Decent share (10-15 range, pre-dilution). Higher than an employee would usually get, and enough that if the company has a decent exit, I'd cash out well. I don't know how many points he's keeping for himself and how many he's allocated to option pools and other people in the company.
I've no problem with the equity number. My issues are: (1) I don't really have any power, and (2) I'm not having fun anymore, so if we don't make money I'm wasting time. For the first 18 months at this job, I could honestly say that even if we made zero and my deferred back pay never came, it would've been worth my while because I had a lot of fun and learned a lot.
I gotta say that the drop in my motivation was gradual. I posted this above: the first 18 months were great. A lot of coding and I had a hell of a good time. When we hit a panic point the CEO made a decision that I thought was bad, and became a 9-to-5er during the 6+ month shit project this bad decision generated, mainly because I just couldn't work on it for longer and saw no point in putting in more ass-in-chair time to keep up appearances. So he started ramping up the status checks (to 2-4 per day) on everyone. I think this high-frequency checking had more to do with our panic point than anything punitive, because everyone else got hit with more pings, but it felt punitive. And when status checks are that frequent, it's hard to be more than a 9-to-5er. An 8-hour day with frequent interruptions is, IME, about the same as a 13-hour day, in terms of fatigue, in coding flow. Much less fun and far less productive, too.
2-4 status checks a day, and you have not launched? That is dysfunctional.
Thank you. It's a bit much. I've observed that it leads to the micromanagement death spiral: status checking leads to low productivity leads to a further sense (on the manager's part) of the need for status checks. Too high a ping frequency leads to a work environment that's about "beating" the checks, which is shitty going both ways, an awful way to work (from an employee's perspective) and a terrible work ethic (from a manager's viewpoint). If you manage people like children, they either become children or get out.
I really let myself slide, staying out of a sense of loyalty, even though the negatives turned me from an A-player to a B-player to now a middle C. I want to be an A-player again. If that means changing jobs, so be it. The nice thing about this job search (as opposed to others) is that I have a job and no urgency.
I really enjoyed this job for the first 18 months, though. For all the negatives, it was fucking fun as hell at first, even though I was living on very little money. Then we had a panic point when we discovered how terrible our first technical hire did his part, and how much work that put between us and a launch. (No one had, to that point, audited his code. Ever. The guy is very smart and has been programming for 10+ years so no one, myself included, saw the need. Lesson learned: a programmer can be smart as hell and have years of experience and still be bad in his specific role. Trust but verify.) I disagreed with the CEO on how to manage this awful code (he wanted to use it and put me into kludge/workaround hell, I wanted to rewrite) and lost, so I dropped to a 9-to-5er because I was pissed about his decision, and then the insanely-frequent status checks came.
you don't ask to be treated differently, you demonstrate that you're worth being treated differently. an attitude like "its not my fault, i'm just a developer" isn't helping.
Damn right. A kick in the pants for which I thank you.
CEO said he didn't intend on having me attend investor meetings because blah, blah I was too green. I figured I'd work hard for 6 months and change his mind. Never happened. At the time, I didn't see the need to go to investor meetings, didn't see that they'd be a good use of my time. But now, with a CEO who meets with customers and investors alone, he actually can call all the shots unquestioned because he's the only one with knowledge of what they need.
He was actually honest with me, before I even started, that he didn't think I was true co-founder material... by saying that he'd not be bringing me in on investor meetings. I was just naive and thought I could "prove myself". And I only got to double-digit equity because of going on deferred cash for so many months (far more than he thought it'd take to get VC). I just let myself deny it, figuring I'd win him over with 12 months of hard work. It never happened, and now my attitude is weak, my work ethic has become mediocre, and I just need to change everything: circumstances and attitude.
I did. Not in a "here's why you're wrong" confrontational manner, nor with lines in the sand, but I did raise many of the issues. It got me nowhere.
I don't think I'm an alpha male, though I wouldn't step as far as "not worth keeping". I make decisions about when to confront and when not and sometimes they're the right ones, sometimes not.
Wow. Thanks for the criticism. (No, I'm not being sarcastic. One of the great things about the Internet is that people say what they honestly think.)
I have settled into "just a developer" mindset, because every time I raise issues, I lose. I pointed out things that were screwed up a long time ago, and they never changed. I guess, subconsciously, I've just accepted that I'm not an alpha male, at least not yet. I'd love to be wrong on that, but I've felt "beta" for more than a year.
> Edit: And if you're an Android or iPhone developer who's interested in education and games and lives in the bay area, forget everything I just said. Your company is beyond help and you should come work with us ;-)
Who is "us"?
I'm in New York and wouldn't leave except for a really great job, but I meet at least some of that bill. I'm also not available for at least 2-3 months. But I would love to talk to you even if it doesn't lead to anything. Care to take this offline? [email protected]
From the way it sounds, you were never treated as a cofounder
On a personal level, I like our CEO a lot. He's really smart and one hell of a great guy but he wants to hold the power/control in his hands as much as possible-- a "benevolent dictatorship" of sorts. I also think he has a great vision and would be excellent in a lot of contexts.
My issue, personally, is that I am doing this to get to a position of high autonomy-- and that may never happen, I'm coming to realize. I figure that if I work to get rich, I'll probably be miserable and might fail and, even if I succeed, won't be for the better for it (though if I have kids, they will be). Or I can work toward autonomy and enjoyment, maybe get rich and maybe not, but at least have the rare privilege of actually enjoying going to work. I'm doing the startup because, if it pans out, I'll have a really cool job and lots of autonomy. Maybe. But if the CEO decides I'm "just a developer" and I end up answering to some hired-gun VP, then I'll have no choice but to quit and, if my equity doesn't do well, years of my life will have been lost.
There's a certain natural distrust I have of business people. Most of them don't mean to do any harm, but they waste others' time and ruin lives with their overconfident promises and their willingness to trample others' interests if they see it as the profitable thing to do. On the other hand, a dismal realist like me, one who acknowledges that failure is possible, can't inspire people in the way profound promises can, now can he?
three years and still no launch is an insane amount of time for a startup. Regardless of what the reason may have been, it should definitely not have taken that long.
I'm not sure how I feel about that one. First of all, there were definite (but forgivable IMO) time-eating mistakes we made in the process, and our first technical hire is brilliant but was a really bad choice for the first programmer, and we're still paying that down. As for time-to-launch, I think there are a lot of "social" startups that can be hacked together in a few weeks, but deep technology takes longer. Maybe not 3 years, but definitely 12 to 18 months.
As a developer, assuming you're good, the market is wide open.
I think I'm both too good and not good enough. "Too good" in the sense that I die a little bit when I have to use languages like Java instead of languages like Haskell or at least Python. "Not good enough" in the sense that I didn't become a programmer until age 24 and, despite natural talent, I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. There's so much in software that I've never touched; it was only a few months ago that I learned HTTP and REST.
PS As a side note, if you're ever interested in joining another startup, I am looking for a cofounder (made a post on here earlier).
Thanks. I'll look at it. I'm actually not looking to move until mid-summer. Given that this is a tiny company, I'm more inclined to give 2-3 months' notice than the standard 2 weeks.
I could definitely do this if the startup job could pay me full salary. Alas, I'm in New York and would not leave the city lightly: family and friends. It'd have to be a dream job for me to consider moving, and with the rocky career I've had I don't even think dream jobs are available (or maybe it's just that I feel like a failure because I'm near 30 and haven't broken out yet).
My appraisal of startup vs. big-company life is that startups have more variation in individual monetary payoff, while big companies have more variance in quality of work. At a startup, you get a mix of interesting work and shitty grunt work that has to be done, and there's nothing personal about it because everyone is getting about the same quality of work, and because doing the grunt work is well worth it if the startup pays off. In a big company, you can end up in an AI/machine learning research group with high autonomy... or you can end up maintaining some shitty legacy payroll system.
But yes, I would consider a job at another startup. Or at a big company. Or at my current company if I knew the situation would improve. I don't want to be a "job hopper" and would love to find a job where it's still worth it to show up for work after 5 years.
I've no problem with the equity number. My issues are: (1) I don't really have any power, and (2) I'm not having fun anymore, so if we don't make money I'm wasting time. For the first 18 months at this job, I could honestly say that even if we made zero and my deferred back pay never came, it would've been worth my while because I had a lot of fun and learned a lot.