payout if we continue to succeed but I've done well for myself and this will be a great stepping stone for the next thing. I could have gone into a corporate Pharma job where my comp would have been a bit higher but I would have moved way more slowly without the chance of upside I have now.
Which is far more common. There are tons of creative ways that startups hide liquidity events from common stock holders like this. And as a share holder you’re stuck signing a new shareholder agreement with even further dilution, or just calling it a loss and walking away.
True but at least when you’re laid off after 10 years you’ve got 10 years of salary and 401k matching. If a startup that pays mostly in stock goes under, you have very little to show for it.
Nothing is certain in life, but risks can still be mitigated. Saving part of a $400k salary is a lot more stable than living on a $40k salary with the promise of several million if the company makes it big.
I’m a highly educated PhD Electrical Engineer from an R1 University and I didn’t understand dilution. We are experts in our narrow domain. The startup I joined diluted me to oblivion during the 10 or so years before it was purchased. That’s on me, of course, but don’t make the mistake that someone highly skilled and knowledgeable in one area is competent in all areas.
And while joining a startup has much better odds that the lotto, the fact is most people who join startups would have been better off financially and in wlb as an employee in an established company.
Yep, I am an executive and I invest in startups + advise them. I would say that at least 90% of startup employees don't understand how company financing and dilution work.
They're not stupid, but they make a decent salary and work hard at their day jobs. They see the company growing and raising more money, so they assume that their shares are also going to the moon. They therefore erroneously believe that when the founders and investors get paid, they will also end up wealthy.
Instead, the founders and investors walk away with tens of millions to hundreds of millions, while they walk away with potentially low $100,000s. Nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not the generational wealth of the co-founders that they fought beside for many years, in most cases. Early employees accept the same financial and reputational risks as co-founders, but get almost none of the reward.
Laymen and techbros don’t understand that the public just doesn’t hear what the corporate engineers and scientists get up to, because we’re under NDAs and corporate culture doesn’t care about publishing and advertising their rock stars.
So you’re telling me the literal highest educated people in the world from the best schools choose to work at startups because they don’t understand the compensation
In some cases those people switch to the new startups without caring much about the compensation as they're already set for life from the previous ones. Given their experience and recognition they often can also dictate conditions of reward. Most of the transitions between projects we hear are like these because nobody cares about random programmers switching to startups otherwise.
Actual people dropping stable office job income to a startup are a good illustration of selection bias - 99.9% fail, but we hear most about the successful 0.01%.
He's not entirely wrong; joining a startup is usually a terrible idea statistically.
What is perhaps more relevant to the point he's making is the fact that you have to have some other source of income or wealth to survive on in order for taking that risk not to be extremely unwise financially.
Just floating this out there in my industry (cybersecurity) startups offer some of the best salary ranges & stock comps compared to larger enterprises source: I’ve worked at startups and large companies.
I also work in cybersecurity, and startups definitely are not offering the best salaries. Big tech and HFT typically have the highest pay. Best offer I've gotten from a startup was ~230k, and that was an AI startup with stupid amounts of AI investment money
Exactly! It's the same as buying lottery tickets. All the "smart" people say that it's a terrible investment, but I've never met a Powerball winner who wasn't wealthier than before they won.
Edit: /s because it might not be obvious. Many more startups fail than succeed. Basing your opinion of a choice to work for a startup on those who have been initial employees at wildly successful startups is like basing your opinion of playing the lottery on only observing the people who won. There are problems encountered by the winners, but the losers lose a lot more.
So you’re telling me the literal highest educated people in the world from the best schools choose to work at startups because they don’t understand the compensation?
Programming and business/finance are different skillsets. You can be excellent at one and not good at the other. I've seen plenty of brilliant software engineers make idiotic choices in other areas, because their skill are narrowly focused on their technical domains.
Many technical people underestimate how complex and uncertain startup equity valuation & dilution are. Speaking from professional experience, when you get high enough on the technical ladder to be involved with the business/financial side too then you realize how messy that can be.
There are many very wealthy early employees that are laughing right now.
Work in startups can be fun because of the culture and impact potential. But make no mistake, the number of early employees that strike it rich is tiny. Statistically you're more likely to get a big windfall putting all your disposable income into a random stock than relying on startup equity.
If your goal is to build wealth, you're better off working at a big tech company and investing the higher income sensibly in a diversified stock portfolio.
So you’re telling me the literal highest educated people in the world from the best schools choose to work at startups because they don’t understand the compensation?
Highly educated in their specific field, undoubtedly. But educated in all the various crevices of employment law into which employers can stuff hidden compensation strategies designed to shift as much risk as possible to you while retaining as much reward for themselves? Educated about how to handle a career salesman with decades of experience selling young professionals on all the heights they could reach if only they take this one chance?
I'm a lawyer who has worked with multiple tech startups. The easiest people to take advantage of are the people who think their expertise in one area means they can't get tricked in a different one.
The smartest people dont just join startups. They join companies like openai. Thats not what a typical startup employee experiences. As a matter of fact most people who join startups as employee 2-20 are idiots or crazy.
A startup is a starting company. OpenAI was once a startup, granted a startup with a handfull of billionaire investors but a startup nontheless.
Of course most startups fail and yeah you could call it stupid because it's a risk but if you're smart enough and play it right it can totally be a good choice to join a startup, it isn't always a bad choice.
No one's calling Tim dipshit from Kentucky to join OpenAI. Calling OpenAI a startup for this discussion shows how clueless you are about these things. The absolute best startups start with a pedigree of already successful talent at the top of their game. They dont reach out to random idiots (in this case even an L4 in Google is an idiot) on LinkedIn.
I had a company that was just out of the startup phase into getting gov't contracts. but when it came time for the offer they told me "we can only pay you in company stocks" for a full-time job. I ignored them for the disrespect.
Equity grants and vesting schedules include terms for what happens when you're acquired with unvested or unexercised options. You don't have to accept terms that include getting fucked. "In the case of acquisition, options and equity grants vest fully..." in legalese worked out well for me.
The decision to join a startup/early-stage company requires more thought than "here's your salary, you good?" That being said, my philosophy is: assume the equity ain't worth shit and take it like a bonus if it does become valuable.
I worked for a company like this they lower healthcare costs for gravely ill people by funneling them into less expensive treatments and experimental drug trials. I think a dying person in some cases might spend any money they can to live. Companies like this work for the insurers because they're to ones who don't want to pay.
They may never turn a profit, but after you get an operation like this running you'll get a lot of investors who share an interest in cutting off the huge huge amounts of money stuff like late stage cancer takes. The client themself isn't necessarily interested in dying with lower claims.
So this is a funny post, insidious business endeavour. Best of luck though, to this guy, since these do work.
I don’t think this is necessarily wrong. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of life to try and buy a couple extra weeks for someone who’s already gravely ill is hardly worth it.
One of the reasons healthcare is so expensive in this country is because so many resources are spent trying to delay the inevitable even if there’s no real quality of life at that point. A lot of other countries are way better with managing end-of-life care than the U.S.
And? Theranos raise $700 million and was once valued at $19 billion. Arrow hasn't gone public and options for non-founders are notoriously hard to cash in.
of which she wouldn’t have seen a penny of because that’s not how startups work. She is an employee so she probably would have still made less than she currently did and would have been paid in diluted stock as a consolation. Startups a very profitable for the people who start them, not so much for the people who work for them unless they get an amazing deal.
If your "marketing" requires you to lookup a name to even find out what the company is called Not even what the company offers/provides. That doesn't really seem like marketing does it...
I couldn't find a wikipedia page for the guy (or his startup), but i did find his page on Crunchbase. It looks like he is the founder and CEO of a startup called Arrow which is categorized as a "Debt Financing" company. Their "About the Company" section says the following:
"Arrow is the AI operating system for modern revenue cycle teams, where billers collaborate alongside AI to handle denials, follow up on claims, and complete RCM tasks faster. Built for billers and loved by CFOs, Arrow helps practices collect more revenue, faster."
Yep that all sure sounds like "increasing access to healthcare by making it more affordable". Not at all like selling AI based financial middleware to health insurance companies so they can justify laying off support staff.
Yep. And AI could actually have some usefulness in dealing with all of the insurance company bullshit (particularly when they are using AI themselves to deny claims and milk their customers). But phrases like "AI operating system" makes this sound like yet another company capitalizing on current buzzwords to get their share of meat from the carcass that is our "healthcare system".
Personally I feel like this is more embarrassing for him than for her. Oh, you're successful but you're still dunking on someone who didn't take a chance on a startup that cold-pitches on Linked In? Woah what a Chad, I guess.
If his startup crashed and burned, or wasn’t as successful he would never post this. It’s just a dumb startup entrepreneur bs, who think they’re better than everyone because they did it “against all odds” and hence no luck was involved in it, and thus look down on everyone else. Most such assholes are usually, or tending on the side of sociopathy, so it tracks lol.
That's results-oriented thinking. The decision not to buy a scratch-off doesn't become a bad one just because the next ticket was going to be a winner.
Sounds petty. Also for every success story there's 1000 failures or more. Sometimes you leap and sometimes you play it safe. 99% of the time the choice the software guy made would have been the right choice.
Unfortunately, the 1% that you're wrong really hurts.
Hi Roshan, Thanks for reaching out; however, I’m satisfied in my current role and wouldn’t be interested at this time. Good luck with your venture, sounds inspiring!
No, generic superficial drivel that adds nothing. Lying to someone's face is not being polite or courteous.
May as well not respond. He might even come away from that exchange thinking his current approach was targeted correctly but just missed opportunity or the wrong person.
What he might have instead learned was:
That he actually reached the intended target, who even took the time to consider who he was and research his credentials. Someone who is satisfied in current role and not interested would not have done those things.
That his hand was showing, and that public profile might need to be updated or considered when entering negotiations or planning cold calls.
That because of the above, his target goal was misaligned with his approach and budget.
That his approach might need refinement as "hiring" full time what he wants was not in scope. Could instead offer contractual work within budget or pad offer with equity offers or something else if really needing that level. Or, re-align and aim for more junior.
She also did not say no. She established what she knew of his position, let him know she would come informed, also let him know she was potentially interested enough to have taken that time, and started by addressing the most immediate issue of compensation.
First of all I’m skeptical it’s even the real Roshan Patel since it uses an upper case i instead of a lower case L
But if it is him, this is not him owning up to his shame. It’s him “flexing” because his company (Arrow) raised $110M in funding from Google the very next year after this exchange
I don’t think this rude at all. I think it’s saving both of them time. They are so far apart on pay unless he’s going to somehow bridge that why even “chat”. A companies good vibes don’t pay bills.
Yeah, most startups fail and she probably didn't want to take the risk. Although she was rude, she was at least upfront about her concerns. I feel the biggest risk with responding to these emails/DMs is that a good chunk of them are just MLM/pyramid scheme recruitment attempts.
No, that's just how LinkedIn shows timestamps on connection request messages - it's by when you respond, not by when it was sent. LinkedIn is stupid, but the timestamps are not a signal that this was staged.
Kinda a dumb response because when you found or join a pre-seed or seed startup, you basically trade cash comp for the lottery ticket of equity. So of course the salary won’t match what you are currently getting from a traditional job. A less egotistical and demeaning response would have been, “I’m currently focused on cash comp. Let’s talk after your Series A.”
First - nobody is forcing anyone to take a job with a startup, so there's nothing wrong with the guy asking if you're interested.
Second - unless you are one of the founders and have unrestricted stock and you're in on AND UNDERSTAND all the financial details, you are by definition a tool, not a creator. You are a means to an end for the people who DO own and control the thing being created.
None of that means it can't still be worthwhile, but it's up to YOU to be sure you are paid fairly for your time and effort along the way - pricing in the added RISK that the company could fall apart any day of the week with no warning, and any restricted options/stock you are granted you should treat as worthless in evaluating that compensation.
If they can't afford to pay you fairly in that context, it's not likely worth your time.
If it's later stage, with real venture capital money (and scrutiny) involved and a demonstrable path toward an exit - either a sale or public offering - THEN you can start to attribute "some" value to those other forms of compensation.
Even then it can all fall apart.
I once owned shares in a company that I helped build from scratch. We grew over 10 years to 1000 employees across 5 states through multiple rounds of funding from Angel investors through several venture capital rounds. We were 3 weeks from our IPO - all preliminary filings and waiting periods done, just waiting for the official date to arrive.
Then the dot-com crash happened.
At that point, we had 125 million in CASH in the bank from the final venture capital round, big international banks involved, etc. We had a solid business plan and profitable software products. Where did it end up?
Instead of using the cash to restructure the business plan around a slower but stable and profitable path, the C-Suite that the banks had installed kept spending assuming the market would come back. For them the IPO WAS the business. They weren't there to build a product or a service business for the long term.
Burned through 125 million in 8 months. Filed bankruptcy, sold off the assets. The software products were sold off to other companies, lots of unemployed people. Stock was worthless. 10 years of work down the drain.
But I was fairly paid all along the way. I NEVER agreed to work for less than I was worth to "help the cause". I was employee number 15, and owned stock projected to be worth 3-5 million at IPO (1999 dollars)
But I was NOT one of the founders - several of whom cashed out hugely at the final venture round in the run-up for the IPO. People like me weren't offered that option, which I would have GLADLY taken.
20 years later, my wife after a long successful and steady career in health care administration at senior levels of a large health system was recruited to help build a startup as one of the early senior executives. She negotiated a significant salary bump with performance bonus and stock participation. The company recently sold to a big conglomerate, and in addition to the big salary for 5 years, she'll walk away having made over 2 million off of the stock.
It can work - but nobody is looking out for you. YOU have to do that for yourself.
To be fair, most start ups are epic failures. It's impossible to see the future and guess which ones will be wildly successful and which ones will never make it out of the starting gate. Roughly 90% of start ups fail within five years. That's not good odds at all for a cold contact on a job from a company nobody heard of before.
For most people, it would be incredibly foolish to give up a good paying job for a company that barely exists for a fraction of the pay. It would be financial suicide for the vast majority of people. My salary is higher than your entire company's value? With a 90% failure rate, I would probably turn down the offer, too.
also a startup '...increasing access to healthcare by making it more affordable...' means another middleman company predating on people. He deserved what they get
Possible exception: if they stumbled into a contract for implementing the backend systems to run a single payer system.
The only contracts related to single payer systems are the ones to murder anyone who begins to make any meaningful progress towards a single payer system.
Free Luigi
Inshallah, brother.
Unfortunately, I'm willing to bet that a concierge style service that negotiates on someone's behalf would save the average American money while still turning profit. For example, my previous company went with a middleman company that had a proprietary formula for rating doctors. My employer would reimburse the cost of any out-of-pocket medical care that wasn't covered by insurance as long as the doctor was approved by this middleman company. This was in addition to the premiums of the insurance plan.
That where the concierge comes in. Instead of paying over $1000 or even $2500 a month for coverage that you can't dictate, the concierge hears you out, picks a plan, and then negotiates any out-of-pocket costs down for you on your behalf. Or even forgo insurance and just negotiate everything down based on your ability to pay. The healthcare marketplace gave people basically unprecedented access to a choice of plans that weren't tied to a specific employer. The plan's costs and coverage were available in full. Depending on subsidies and medicaid, people were potentially able to get better insurance than what an employer could offer while still paying less. The problem is that it's tough to assess the risk of choosing a given plan over another.
I don't think this will ever work in practice unless it's done on a per state basis. It requires diligent research and deeper knowledge than what a call center script can offer. You can't just skim off the top building a house of cards, because it becomes readily apparent when someone is or isn't saving money.
Or we can just have a single payer system.
I live in a country where it's mandatory to get insurance when you own a car (to cover potential damages to other people's vehicles). The law defines a minimum coverage that is more than plenty for my needs, so I literally only needed "minimum coverage of this mandatory insurance."
Wrote to 5 different companies that were listed as the cheapest on some comparison website. All came back with offers notably higher than listed on said website, but still on the cheap side (when comparing with friends). A friend suggested some insurance facilitator. I had little hopes, but since they take their cut from the insurance company, I gave it a shot anyway.
They came back with an offer that was a decent chunk lower than the best I got, from one of the companies I had written to (which didn't even get close to being the best offer I got directly). No idea how adding another middleman could possibly reduce consumer costs, but... apparently it can. I guess, I might have gotten a similar offer if I did some smart negotiating, but still... They got me that offer and got their own salary out of the insurance.
Definitely feels like a market failure, when ultimately the insurance company could have locked me down as a customer without paying an external facilitator, simply by sending me that exact offer in the first place... But that's how it went.
I actually have the answer to this. A lot of insurance (at least in the US) is not sold on a direct to consumer basis. I don't have all of the details, but I built accounting systems for a major commercial and specialty insurer.
When you go to a company like Geico, Liberty Mutual, or State Farm, you're getting their direct to consumer rate with a very specific set of underwriting rules that can qualify someone from the general public. Brokers will have access to a dozen or so companies that have a separate set of underwriting rules handled by a broker. Auto insurance is complicated behind the scenes. The cost of your premium all manifests according to which rules your specific situation triggers.
Insurance companies wouldn't call it a market failure, because they aren't losing money on sales per se. They treat brokers as a business expense that takes a small commission on sales. The general public that gets their rate from direct sales will typically fall under a specific subsidiary while the policies written by a broker likely fall under another. Customers just see it as Progressive or All State.
wouldn't it just be preying?
It looks like there was already a whole conversation about this. TIL.
I won the startup lottery. Even if I knew it was going to pay off, I wouldn't do it again.
Get a job at a big corp, make enough money to live a decent life and enjoy it. Startup culture is beyond fucking toxic and the small chance of it paying out makes it a terrible value proposition.
In my late 20s/early 30s, I did the 70-90 hour weeks for almost two years before that pivoted to being on the road 270+ days/year with a 7 figure stake on paper with a startup as Employee #3 that went tits up in a matter of 10 weeks.
Ouch!
They've done studies on the link between money and happiness. While the actual thresholds vary based on the region (and the bias of the study), all studies found the same thing - there is a certain point where giving a person more money doesn't make them measurably more happy. And there are usually two thresholds - the point where a lack of money is no longer a source of problems, and the point where a supply of money becomes a solution to other problems. When you no longer have to juggle which bills get paid each month, that's a huge source of stress that goes away. When you can afford to hire a professional to do certain jobs that you don't want to, that's a huge source of stress that goes away.
Your comment really nails it. If you're in a career that can fetch an upper-middle class lifestyle with a regular 9-to-5 schedule, why would you gamble all that away for the possibility of millions on a 7-to-7 schedule? You won't be measurably happier with the extra money, but you will be miserable with the working conditions.
My brother made it rich on a company’s ipo that he and a friend from work started. His partner, or boss really, quit his job where they worked and my brother kept his job. My brother’s job for the startup was to code through the night, get about an hour or two of sleep, and then goto his full time job. Some pretty advanced coding, but ultimately just coding. His friend on the other hand was a certified genius, had already done most of the hard work, and got the name out there because of his credentials. Their company was some kind of network security. Anyways- for about a year my brother kept this routine up with no guarantee of anything. But the company succeeded and was to be sold to a friendly foreign nation country for like $250 million (my brother owned about 12% of company after multiple rounds of financing) or something up there. Unfortunately the US government stepped in and stopped the sale on grounds the sale posed a national security risk. They did wind up doing an IPO, (no idea what he cleared selling his shares) but he made nowhere near the amount he’d made if the sale went through. He was suicidal for a while after the sale was stopped.
Point of story - imo, if you’re going to go to a startup you gotta have another source of income, if you are not getting paid much (or at all) and for when the company fails.
Having wealth also creates a lot of problems and expectations. Ended up moving because of it and living very low key now. Some people here know I have money but they have no idea how much. It's nice just being "normal".
Expectations are other people's problems.
Having done it and lost in the USA, I would love to see how other countries handle small businesses like that. It was fun being bleeding edge, but like you said, it turns toxic immediately.
I know a person who thinks the complete opposite.
Gone startup -> big corp -> startup.
Because they got bored, didn't feel exiting.
I get why they're chasing it but I feel like friends/family should be the primary place we look to for fulfillment. Careers aren't a bad place either but finding a place that's doing something new/exciting and it isn't for 80 hours a week is about as likely as finding a unicorn. If they've found that, I really hope that place keeps that mindset locked in stone for the rest of your acquaintances career.
But there's turning down and then there's being an absolute dick about it. They definitely chose violence that moment.
This wasn't really the most tactful way it could have been phrased for strictly refusing the job, but it was a reasonably tactful way of pointing out to the guy that he was aiming too high in his recruitment attempts.
I honestly can't think of many more tactful ways of letting the owner of a start up know that he's never going to get the kind of talent he apparently wants at such alow pay rate without spending a lot of time on the effort. And I have no reason to put half a day into composing a letter to make sure a new business owner's feelings don't get hurt. Owning a business is brutal. If he can't handle blunt criticism, he's never going to succeed.
In this particular case, he managed it fine, and eventually built a successful business. Those who would get too butthurt to function after a rejection like this likely wouldn't be able to handle the rigors of owning a business. The response was pretty tame, all things considered.
I don't know who this dude is; I googled it and I don't know what Arrow is either. I'm not American, so a healthcare payment system doesn't mean anything to me, I guess.
But, coming in blind, I read it like he's still embarrassed about this, like he made the wrong move, not her. In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with you/the comment above, lol.
I think she told him no in a firm, and even kind of funny way. I can see how it could come across as hostile or demeaning, but it just seems very self-assured to me.
Maybe he thinks about it and how he won in the end, but that wasn't the impression I got. Again, I'm ignorant on all this though, lol.
Software developers understand when joining a startup you're trading salary for equity, with the potential to make millions of dollars if the startup succeeds. If the guy has a great idea, an MVP (minimum viable product) and/or solid track record, he should be aiming high.
'Thank you for your interest, unfortunately from what I have researched you are unlikely to be able to offer me a competitive package at the moment to meet my financial commitments. I would love to be able to revisit this in the future so please keep me in mind if your launch goes as planned. Bw.'
That's nice, but honestly the response given is probably the response of someone who is sick of being cold-messaged with lowball offers by startups.
The amount of shit you get on LinkedIn is honestly insane if you work in anything remotely IT related.
I work in a very niche branch of sat comm, specifically formal messaging and integration of legacy serial systems
I've had offers to be a senior java developer, juniper firewall SME and netapp storage specialist. I'm about a qualified at them as a random person off the street
I kind of personally just want to accept one of those jobs and try to fake until I make it or last until I get fired. Not my fault they went out seeking under qualified people.
Yeah, the folks in here saying "that was rude" aren't the kind of people this guy is (badly) trying to hire.
I'd have said the same thing, because he's the umpteen-millionth person to hit my inbox begging for free labor.
To be fair if someone asked you to give up your job and instead work for a basically not existent company with about three times the actual workload and a tenth the pay I have a feeling you’d probably be pretty insulted. I know I sure as hell would be. Glad it seems to have worked out for whoever the fuck this Roshan dude is but frankly I wouldn’t have expected anything less out of this kind of interaction.
I dont know that I would be insulted. But I probably would have responded the same way. Its a good sanity check. "The amount of money you have raised is not enough to hire engineers at the level you are asking. You need to increase your cash reserves or lower your expectations."
Would have been the polite way to say that.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Yeah fancy word just sounds like lawyer or fucking scammer, at least this dude is pretty clear about his message of piss off.
Her or their (nonspecific) to be accurate.
Oh yeah not see the she/her mb
Only 2 kinds of people speaking fancy on direct chat, lawyer or scammer, at least we know the guy is not in either category.
Polite words are for my boss and coworkers. Cold callers are not afforded that privilege.
They like to teach a lesson and think of it as 'tough love'. To benefit
Is it not also a dick move to make people jeopardise their livelihood, so i have a shot at making a horrible businessmodel run?
It’s an exciting opportunity, Mr Hazard!
And good on them.
This is not being a dick. This is being realistic. Pre-seed funding is typically the money it takes to actually make a working prototype of your idea. It's personal financial contributions to the product (or money borrowed from friends, family, etc.)
This person is looking to hire a software engineer that they do not have the funds to pay. They have no revenue. They don't have anything they could show a bank to get a business loan/line of credit that would allow them to pay a salary. They do not have a means to pay this person.
This post is just a rehash of the classic "Hey bro, I hear you're a programmer. I have a cool idea for an app. Do you wanna be 50/50? I'll handle the business side of things and you do the computer stuff."
It's also the way startups operate that would make a lot of people hesitate, especially if you've been in the position before and now work for a more mature company. Basically, working with a startup usually means much longer hours, being expected to pick up the slack across multiple job roles including ones you're not comfortable with or knowledgeable about, not being able to take vacation time or sometimes even weekends. All on the promise that some day the work will pay off after a few years if the management is both competent and willing to hold up their end of the bargain.
Larger and longer running companies have many problems of their own, but they're usually at least steady and solvent. To be asked to leave that for a company that couldn't afford you if you were the only employee at your current salary? That's a big ask even if there were somehow a guarantee that a much larger funding round was going to complete soon.
It would depend on how you view the startup.
A lot of us need a full-time steady job for the paycheck. But if you have some leeway, a working spouse or a pretty good cushion saved up or a particularly cheap living situation or some combination, you can afford to take a risk.
In which case, you would want to evaluate the startup and the people starting it up, and your place in it.
Is the thing they’re planning to do something that’s a good idea? Are they the right people to start doing it? Is it something that can make money for the people doing it? Are the startup people capable of starting a company, running a company, expanding a company, making money from a company?
What does this opportunity get you? The chance to make a difference? The chance to start and run a department? The chance to be a founding partner in something that you could help make important? that you could help make valuable? Is there a chance it could pay you a salary in the future that would make you happier? Is there a chance it could be a valuable enterprise in the future that could be sold to someone and give you a payout?
Most startups are epic failures, but some do okay long term and some do very well long term, and occasionally you find one that does spectacularly. And even the “does okay long term” ones can be pretty nice to work with. It depends on who is starting them, and why, and what they want out of it, and what part you get to play in it.
Exactly... and also not every is suited for start-ups. It's a different type of thinking, less political, needs more motivations, more risky also, and requires skills across the board. Most head of engineering for instance in start-ups would be expected to code, while in big firms they'd be mostly managing. Different skills.
I get it though, LinkedIn is full of spammy BS all the time. I’ve certainly told people to fuck off in similarly blunt ways on there.
I recently got a text message advertising scammy work opportunities from someone pretending to be the company I work for.
Are ypu sure they were pretending? My multibillion dollar company regularly shits AI slop into my inmail.
If it's your exact position they might also be planning to replace you lol
I recently had a recruiter reach out on a Saturday about a contract position. I was at Lowe’s in the middle of ordering paint when I saw the message and assumed it was spam bc who’s hitting me up at 2pm on a Saturday?
So when she asked my rate I gave her a crazy big number assuming it was a bullshit position and went on with my day.
Turns out it was a Fortune 500 co and they matched my ridiculous rate request 😄 fun little money grab before the holidays. Never hurts to passively play along!
Yeah, at least she put in effort to reply to the offer in the first place
Could’ve done it politely tho
I mean, what was impolite about it? It was matter of factly, I don’t think it was impolite. He took his shot and she told him exactly why she wouldn’t take it.
Why be polite to a bot?
Clearly not a bot
Either a bot (in the programming sense) or a bot (tech startup sociopath), there's no discernable difference.
Very clearly a bot that sent that same message to multiple engineers.
And the bot thinks about the message years later? It's quite clearly a dude who at worst copy and pasted the message to multiple people.
Without doing any research on the candidates he sent the note to. Hes either a bot or a douchebag. Don't be polite to bots or douchebags.
And then they raised 110 million the following year
Well, switching to a startup is a high risk high reward play
People significantly overestimate the reward though. You dont get preferred shares. They dilute significantly. When you quit, you have to exercise and pay AMT. The opportunity cost of printing money and investing it from a regular job is gone. Joining a startup as an employee is a bad idea.
Been part of 2 startups that exited and got nothing. First one was setup so that the cost to exercise my shares was exactly equal to their value so it would be a null transfer.
Second was acquired by a bigger company, but they bought it with shares instead of cash. My stock options in old company were worthless, and only the actual investor shareholders recieved stock in the new company
To me the reward is also less micro management, more involvement in product and company direction. Working with motivated people who are compensated by the success of the company. Generally just a more enjoyable employment experience
I've gotten a low seven figure payoff from a startup and I paid less than 40k to exercise, did it over several years so no amt for me 🤷♂️.
I'll keep taking the risk lol
If you enjoy it sure. Im sure woodworking is enjoyment too. Seven figure payouts are a 1/10 probability and thats being generous. The opportunity cost of having worked at meta or Nvidia during the same time and made millions anyway is too much to recommend otherwise.
Of course I agree it can be more fun for many (including me). I continue to work at a startup. They let me work from anywhere in the world and I have guaranteed job security. But its not about money.
People who can land a job at Nvidia aren’t going to risk that going to a preseed/seed startup unless they know they will make more money in that startup.
Eh. People want to work on what they want to work on. Lots of smart people view the big companies in a negative light. I definitely wouldn’t say that the best stay away from startups
Yeah I mean I have friends who work at the infrastructure titans (Microsoft/Amazon/Uber/Google) and could probably land a job through them, but I've seen the hours they work vs the extreme flexibility I get at my small business software company and the flexibility and moderately high salary is worth more than the extra high salary and no flexibility I'd get going to Microsoft. Some people value the work/life balance at a lower salary point, I'll have to work until actual retirement age but I can do all my hobbies and such while I'm young-ish, some people want front-load their career stress, get paid a ton now, lose all their hair, and retire before 50. Both are valid strategies.
Heh. There’s also people who like the big companies because they can slack off more (me). Really depends on where you end up. They are pretty big after all
Likewise. Both of my SWE jobs have been for massive companies, and both have been exceptionally chill & remote.
I sure it's much easier to slip through the cracks at larger companies than it is at a start-up where they'll be expecting everyone to pull their weight plus some.
I work at a startup and regularly recruit people out of big tech where the startup needs to 5x+ to break even for them. I took a 50% cut on salary to join.
There's so much that can wear you down working at those big companies. A really good startup work culture is insanely energizing and you'll get opportunities to have way more responsibility very quickly. I have fewer people rolling up to me than comparable big tech directors or VPs but when I tell them the stuff I'm personally involved in they say they'd never get to do that at their company.
Or they want to create something better, and don't do things solely for their own financial gain.
What? No, they're exactly the people who would do this lol.
lol 1/10 is a lot higher than your chances of coming close to that at a corpo
I'm at a large corporation with a pension, bonuses, and salary escalating higher than inflation and CoL combined. I could make more at a start-up, but I could also flare out. I've been at two startups, one post-startup, and one boutique company. I'll take the security over the startup any day, and I know several people who ARE startup IC millionaires.
Nah 1/10 is realistic, as long as you dont consider some company that starts outside sf or ny a startup lol. I was in a ds boot camp and we keep in touch a batch of folks, and many have made some bank doing startups.
Start-ups are great at less micromanagers since you only have 1 working manager.
Last Big Corporation I was at, I had 4 bosses. It was some real Office Space TPS memo bullshit. Hope them the worst.
Yeah working at a more human scale is better for fulfilment and mental health, who would've thunk.
I don't know any chill startups. My husband's high school buddy works at a startup and people are constantly getting fired for not meeting the CEOs vision. Lots of late nights and work weeks are rarely 40 hours.
Sounds like you lucked out, but that's not the usual startup experience for people.
And most startups that give you options don't go up in value, so when you exercise them they're worth less than if you'd just got a cash bonus originally
People on Reddit just talk out of their ass and get upvoted. So you’re telling me the literal highest educated people in the world from the best schools choose to work at startups because they don’t understand the compensation? Each startup has a different compensation structure, some are good, some are bad. There are many very wealthy early employees that are laughing right now.
There’s also a bunch of former early startup employees who have it as an episode on their resume with nothing to show for it because the startup failed into bankruptcy.
Also just because someone is a really good software engineer doesn’t mean they understand the way that being compensated in stock (or stock options) works or how to read the legal documents that are part of compensation agreements. That’s typically a finance guy and lawyer’s specialty respectively.
I worked at a start up for a few years and it went bankrupt. But I was well compensated and I learned a ton. Obviously didn't make out like a bandit with shares but it wasn't a waste of those years.
This has been my situation. My first startup failed, but it gave me a ton of experience and I easily shaved 5 years off the corporate ladder grind. My current startup I came in at a much higher level and have been well compensated. We now have a new medicine in clinical trials. We're fairly diluted so it may not be a huge payout if we continue to succeed but I've done well for myself and this will be a great stepping stone for the next thing. I could have gone into a corporate Pharma job where my comp would have been a bit higher but I would have moved way more slowly without the chance of upside I have now.
I had a similar experience except i wasn't compensated well and the shares I got instead of raises were worthless.
And if the company doesn't IPO but is bought out privately, the new company doesn't have to pay out shares
Which is far more common. There are tons of creative ways that startups hide liquidity events from common stock holders like this. And as a share holder you’re stuck signing a new shareholder agreement with even further dilution, or just calling it a loss and walking away.
There’s just as many if not more that get laid off after a decade at an established large company
True but at least when you’re laid off after 10 years you’ve got 10 years of salary and 401k matching. If a startup that pays mostly in stock goes under, you have very little to show for it.
Nothing is certain in life, but risks can still be mitigated. Saving part of a $400k salary is a lot more stable than living on a $40k salary with the promise of several million if the company makes it big.
I’m a highly educated PhD Electrical Engineer from an R1 University and I didn’t understand dilution. We are experts in our narrow domain. The startup I joined diluted me to oblivion during the 10 or so years before it was purchased. That’s on me, of course, but don’t make the mistake that someone highly skilled and knowledgeable in one area is competent in all areas.
And while joining a startup has much better odds that the lotto, the fact is most people who join startups would have been better off financially and in wlb as an employee in an established company.
Yep, I am an executive and I invest in startups + advise them. I would say that at least 90% of startup employees don't understand how company financing and dilution work.
They're not stupid, but they make a decent salary and work hard at their day jobs. They see the company growing and raising more money, so they assume that their shares are also going to the moon. They therefore erroneously believe that when the founders and investors get paid, they will also end up wealthy.
Instead, the founders and investors walk away with tens of millions to hundreds of millions, while they walk away with potentially low $100,000s. Nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not the generational wealth of the co-founders that they fought beside for many years, in most cases. Early employees accept the same financial and reputational risks as co-founders, but get almost none of the reward.
Yeah, if I’m gonna deal with startup crap it’s gonna be for my company, not someone else’s.
Most top grads go to the big companies, not startups
Laymen and techbros don’t understand that the public just doesn’t hear what the corporate engineers and scientists get up to, because we’re under NDAs and corporate culture doesn’t care about publishing and advertising their rock stars.
In some cases those people switch to the new startups without caring much about the compensation as they're already set for life from the previous ones. Given their experience and recognition they often can also dictate conditions of reward. Most of the transitions between projects we hear are like these because nobody cares about random programmers switching to startups otherwise.
Actual people dropping stable office job income to a startup are a good illustration of selection bias - 99.9% fail, but we hear most about the successful 0.01%.
You're right but that's survivor bias FYI.
You’re right, thanks for the correction
He's not entirely wrong; joining a startup is usually a terrible idea statistically.
What is perhaps more relevant to the point he's making is the fact that you have to have some other source of income or wealth to survive on in order for taking that risk not to be extremely unwise financially.
Just floating this out there in my industry (cybersecurity) startups offer some of the best salary ranges & stock comps compared to larger enterprises source: I’ve worked at startups and large companies.
I also work in cybersecurity, and startups definitely are not offering the best salaries. Big tech and HFT typically have the highest pay. Best offer I've gotten from a startup was ~230k, and that was an AI startup with stupid amounts of AI investment money
Yeah, no. You just don't know what you're talking about. It's simple math:
If I co-found a company, maybe I end up with 30% ownership of the company at liquidity after fundraising and dilution etc.
If I'm an early employee and exec at a company, maybe I end up with 0.25% of the shares at liquidity.
In either case, you have the same amount of risk. You likely work just as hard. Yes you can make money but it's nowhere close to founder money.
People who become rich as early employees are insanely rare. For every one of them, there's a founder who took the same risks and made 100x more.
Not only that, but “early employee” now means pre-A-round. If you show up after VC does, you’re absolutely hosed in terms of equity.
Really huffing your own farts here, huh?
If you don't have equity you have nothing.
If you have equity it's likely worthless.
Going to FANG, living modestly, and throwing fuck tonnes of money in to investments, is a better road to comfort.
Exactly! It's the same as buying lottery tickets. All the "smart" people say that it's a terrible investment, but I've never met a Powerball winner who wasn't wealthier than before they won.
Edit: /s because it might not be obvious. Many more startups fail than succeed. Basing your opinion of a choice to work for a startup on those who have been initial employees at wildly successful startups is like basing your opinion of playing the lottery on only observing the people who won. There are problems encountered by the winners, but the losers lose a lot more.
Programming and business/finance are different skillsets. You can be excellent at one and not good at the other. I've seen plenty of brilliant software engineers make idiotic choices in other areas, because their skill are narrowly focused on their technical domains.
Many technical people underestimate how complex and uncertain startup equity valuation & dilution are. Speaking from professional experience, when you get high enough on the technical ladder to be involved with the business/financial side too then you realize how messy that can be.
Work in startups can be fun because of the culture and impact potential. But make no mistake, the number of early employees that strike it rich is tiny. Statistically you're more likely to get a big windfall putting all your disposable income into a random stock than relying on startup equity.
If your goal is to build wealth, you're better off working at a big tech company and investing the higher income sensibly in a diversified stock portfolio.
and here we have someone on reddit just talking out of their ass and getting upvoted
show me how many phd level grads from the top schools are joining startups. surely u got a source since ur saying that's the case, right?
I was one (20 years ago). Not a smart move on my part.
Highly educated in their specific field, undoubtedly. But educated in all the various crevices of employment law into which employers can stuff hidden compensation strategies designed to shift as much risk as possible to you while retaining as much reward for themselves? Educated about how to handle a career salesman with decades of experience selling young professionals on all the heights they could reach if only they take this one chance?
I'm a lawyer who has worked with multiple tech startups. The easiest people to take advantage of are the people who think their expertise in one area means they can't get tricked in a different one.
The smartest people dont just join startups. They join companies like openai. Thats not what a typical startup employee experiences. As a matter of fact most people who join startups as employee 2-20 are idiots or crazy.
A startup is a starting company. OpenAI was once a startup, granted a startup with a handfull of billionaire investors but a startup nontheless.
Of course most startups fail and yeah you could call it stupid because it's a risk but if you're smart enough and play it right it can totally be a good choice to join a startup, it isn't always a bad choice.
No one's calling Tim dipshit from Kentucky to join OpenAI. Calling OpenAI a startup for this discussion shows how clueless you are about these things. The absolute best startups start with a pedigree of already successful talent at the top of their game. They dont reach out to random idiots (in this case even an L4 in Google is an idiot) on LinkedIn.
Facts but I'm also not the one making sweeping statements about startups being an idiotic endeavour.
All I'm saying is that as long as you're smart about it startups can still be valid choices for work.
Oh yes and don’t forget the vesting schedules. I was at a start with a 5 year schedule for 2k shares…
I had a company that was just out of the startup phase into getting gov't contracts. but when it came time for the offer they told me "we can only pay you in company stocks" for a full-time job. I ignored them for the disrespect.
The engineers probably didn't see a dime of it lol. So many start up employees have gotten hurt by valuation shenanigans
Here have some stock options for when we never go public.
Or if we get acquired, we will do it in a way that our leaders and investors get rich, but your options are worthless.
Ahhh capitalism. One thing never changes, the little guy always gets fucked.
Equity grants and vesting schedules include terms for what happens when you're acquired with unvested or unexercised options. You don't have to accept terms that include getting fucked. "In the case of acquisition, options and equity grants vest fully..." in legalese worked out well for me.
The decision to join a startup/early-stage company requires more thought than "here's your salary, you good?" That being said, my philosophy is: assume the equity ain't worth shit and take it like a bonus if it does become valuable.
I worked for a company like this they lower healthcare costs for gravely ill people by funneling them into less expensive treatments and experimental drug trials. I think a dying person in some cases might spend any money they can to live. Companies like this work for the insurers because they're to ones who don't want to pay.
They may never turn a profit, but after you get an operation like this running you'll get a lot of investors who share an interest in cutting off the huge huge amounts of money stuff like late stage cancer takes. The client themself isn't necessarily interested in dying with lower claims.
So this is a funny post, insidious business endeavour. Best of luck though, to this guy, since these do work.
I don’t think this is necessarily wrong. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of life to try and buy a couple extra weeks for someone who’s already gravely ill is hardly worth it.
One of the reasons healthcare is so expensive in this country is because so many resources are spent trying to delay the inevitable even if there’s no real quality of life at that point. A lot of other countries are way better with managing end-of-life care than the U.S.
And? Theranos raise $700 million and was once valued at $19 billion. Arrow hasn't gone public and options for non-founders are notoriously hard to cash in.
of which she wouldn’t have seen a penny of because that’s not how startups work. She is an employee so she probably would have still made less than she currently did and would have been paid in diluted stock as a consolation. Startups a very profitable for the people who start them, not so much for the people who work for them unless they get an amazing deal.
Yeah, but there's no payday until you sell the damn thing.
Are they willing to give her 0.5% of it? No? Then she probably still made the right choice.
And three years later currently have an ai chatbot that can't answer the question that the chatbot suggested i ask . 110mil well spent.
I also have to wonder if she misread the seed round (or this never happened and this is just clever marketing), because the seed round was $3.6mil…
Pre-seed round was $125k
Turns out I’m too poor to see that information, and that’s also less than my salary 😅
...should we recognize this guy?
I'm 99% sure this is some kind of "guerilla marketing" BS from that guy to get exposure for his company.
Doesn't seem like efficient marketing if you don't even include the company name.
He probably didn’t want to make it too obvious, you gotta look up his name, and see where he works.
If your "marketing" requires you to lookup a name to even find out what the company is called Not even what the company offers/provides. That doesn't really seem like marketing does it...
While true, there's more people talking about him now than before this post.
I couldn't find a wikipedia page for the guy (or his startup), but i did find his page on Crunchbase. It looks like he is the founder and CEO of a startup called Arrow which is categorized as a "Debt Financing" company. Their "About the Company" section says the following:
"Arrow is the AI operating system for modern revenue cycle teams, where billers collaborate alongside AI to handle denials, follow up on claims, and complete RCM tasks faster. Built for billers and loved by CFOs, Arrow helps practices collect more revenue, faster."
Yep that all sure sounds like "increasing access to healthcare by making it more affordable". Not at all like selling AI based financial middleware to health insurance companies so they can justify laying off support staff.
Yep. And AI could actually have some usefulness in dealing with all of the insurance company bullshit (particularly when they are using AI themselves to deny claims and milk their customers). But phrases like "AI operating system" makes this sound like yet another company capitalizing on current buzzwords to get their share of meat from the carcass that is our "healthcare system".
I am reading the comments and so far what I read no one explained who he is.
The importance of tact
Bro posted after 2 years to show her what she missed out on
Provided the package has: 1) ESOP 2) Ability to sell shares to any party, without board / shareholder approval
The gains may never be realised if the company doesn't IPO, or the seed investors can do a drag along when exiting
There hasn't been an exit so she hasn't missed out on anything. Any equity awarded to her would still be worth nothing right now.
Personally I feel like this is more embarrassing for him than for her. Oh, you're successful but you're still dunking on someone who didn't take a chance on a startup that cold-pitches on Linked In? Woah what a Chad, I guess.
Yeah, I scoped out this dudes socials and he seems like a mild prick tbh.
If his startup crashed and burned, or wasn’t as successful he would never post this. It’s just a dumb startup entrepreneur bs, who think they’re better than everyone because they did it “against all odds” and hence no luck was involved in it, and thus look down on everyone else. Most such assholes are usually, or tending on the side of sociopathy, so it tracks lol.
That's results-oriented thinking. The decision not to buy a scratch-off doesn't become a bad one just because the next ticket was going to be a winner.
Sounds petty. Also for every success story there's 1000 failures or more. Sometimes you leap and sometimes you play it safe. 99% of the time the choice the software guy made would have been the right choice.
Unfortunately, the 1% that you're wrong really hurts.
That’s why it’s better to not look back after the decision is made. Last thing you want is long term regret
There are also some people who would take a pay cut to further a project that is morally fulfilling.
Hi Roshan, Thanks for reaching out; however, I’m satisfied in my current role and wouldn’t be interested at this time. Good luck with your venture, sounds inspiring!
Yeah but that wouldn't make me feel better about myself for making so much money though
Yeah good point.
You could also say “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you could afford me given my current compensation“
No, generic superficial drivel that adds nothing. Lying to someone's face is not being polite or courteous. May as well not respond. He might even come away from that exchange thinking his current approach was targeted correctly but just missed opportunity or the wrong person.
What he might have instead learned was:
That he actually reached the intended target, who even took the time to consider who he was and research his credentials. Someone who is satisfied in current role and not interested would not have done those things.
That his hand was showing, and that public profile might need to be updated or considered when entering negotiations or planning cold calls.
That because of the above, his target goal was misaligned with his approach and budget.
That his approach might need refinement as "hiring" full time what he wants was not in scope. Could instead offer contractual work within budget or pad offer with equity offers or something else if really needing that level. Or, re-align and aim for more junior.
She also did not say no. She established what she knew of his position, let him know she would come informed, also let him know she was potentially interested enough to have taken that time, and started by addressing the most immediate issue of compensation.
She managed all of that in less than 20 words.
I hate suck-ups. Nothing wrong with being honest, like she was.
That response isn’t being a suck up at all. It just wasn’t unnecessarily rude and snarky
This thread is full of people who think being an ass is gonna get them somewhere
It pushes it to the other side of the spectrum - r/linkedinlunatics
Not sure which is worse.
Does redacted still have a job today?
Well we know they're apparently all over the Epstein files so probably not.
If the presidency is anything to go by, being in the Epstein files isn’t a barrier to employment.
Is there any Redacted stock I can buy? Looks like a booming business!
Well their pre-seed round was $3.6M, so with a salary higher than that I'm sure she's doing fine.
Why would anyone want to work for some dickhead who thinks that there's nothing wrong with healthcare that a little more capitalism can't solve?
“ I’ll use the other knife to pry the first one out”
You’ve just invented surgery.
Yeah, I was just going to ask how is the affordability doing. From what I read, the company only streamlined the calculations and payment process.
Adding another middleman only makes prices go up. He's not doing anything to help healthcare prices.
I'm not sure why you view this as adding a middle man. This is replacing a middle man with a different one. One that's (at least supposedly) cheaper.
One of the great things about Medicare for all is that it would put leeches like this guy out of business.
Underrated comment
Props for being able to bring up your own shame and own it tho
First of all I’m skeptical it’s even the real Roshan Patel since it uses an upper case i instead of a lower case L
But if it is him, this is not him owning up to his shame. It’s him “flexing” because his company (Arrow) raised $110M in funding from Google the very next year after this exchange
I don’t think this rude at all. I think it’s saving both of them time. They are so far apart on pay unless he’s going to somehow bridge that why even “chat”. A companies good vibes don’t pay bills.
Yeah, most startups fail and she probably didn't want to take the risk. Although she was rude, she was at least upfront about her concerns. I feel the biggest risk with responding to these emails/DMs is that a good chunk of them are just MLM/pyramid scheme recruitment attempts.
I mean. Nothing about this guy’s request seems reasonable. “Hey give up your own wealth and stability to sacrifice for my startup dream!”
I'm sure he didn't know what ballpark the engineer was playing at. If he did, then yeah, very bold.
Starting a business and not doing the research of going market prices for hiring a decent team? I’d also go with bold no.
Brutal.
Bit* odd that that both messages happened at 3:35pm?
She checked CrunchBase and responded in less than 60 seconds.
Sounds made up ?
*E
No, that's just how LinkedIn shows timestamps on connection request messages - it's by when you respond, not by when it was sent. LinkedIn is stupid, but the timestamps are not a signal that this was staged.
Lol shitty response
Just because something happened doesn’t mean it was likely to happen
Kinda a dumb response because when you found or join a pre-seed or seed startup, you basically trade cash comp for the lottery ticket of equity. So of course the salary won’t match what you are currently getting from a traditional job. A less egotistical and demeaning response would have been, “I’m currently focused on cash comp. Let’s talk after your Series A.”
So many uninformed comments....
First - nobody is forcing anyone to take a job with a startup, so there's nothing wrong with the guy asking if you're interested.
Second - unless you are one of the founders and have unrestricted stock and you're in on AND UNDERSTAND all the financial details, you are by definition a tool, not a creator. You are a means to an end for the people who DO own and control the thing being created.
None of that means it can't still be worthwhile, but it's up to YOU to be sure you are paid fairly for your time and effort along the way - pricing in the added RISK that the company could fall apart any day of the week with no warning, and any restricted options/stock you are granted you should treat as worthless in evaluating that compensation.
If they can't afford to pay you fairly in that context, it's not likely worth your time.
If it's later stage, with real venture capital money (and scrutiny) involved and a demonstrable path toward an exit - either a sale or public offering - THEN you can start to attribute "some" value to those other forms of compensation.
Even then it can all fall apart.
I once owned shares in a company that I helped build from scratch. We grew over 10 years to 1000 employees across 5 states through multiple rounds of funding from Angel investors through several venture capital rounds. We were 3 weeks from our IPO - all preliminary filings and waiting periods done, just waiting for the official date to arrive.
Then the dot-com crash happened.
At that point, we had 125 million in CASH in the bank from the final venture capital round, big international banks involved, etc. We had a solid business plan and profitable software products. Where did it end up?
Instead of using the cash to restructure the business plan around a slower but stable and profitable path, the C-Suite that the banks had installed kept spending assuming the market would come back. For them the IPO WAS the business. They weren't there to build a product or a service business for the long term.
Burned through 125 million in 8 months. Filed bankruptcy, sold off the assets. The software products were sold off to other companies, lots of unemployed people. Stock was worthless. 10 years of work down the drain.
But I was fairly paid all along the way. I NEVER agreed to work for less than I was worth to "help the cause". I was employee number 15, and owned stock projected to be worth 3-5 million at IPO (1999 dollars)
But I was NOT one of the founders - several of whom cashed out hugely at the final venture round in the run-up for the IPO. People like me weren't offered that option, which I would have GLADLY taken.
20 years later, my wife after a long successful and steady career in health care administration at senior levels of a large health system was recruited to help build a startup as one of the early senior executives. She negotiated a significant salary bump with performance bonus and stock participation. The company recently sold to a big conglomerate, and in addition to the big salary for 5 years, she'll walk away having made over 2 million off of the stock.
It can work - but nobody is looking out for you. YOU have to do that for yourself.
I like how this comment section defending her like there are only two ways to answer, be an asshole or write an essay
Just be normal and say no, why are linkedin people always so fucking weird
I don't know her or that guy, but LinkedIn is totally FULL of spam from "founders" like this. After a while you get pretty tired of it
Imagine thinking she did anything that needs defending in the first place. Ya'll fucking weird.
Am I misunderstanding how this chat works. Or does nobody else find it odd she replied in less than a minute?
It wasn’t a question on salary right?
Two years and still the same photo?