I would be hard-pressed to name a venture investor that also finds themselves in the real estate business to such an extent that they want their investments to relocate? Investors do not own SF property for their companies and even the traditional ones on Sand Hill Road are leasing (expensive) office space like the rest of us.
It is possible that the investment and the board had influence on the decision but that could be for reasons independent of real estate ownership.
Congrats to Marco and team - they busted their ass in a tough market, stuck with it for years when no one gave a rat's ass about them and are now flying high.
Sam Altman is a great writer. He was also Founder/CEO of Loopt. I have to wonder why this post doesn't relate the traits back to his work at Loopt so the lessons learned can be more contextualized.
For example, are there areas where he was a mediocre founder by his own definition? Were there times when he was mediocre and then became great? What did it take to go from mediocre to great?
I'm surprised that the essay is so general in nature when there's a wealth of specific (and maybe more valuable) cases that could have been shared even after respecting privacy of individuals involved, etc.
Founders of early stage startups (as in, not AirBnB or Square or other companies clearly in torrid scaling mode) heading to Vegas frequently on chartered planes?
Yeah that doesn't scream RED FLAG at all.
I am honestly shocked at how poorly understood early stage startups really are if this is true. Any half-decent founder knows to be frugal, treat every dollar like it's their last and loses sleep over money in the bank (God knows I do and have been for 3+ years after raising $5M+).
1. You're dead wrong if you think employers are always getting more out of the employee. It's a mutually beneficial relationship and a free, highly competitive market in SF. If poorly treated, candidates bail and current team members do too.
2. We aren't talking about profits at all. This confuses and conflates eventual profits with employee salaries.
3. Nothing that I said indicates that we treat them like they came out of school. If you have a better alternative, I am all ears.
4. We don't want to do it quickly and cheaply. We want to do it as best as possible under our constraints. We're a small startup.
Good luck to you as well and thanks for flipping the bird. So mature!
I was talking about 25 onsite conversations leading to 10 offers and maybe 3-5 acceptances. In order to have 25 onsite conversations companies likely have to talk to 125-150+ total individuals via phone/email/networking events. That's at the low end once all the processes are dialed in.
I agree that companies have to be respectful of candidates' time. People do talk to their friends before they engage with companies or accept offers and word can get around fast if companies mistreat candidates (as it should).
Sigh - yet another hiring process complaint post. As an employer hopefully I can shed some light here.
a) If you are trying to hire 5 engineers, say, you need to talk to ~25 candidates at least. It's a competitive market.
b) If you aim to talk to 25 candidates in a short period of time, you need to have SOME standard way to evaluate candidates if you don't want to just throw darts on the board. Being sloppy with process is bad for companies and the engineers and a waste of everyone's time.
c) In order to create a standard process, you have a very limited # of options to work from. I've seen comments like "do a co-working day to get a real sense" or "do a contract and see them work with you daily" positioned as realistic options. They are not. If an engineer has an existing full-time job they don't have the time to do co-working days or contracts.
d) The other options are 1) whiteboard interviews 2) coding challenges 3) some combination thereof.
e) Lots of candidates hate whiteboard interviews. Lots of candidates hate coding challenges too. Neither is a perfect system but it's better than doing nothing or asking for co-working time.
f) We use coding challenges at the top end but we time-box it to 3 hours. If someone asked us to pay for the time, we would happily do so.
g) Our coding challenges have 3 different problems so candidates can pick whichever aligns best to skills. One problem is JavaScript-heavy and 2 others are Ruby/Rails-heavy.
h) Several engineers on the team solved the coding challenges on a timed basis before we put them out to candidates. Doing otherwise would be stupid/unfair.
i) In the few cases where we've been able to do 1-2 co-working days, we have offered to pay for the candidate's time. Not full freight consulting dollars but something that indicates our seriousness.
j) In this case, the OP got caught by a dumb coding challenge to build a full website. But the headline paints with a broad brush because coding challenges by themselves are not evil. They are a tool that can be used well or poorly. That's all.
That's not quite right. It's unclear how much total the VCs put in, at least from the article. But it sounds like they continued to fund the company while the founders' involvement ceased over 10 years ago.
"For the next decade, Bloodhound recovered and slowly grew, raising seven more rounds of financing." <-- if the insiders participated in follow-on rounds they stayed involved all the way through. Once again, that's what seems to be indicated but it isn't spelled out.
For what it's worth - the backlash is still kind of the case in the South (not speaking statistically, just from personal experience). I grew up around Mumbai and traveled to the southern part of the country 5 years ago where Hindi is not the native tongue.
Hindi was not particularly well-spoken nor was it always well-received by the other person. We wound up talking in English most of the time.
I grew up in and around Mumbai...the ad is (unsurprisingly) quite disconnected from the facts on the ground but holy cow. Great production values, great storytelling, relevant tie-ins to Google products. Just great.
It's interesting to note that across 165 comments, only 2-3 have even touched upon Quality Score let alone attempted to discuss it in detail.
Based upon personal experience (worked at a company that spent 8 digits on Google Ads on an annualized basis, profitably and successfully over a long period of time) I can assure you that Quality Score does NOT mean very little.
It is also a falsehood to state that Quality Score is entirely about "how a site looks". Google actually even measures how quickly users come back to Google after clicking on an Ad - and if users come back too often in too short a period of time (signal for poor quality ad landing page), the advertiser's Quality Score can be penalized (to what extent, exactly, is of course unclear).
I have yet to see it work successfully in a startup context - I am sure it can be done and there is certainly empirical evidence out there - but I have yet to see it work.
The feedback loop is frequently difficult to get right. Communication barriers don't help (fwiw I grew up in India so have some sort of limited advantage but not by much). The time zone difference does actually slow things down a tad bit more.
You talk about 2 rather different milestones in your comment - building a lo-fi MVP is certainly possible with an offshore team. But lo-fi MVP != product/market fit on any reasonable definition of p/m fit (Sean Ellis' formulation of 40% of users/customers) being disappointed with your disappearance, say). Getting to p/m fit may require lots of rapid experimentation, iteration, brainstorming and so forth...and that's when you can run into trouble with offshore contractors.
I did AngelPad with them in Winter 2011 and we worked out of the same office building for a year. Awesome guys, great passion, sharp technologists and all around good people. Couldn't have happened to better people.
I'll disagree with the top commenter - I enjoyed the four hour workweek dig.
Regardless, as a fellow founder with a startup of a roughly similar age and an office literally across the street from Referly this post makes me profoundly sad and more determined. I can't imagine what it's like to walk into an empty office with cleaned-out desks. I walk through our office late at night sometimes, so happy to see the standing desks filled with monitor mounts and noise-canceling headphones and post-it notes and Mac power cords snaking over cheap Ikea particle board. On my more morbid evenings, I wonder if I'll ever have to walk down the aisle and stare at a pile of empty desks...and it makes me double down and work harder than ever before.
Hats off to @dmor for sharing so candidly. I don't think I could do it if I were in her position.
Um. No. That works for GitHub, Facebook and Pinterest (and God knows I'd kill to be in their shoes) but for the rest of us this advice doesn't quite work out.
Any investor will also want to understand the overall market, trends, pain points, customer case studies if any, competitors, product roadmap, etc. Don't want to do this type of work on your pitch and don't have the kind of explosive growth the companies above had? Good luck.