Comment by atleastoptimal
Comment by atleastoptimal 10 months ago
Yeah if you're literally the person building the product you should at least get cofounder credit. It's silly that one person pitches a company and touts all the cool things about the product, but the product doesn't exist, it's all to entice some intelligent but naïve bright eyed engineering grad that they're getting a good deal.
I worked as a founding engineer and the CEO kept saying that I'm basically set for life because he was certain the company would become a ~$10 Billion unicorn. Of course then I thought "Why would he say this if he weren't very certain it would happen", but that bravado optimism I realized was just par for course among founders, and only 1% make it. Your chance of becoming wealthy in 10 years in aggregate are much higher just working for a normal tech company and investing your disposable income.
Hear me out - you’re loosing in comparison to other jobs you might had had with required skills _even_ if startup succeds!
Founding engineers get 1% of company at best.
With very optimistic 200mil buyout in extremely optimistic 5 years you have 2mil tops.
With conservatively optimistic 400k/year (senior level salaries in a public company in us) you make this in same 5 years without a) relying on luck b) without 80h work week c) with plenty of talented colleagues to learn from etc etc.
This isn’t even about a chance it’s a pure math.
Just like casino is not about the chance, it’s about statistics.
But it promotes idea of “chance” to attract customers.