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Claude Sonnet 5 22 days ago

I want to propose alternative reality where 1.5-2.5T in value doesn't go to a handful of companies. Instead it turns out to be like restaurants where this gets distributed to lots and lots of small, local, mostly interchangeable teams. There will of course be some super star "chefs" leading the industry and setting trends and some "restaurant chain" like big businesses and supply chain for all of this.

Unfortunately this author has no idea about how equity works in real life, 2 things that stand out from experience of being very early employee 8 times: 1. If startup raised money at some point in the past and they are at 50M valuation then there is no chance average employee will get offer of 1% (you would need to be someone special to get that) 2. There will be many more dilution rounds before they get to 1B valuation so chances are that 1% will get cut to 0.3% over that time period

I founded 2 of the companies above (1 acquihire, 1 sold big portion of my shares back to investors when I left).

Yes I agree founding is much better than being first engineer. Reason I kept joining as first engineer is because I found product market fit for my self (it's funny to say that haha). I was able to pitch myself as first engineer that builds first product and first teams. Someone super technical who likes to grow code and grow people is actually pretty rare in startup world so I was able to ask for high comp and choose to work on interesting projects.

Founding engineer 8 times. 5 exits(2 sold shares back to investors, 2 acquihires, 1 acquisition). Never really made any significant money. I would make 10x more if I spent same time at big tech. Milage may vary but my 2 cents if you want to be entrepreneur or work for a startup:

1. Enjoy the process (You can push harder and longer if you enjoy what you do and at the end it won't matter if money doesn't come because any time spent enjoying what you do is already a win)

2. Work with people you like (For founders: don't be single founder, 90% of the times single founders either don't know how to share or no one wants to work with them)

It’s the best time to start a company. Few people can build anything now. Big companies are at a huge disadvantage now because they can’t be personal. Software development is going decentralized. You can go to a bunch of businesses and be personal, and develop personalized solutions for them in person. You only need few such clients to be profitable and have lifestyle business.

I was learning OS stuff and made a toy virus for myself back in 1999 and I thought it would be cool if antivirus officially recognized it so I sent a copy to antivirus company(Dr.Web. I think it was called?) and to my surprise now all antivirus databases have it and someone even has gif recording of machine booting up with it… so clearly they must be sharing not just db but also the executables etc

I think the dumbest thing in a lot of ETL is the API: - company collects data in database then creates API on top of - another company uses this API to put stuff into their own database waste of everyone's time, just share the relevant database or relevant dump in some way this will make everyone's life easier, this of course doesn't work for dynamic data

On the other hand it is very positive because it inspires others in whatever “I am X” situation to get involved. It’s not uncommon for other fields like sports etc to have similar influence: “someone else like me is doing this so I can do it too!”