BayAreaSmayArea

Money & Scale

From what I can tell even with the title it doesn’t matter. I had CTO label and had our companies PMs reporting into me as well. Folks at bigger co’s just don’t seem to care and don’t put value in the experience gained from “leadership” positions in startups.

From what I can tell you can still greatly increase your career velocity as an IC by doing a startup for a few years. It quickly falls away for management roles unless your company hits a big win AND you had a very publicly facing role, in which case the career boost isn’t very needed due to the big win part.

I'm largely in the same boat. I was part of the founding team, architected our systems, wrote a good part of it, and eventually look over leadership of the engineering and product teams as the CEO had to focus on more external matters. I played the SE role on any meaningful call, worked closely with marketing, and even did sales directly a couple of times landing us an LOI at a critical time.

We had an "ok" exit, not enough to never work again by any means but it put some decent amount of money in the bank.

After riding out the acquisition for a year I've been looking for my next role and it feels like I don't fit in anyones box well enough to get the nod. Besides landing an exec position at a startup with funding, the big tech companies of the world seem like the only place to get good compensation for that expertise. From what I can tell, the big tech places don't seem to be interested in hiring people from startup-heavy backgrounds nearly as much as they used to be.

My approach is to try to reestablish some networks, and tossing resumes are interesting job listings. But the reality is that almost no one is getting hired for great roles without a warm intro to a hiring manager. Dusting off the old personal website never hurt either, it might at least let you get into the right kind of conversation after the warm intro.

It feels like I'd be in a great position to start a startup but with spouse and young kids its not the right time (especially now) to do that sort of thing.

but who do they come for? The corporation itself that never did any business and has no assets/liabilities/transactions?

dumb question, do you have to dissolve it if you never did any business with it?

$90M in funding according to crunchbase, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/eero/funding_rounds/..., and it's been almost 3 years since the last one.

Interesting, I haven’t had a timesheet since I was an intern during college almost 20 years ago.

I didn’t realize that timesheets we’re still a common part of being a salaried employee in tech.

Something that comes up in these discussions is the concept of “company time”.

Company resources is clear cut, but what is company time for a salaried employee? How does that change with being a remote employee?

I’ve moved to a strategic product role and honestly work less than an hour a day on average and seldom go into the office. If I decide to work on a side project does that restrict me from git commits between 8-5?

Yep, that is exactly the kind of clause I’m asking about. 1 year I believe is typical.

If startup is defined as a business focused on rapid growth and likely VC funded I'd say that is the hope of nearly every one of them.

Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.

I'll take you up on that. I've recently started a little side project using graphql and location based data, nothing serious just sharpening up on some things that are new or that I haven't touched in a while.

I haven't found as much in the world of graphql using location based data and how the queries usually look and how the resolvers are built. Do you know of any nicely put together graphql projects with nice filters/etc available that deal primarily with location based data?

Having a kid kicked my ass in high gear as far as learning and monetizing that learning. I've been fortunate enough to have good jobs and arguable didn't "need" to do more but when I found out we were going to have a child every part of my body shifted into provider overdrive.

I started consulting, hustling, and expanding my knowledge and skillset as rapidly as I could. I started a consultancy on the side and nearly doubled my income over the course of a few months. Between that and my boy not being a very good sleeper I probably ran on an average of 4.5 hours rest a night for between 3-4 years (with once a week crashes of a long night of sleep on Fridays and Saturday afternoon nap).

It was tough, damn tough, but I made sure to spend quality time with him every night and most mornings, gave him nearly every bath during the first 2 years of his life, and got up with him every time he needed me in the night from midnight to 7am as that was my shift so the wife could sleep. During the same time I achieved an extremely high proficiency with ruby and later rails, learned to sell myself, came on as first engineer at a startup and dug deep into Elixir right around the time it hit 1.0, eventually launching a product written in it and learning a ridiculous amount about the BEAM in the process.

Theres less time to fart around with video games, and I don't have much in the way of hobbies, but little fulfillment was going to come from those areas anyway.

Its doable, and I'm alive and sane on the other side with a load of accomplishments to point to, a great relationship with my wife/son and reasonable assurance that my child(ren) will have everything they need to be successful.

Hard to call Twitter a startup :), but yeah by the articles own admission they're using mostly Scala with some Java.

Can you elaborate a bit on why you're using Java8 in your startup project?

Pretty much echo what everyone has said, as an individual contributor if you double up you're doing good.

Yeah, not SF, not for me. I'm in the southern US so 130 is near the top end for technical, non managerial, positions. The salary offered is a noticeable but not terrible cut.

I've had friends tried to recruit me in other parts of the country and gotten asked if I'm "king of my town" with what I'm making.

Agreed on the cofoundery-ness of it for the most part. They've been working on the idea and getting things fleshed out of the last 9 months and aren't taking a salary. I'd certainly like to make my way closer to the double digit mark, but honestly its tough to put forward much of an argument when the startup world is so capital centric.

Do people normally lock in that low forever?

We're talking about triggers for going up to an agreed upon market++ salary with next fundraising round, or some significant sales for our product, etc.

So essentially employee equity is never "significant" in your opinion?

Completely understand that, but my question was about significant from an employee perspective as I mentioned in the OP.

So if I'm reading you right, if the founders have split things with 40% each, and an option pool of 20%, significant would be > 4%?

So thats part of my dilemma, I don't think theres much risk at all and I'm a bit confused by talk of risk in the startup world for software guys. The market is hot and I have little doubt I could walk out tomorrow and get a 110-120k job, and maybe a bit more, so the risk is only that I'm gambling the lower wages for the chances of bigger payout.

Seems pretty minor on the risk side for me and I'm not sure how I can effectively argue for more.

yeah, its a grant with vesting period, not options. As far as type I'll have to get into with actual contracts to sign but I believe we're all the same across the board, talking in terms of fully diluted percentage.

So, I guess I don't understand how building the bones of the company equates to equity. Is that based on the premise that ideas are cheap and execution is expensive/rarer and should be compensated with a piece of it?

Looking at the wealthfront equity map, https://www.wealthfront.com/tools/startup-salary-equity-comp..., it seems like nobody in funded startups has more than about a percentage. Is that tool off, are expectations too low?