To just make the point as well in regards to variability. The politics and political infighting at startups can be just as bad or worse than larger established companies as well.
I think the best way to categorize the startup experience is a choose your own adventure game. Basically everything is variable and it's your responsibility to find what environment best suites you.
> We hear about all the IPO’s that made 200 overnight millionaires. But we don’t hear about the vast majority that either fail, have a poor exit, or just sort flag in the wind.
To play devils advocate, most people who intentionally optimize their career focusing on equity rather than TC know this fairly well and have had their fair share of duds. You can also make the argument that overall the EV of optimizing your career for equity is probably lower than just getting a high paying FAANG job.
However, with all that being said, the only way to be the "overnight millionaire" is to play the game. Also, there really isn't any overnight millionaires, those people probably worked for years for sub-par comp compared to alternatives and took a large risk whether knowingly or not to get that payout which may or may not have existed.
There really is no free-lunch if your employee #5 at Uber you made tens of millions of dollars, however you took the risk of being employee #5 at Uber. Look at Snapchat though they paid huge amounts of equity when they were trading in the 10's even after they IPO'd if you were employee #10002 and joined Snap at 100k-250k in equity that netted you anywhere between 600k-1.5m if you held the shares, that's not including cash comp. However, you took the risk of joining a tech company that at the time nobody really wanted to join and may very well have closed the doors.
That being said there very much is an alternative risk of going the safe route of just optimizing total TC. That risk is generally that path is well defined, the salary bands are well published, and overall despite whatever amount of effort you put in that will be around the amount you make. You'll be flogged into a corporate grind if you really want to make more either by job hopping or trying to get promoted. The risk with the defined path is well, its just that linear and well defined, not saying it's a great path and maybe even a better one overall but it means you'll be working for Facebook when the next company that is going to disrupt Facebook is potentially out there today.
Equity stakes for employees means the tails on the right side of the distribution are rich. Assuming you get a cash comp that makes you happy that equity stake my very well be the thing that puts you in the 1-10m+ range if your extremely lucky. If not even if its mildly successful a 50-500k payout with a decent salary of say 150k a year over 5 years netted you 160-250k comp a year while putting you in the run to make potentially millions.
If you work for a "startup" that is a decent place to work and respects WLB etc then taking those "risks" over your career might make a-lot of sense. You'll probably learn way more too, have more autonomy, and frankly they can just be alot of fun.
I love this idea to get at least a pipeline of people to talk to in order to get closer to PMF. Sometimes its abysmally hard to even get people to get feedback from in the early days of a product it's like the great filter for pre-seed/early-seed startups are you actually building something someone, anyone, even just like one person wants to use? However, this could be a huge trap for founders or people with passion projects which they just want to be passion projects.
I guess the one thing I've realized is the problem with this is the one more feature trap. Sometimes those people who like your toy will never pay for it, which may be fine depending on your goals, but the issue is there just as relentlessly demanding as paying customers. It's demoralizing to have a side-hobby project which you don't want to monetize but still has all the demands from "adopters/customers" that a paid solution would. It just destroys your passion for that project because it ultimately it just becomes work.
Really charging for a product is great and I think hacker culture seems to dismiss it because its not in the ethos but if there's anything in retrospect I think I've learned so far with my many failed side-projects is charging for them is the best way to have a great personal experience and best experience for who your building that product for. Mostly because it aligns incentives appropriately.
As much as I've enjoyed some of my passion projects I can't think of one I ended up "finishing" which I wouldn't get some monetary gain from. Because let's be honest whose passionate about setting up a Jenkins server, or implementing git checks, writing unit tests or creating onboarding documentation for cranky free or OS users? At a certain point a successful side-project/product requires you to do things you wont enjoy doing, and honestly some of those things may be the most important things you do for the "success" of that side-project/product.
I'd rather be spending that time with loved ones, enjoying the sun, which is ultimately far more rewarding than a few git stars or upvotes for ego. With that being said I think if you utilize this approach which is basically just freemium for B2B like projects it could be a powerful step towards finding your ideal customer and getting paid users, but it has to be just that a step towards acquiring paid users.
My personal take is working hard is a precondition towards being successful but not necessarily a guarantee.
Lots of normal people work very hard, many normal people I know outside of tech are working night shifts and a day job to just sustain their lives. Many of these people rarely have a full day off, rather they might scale back the night job in order to get rest, or rest whenever their scheduling allows for it. There probably working just as hard as a Bill Gates, but these people aren't exactly walking towards a path of riches. They're just sustaining and it's a very unfortunate reality of America today.
Really success comes from the prerequisite of hard work, the aptitude of the individual in regards to the task, and the ability of the resulting work to pay off in convexity, similar to a call option in finance. Generally non-convex pay outs are also associated with risk, perhaps alot of it. So really success comes from working very hard, being smart about it and taking on risk.
There's alot to unpack here and I resonate with it to a degree since I've also failed with 3 ventures so far, luckily while employed so as a result the failure wasn't so life or death, simply a learning experience.
1) Your 100% employable but like others have said you're not playing the tech interview gauntlet game.
2) Recover and reflect: Figure out what worked and what didn't work. This is important for your burnout recovery. Part of being burnt out means you feel incapable of achieving. This is not the case, reflect on what you did right and what went wrong, understand what you have to do to get where you want to be by taking stock of where you're at now. Then make a plan of where you want to be, keep yourself accountable, and every week analyze again where you are at and where do you want to be. Only make a plan after you have recovered.
3) De-risk your life, startups are inherently risky 96% of them don't make it to a Series B. However, you can build a SaaS product that gives you lifestyle money without taking on investors. Figure out how to take high impact low risk in everything you do in life. This allows you to have outsized returns on the things that work out and minimal drawdown for the things that don't. Sometimes you have to do risky things but if you're going to take risk find the metrics that you seem satisfied that make the risk worth it and then have a backup plan if it fails. This way you'll never be surprised.
A brief exercise in shipping an MVP and seeing if it gets traction before refining the feature set =). Thanks for reading my ramblings despite the lack of proofreading hopefully its a bit better for others now.
The advice here is fairly practical but I think doesn't do much to encompass the premise of the question: which is how to you become more empathetic?
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This is a complex skill because it requires 1) understanding and 2) the ability to share and engage with someone else's feelings.
To be more empathetic you need to understand why the person feels the way they do and this is often done through either shared experiences or insight into those feelings.
Reading can be a great way to become more empathetic as it exposes you to the thought patterns of another individual in the experience they choose to write about. So reading various books about people's experiences can give you a broader perspective about peoples reactions, feelings, and thoughts to events that have occurred in their lives. There's really no shortcut when it comes to reading, the best advice is to read alot about various different things from the first hand perspective of others.
Reading is just one way to understand people's shared experiences actually talking to a diverse set of people about their lives is another way to build this skill. As engineers we're generally not good at this but an example would be going to a bar asking about someone's life and just letting them speak as you listen. I'll also add its an amazing way to make friends and people are infinitely complex and seemingly "average" lives are filled with wonderful insights, experiences, and things to learn from.
The second part is being able to share and engage, this requires an understanding of your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. If you lack the ability to understand how your feeling trying to understand someone else's feelings is generally moot.
If you have trouble engaging with your thought patterns or feelings CBT can be helpful as well as mindfulness.
When your able to understand your own emotions you'll more easily be able to understand other people's experiences as you'll more easily shift perspective of what your reaction would be to an experience someone else is having or had.
Empathy is a hard skill but extremely important for intrapersonal relationships and ultimately success and it is a skill which can wax and wane based on active practice. An example why empathy is important is a founder who is more empathetic will be able to understand customer pain points more accurately, creating a better product which more purposefully solves a problem.
It's simpler than that ZIRP simply means the only way to find yield is in assets i.e. to fulfill fiduciary obligations i.e. pensions you have to go further out on the risk curve to produce that yield e.g. buy equities. The equation is simply one of risk adjusted return relative to sharpe and there's currently no yield in US debt.
I wanted to make a post on what APIs are in a short bite sized chunk, assuming you have literally 0 programming knowledge. Please let me know if you find it helpful! Also let me know if you'd like me to make more posts in this format. Thanks!
Personally I think this is a fantastic idea, I always have an issue with barbers getting wildly different hairstyles from the same specifications, a few inches off top with scissors, 3 buzz on the sides, you'd be surprised the variation that occurs from that simple specification.
If I was an exec at Tinder what do you do here? There's nothing exactly that differentiates FB Dating from Tinder and I can't think of an USP differentiating the two, except that FB Dating may be more convenient.
Kind of an interesting precedent though that FB decided to build this in-house rather than buy Tinder as well.
Assuming growth is linearly correlated with resources. It's not, wealth can be created though cognitive effort i.e. software engineering.
> finite planet
Assuming humans are bounded to Earth for growth.
The markets are the collective reflection of humanities productive efforts in the form of currency. Saying that growth will cease to exist in the future is the same as saying humanity will cease to be productive, a bet I am not personally willing to make.
I think the best way to categorize the startup experience is a choose your own adventure game. Basically everything is variable and it's your responsibility to find what environment best suites you.