The most expensive lottery ticket in the world

202 点作者 barretts大约 11 年前

33 条评论

"engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company"I stopped reading right there* . I've worked for a few big companies, a small lifestyle company, and a few startups, and I'm invariably happiest at a small company.Financially, the book may be right: I'm not going to get rich as a startup employee, and I'll probably fail if I start my own. However, the thing I do for more than half my waking hours for the duration of my working life is something I enjoy. I get up reasonably interested in going to work, and go home feeling like I'm building something.You can phrase it cynically if you want. You can say I'm deluded; that I'm building someone else's dream; that I could be making more money doing something else.But I enjoy what I do, and I make enough money to support myself, so don't tell me I'd invariably be happier at a big company. I've been down that road, and it's the only time since middle school I ever considered not being a programmer.* Ok, so I actually continued reading, but you get the point.

评论 #7622588 未加载

评论 #7623559 未加载

评论 #7622418 未加载

评论 #7622441 未加载

评论 #7624216 未加载

评论 #7627598 未加载

评论 #7622397 未加载

diego大约 11 年前

What the author does not seem to understand is that some people actually enjoy doing hard things. 35,755 people signed up for the Boston Marathon yesterday, and paid for it. Why pay to run 26 miles when you could be having a lazy Sunday breakfast instead?I practice a form of rock climbing called bouldering. It's about walking up to a big boulder and climbing it along the hardest possible line you can. Hikers sometimes point out that "you could have just walked up on the other side."Yes, doing a startup is hard. It can also be fun (probably type II or type III fun if you ask me). A climber named Kevin Jorgeson explained it quite well during a talk he gave at Google:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsl4evw0a7Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsl4evw0a7Q</a>

评论 #7623064 未加载

pyrrhotech大约 11 年前

I wish some of these articles would acknowledge that you have to be a top 10-20% engineer to work for Google. A lot of us are doing ok, but don't have the talent or work-ethic or what have you to do quite that well. Regardless, great article. I personally wouldn't consider starting a company until after I was financially independent and could bootstrap it with extra money that I wouldn't care to lose. And I'd never spend more than a normal workweek at it.For those who say that doesn't work, my Grandad started his first company at age 58 with an excess million dollars out of 5 million he had saved from working a normal job until that point. He's never worked more than 40 hours per week in his life, and 25 years later, his company is a great success, turning 1 million into 60MM and having a lot of fun doing it.

评论 #7622475 未加载

评论 #7622567 未加载

srlake大约 11 年前

As a startup-founder (Thalmic, YC w13), I wholeheartedly disagree with the viewpoint of the author here.Is the pressure high, and the chance of success low? Certainly.Was the expected value of taking a Google salary rather than the risk-weighted value of starting a company higher? Again, yes.But the missing piece here is that sometimes it's not about the money, the perks, the hours. I love doing what I'm doing today, regardless of all of the above. My two co-founders here would say the same. We get to choose exactly who we want to work with, what we want to work on, and get a real shot at having an impact on people's lives all over the world, through the products we create.If we didn't have entrepreneurs taking this irrational leap, we wouldn't have the Google's of the world to employ those who choose the other path.

评论 #7625639 未加载

gpcz大约 11 年前

I'd recommend that anyone interested in startups download a capitalization table (Google "cap table download" without the quotes for a variety of choices), and just play with different scenarios. Plug in rounds from companies on Crunchbase (not just super-successful ones) and see what kind of money the founders are slated to get. See what happens if you don't meet expectations and go through a down round. It's better to see these possibilities before you're financially and emotionally invested in a company going through one of them.If you still believe your startup idea is a slam-dunk after seeing how horrible things can get if there's any hiccup in the process, then you're ready to take an investor's time to give a proposal.

NhanH大约 11 年前

It seems quite obvious that if you're aiming to optimize your happiness, putting yourself into a stressful situation is never a good idea, even when you disregard the financial aspect.As one of those young kids who've seen a lot of articles (and even HN's comments) in similar vein of this one, I'd love to see a rebuttal for those types of articles.I know that everyone is supposed to have their own reasons, but not all of us is eloquent enough to put it into words. And some great writing to set our mind straight (in one way or another) would be great :-)

评论 #7622537 未加载

barce大约 11 年前

I still think a lottery ticket is still has far worse ROI, than the YCombinator application and startup process.Let's say you pony up rent for your YCombinator startup and are paying about $2400 / month + utilities for 3 months. Let's say you get your food & other necessities costs to $80 / week.That's an $8160 investment.What you get back are the weekly dinners with great speakers. The connections you make should be worth at least $150k if your startup fails and you have to use that connection to get a job. I'm assuming a markup in your value as an employee for just getting into YCombinator.$8160 and you can make 20% - 35% more than your peers if it fails.$8160 in lottery tickets will pretty much get you zero if you fail.

评论 #7622824 未加载

评论 #7622998 未加载

评论 #7622816 未加载

评论 #7622833 未加载

_Adam大约 11 年前

"No Exit makes it very clear that the life of a startup founder is a miserable one, and that engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company."Any book that tries to tell me how I'm supposed to be happy is automatically placed in the same category as religious texts.

评论 #7622406 未加载

tunesmith大约 11 年前

That argument is a step away from arguing that incubator companies are taking advantage of the younger tech generation. Along the lines of... by selling the illusion of likely startup success, and offering support in startups and entrepreneurship, incubators basically decrease their own investment variance and increase their own odds of successful investment performance, while the younger founders will usually (outside of the rare big winners) lose out on a few years of earning potential in a temporarily hot economy.

cousin_it大约 11 年前

Is this true?The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum. Even on a purely financial basis, if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones. A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money.If it's true, that will strongly influence my opinion of the startup scene.

评论 #7624978 未加载

edj大约 11 年前

I'm always deeply suspicious of "statistics" that claim startups only have a 1 in 10 chance of success. From the article: "if 90% of startups fail, it simply can’t be the case that all of the startups they know are succeeding."But it looks like that may not be so far from the truth: "About three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don't return investors' capital, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School."[1]1: <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-expensive-lottery-ticket-in-the-world/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-ex...</a>

评论 #7623007 未加载

评论 #7624038 未加载

评论 #7623071 未加载

JonoBB大约 11 年前

There is a massive gulf between "winning the lottery ticket" and failing.There are many many many startups (or whatever term you want to give them) that create a good living for the founder, and perhaps a few employees as well. Not all startups have to (read: the vat majority don't) get VP funding et-al in order to be enjoyable and provide an viable level of income.

soup10大约 11 年前

Start a business, not a startup. You will have much more control and independence if you aren't desperate for funding and growth, not to mention you are much more likely to succeed. Startups(defined as extremely risky, high reward, growth oriented businesses) are not a very rational option for most people unless you have circumstances that mitigate the risk/stress. Also don't start yet another social/cloud/education/trendy thing here business, start something allows you to leverage your unique set of skills/knowledge/interests and experience.Also, give up early! When you don't think something isn't worth pursuing anymore, figure out why, and don't be afraid to give up and try something else. Not every project is going to be successful and there is no shame in failing unless you have badly/unrealistically set expectations to the people you work with, in which case they are going to be rightly pissed.

gms大约 11 年前

Good thing people don't take the advice in the last sentence, otherwise there would be no Google for said well-paid engineers.

beat大约 11 年前

One problem with the article is that is blurs the line between "founder" and "startup employee". The majority of startup employees are getting a paycheck on top of options - paycheck at lower rates than mainstream corporate work, but with a potential payoff if it succeeds. And if it fails, it's not hard for an experienced programmer to find another job.Founders are a breed apart from programmers. If someone has that drive to create their own business from scratch, telling them that it's economically foolish to do so is like telling Van Gogh that he'd be better off painting houses - technically true, but irrelevant to the motives of the artist.

评论 #7622463 未加载

tomblomfield大约 11 年前

> The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum... if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful onesThat's a very strange definition of "zero sum". The fact that VC investment is barely profitable does not mean the industry is zero-sum. There is the potential for huge value creation - the very opposite of zero-sum<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_sum" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_sum</a>

iddav大约 11 年前

Well, I'm an engineer who quit my cushy job at Google to go it alone. So, I suppose this makes me an idiot.I think the big question the author fails to address is: Do these deluded engineers end up regretting their decisions in the long-term?I think most people in the startup community understand that failure-- and the misery that comes with it-- comes with the territory, and the key is whether you can learn with each failure. And I would argue that there's no better to place to learn than an environment where your income depends directly on whether you're genuinely solving a problem for people (the people who "run the lottery" are your target customers, not the VCs, by the way). In my case, I've failed at over a dozen projects (some prior to my time at Google) while finding a few moderately successful ones along the way, and I'm continuing to fail, learn, and grow.And I like to think that this better understanding of harsh realities of how the world actually works gained from doing a startup-- whether you succeed or fail, whether you end up at a small company or a large company-- is a return on your investment that continues to serve you for the rest of your career.

评论 #7623020 未加载

评论 #7622931 未加载

zmitri大约 11 年前

As someone who started a company articles like this make no sense to me.There's money-driven people everywhere, but if you want to get rich, your best bet isn't to start a company. Work at a hedge fund and work your way up. People makes millions a year. Way easier than starting something. That being said it's also soul sucking and absolutely mindless. Provides little value.Perhaps there's more to starting company than ecosystem?Starting company allows you to address a problem directly. Whether that addresses a real problem, or is a cash grab, depends on founders.Most "good founders" do it because they want to make it real. That articles propagates some kind of wannabe culture as being the real value of starting a company. Which is so lame.Life is short and starting your own company is way better than being an employee at a big company in my opinion. If you are young you are undervalued.Obviously it's more nuanced then this comment and not everyone is in a position to start a company or work at a small company, and hell no is it a meritocracy, lots of problems, but damn, do your own thing.

rwmj大约 11 年前

I'll tell you from experience there is a fate worse than your startup failing. That is that your startup bumps along neither making it big nor having the good grace to go out of business. You just have the monthly stress of making payroll with no end in sight. (Thankfully I'm out of that and working for The Man, and never happier)

funkyy大约 11 年前

Some people prefer to aim at the moon rather than look at the ground. The issue with this article is that even if 5% startups will succeed - thats OK. Lets create 20 startups over next 20-30 years then. Because once you succeed - you are way ahead of anything that could happen in your life when just simply working for big company. Yeah, its hard work. Yeah, you will fail few times. So what? At least you learn invaluable things. Author seems to be missing the point... Not everyone is afraid of failure and not everyone wants good pay every month. Some people wants to fulfill their ego, needs, dreams and the price tag over this is well above living on the edge of poverty. If author is happy to live in safety of his job and security - great. But dont judge, or try to teach people that dont want to. Its very close minded by him to do so.

评论 #7624130 未加载

Futurebot大约 11 年前

The book and article might be 100% right, but it still doesn't always matter. There are other reasons people start their own companies:1) If you're after personal autonomy, no amount of working at a great company can give you that.2) Not everyone has the skills to work at the Googles of the world. A mediocre engineer can still make a great business owner, though.3) Not everyone has the right demeanor to work for other people.4) Some people have worked for other companies, and decided it simply wasn't for them. Maybe they realized they were not paid anywhere close to enough for the value they created, or they simply couldn't take the politics.5) The chance to make your bones (largely) on your own is a powerful thing.It is often irrational from a short-to-medium-term financial perspective, and the Lottery Effect is sometimes at play, no question. The reasons above won't just go away, though.

conradev大约 11 年前

Having only read the article and not the entire book, I am curious to see if the author explores the motivations behind starting a company. The article makes it sound like money and fame are assumed to be the only motivations.I feel that entrepreneurship is fundamentally about controlling one's own future.

评论 #7622760 未加载

ZenPro大约 11 年前

To be fair, the article is not wrong in a lot of what it says. In actual fact, a close reading of VC/Angel writing including Paul Graham pretty much correlate exactly with the author has posited especially regarding VC investment.In the UK, angels can claim 50% tax relief on any investment followed by claiming back up to 100% of any losses (minus the tax relief). Investing is almost risk free.Just find yourself some entrepreneurs, sell them the dream, supply ramen noodles and repeat x 10 until one of them hits.

chrisbennet大约 11 年前

Let me see, going to college and coming out with an insane amount of debt - to work as a writer. That sounds like pretty big gamble. Very, very few writers "make it big".

barretts大约 11 年前

Felix conveniently assumes a startup has a binary outcome: Immense riches or ignominious failure. In reality, there's a spectrum. I know a lot of people who sold their company for $1 million to $10 million. Depending on how the cap tables work, this is usually not life-changing money but enough to average out to a really decent salary for 1-5 years of work, plus a job at a good company at the end of the ride.

josephschmoe大约 11 年前

Startups are a double-or-nothing game with 2-3 months between wins and 0 months between losses. Everybody either just won or just restarted.

clamprecht大约 11 年前

I think one factor at play is that even if your startup fails, you can almost always fall back on a developer job, which usually pays very well. So yeah it's like playing a lottery, but not spending your last dollar on the ticket.Even more, having startup experience on your resume is usually a good thing, even if the startup failed.

评论 #7622427 未加载

评论 #7622446 未加载

cpks大约 11 年前

The most important thing in life is for life to have meaning. Trying to change the world -- even if you don't succeed -- does that. Trying to make adsense profits go up by 0.1% -- perhaps a bit less so.

marshray大约 11 年前

A 10% chance of succeeding at a startup is far better than that of the average Journalism school graduate's chance of making a career writing Opinion columns for a major press outlet like Reuters.

lexcorvus大约 11 年前

The article exaggerates slightly, but based on my experience it's basically right. Alas.

lutusp大约 11 年前

Punch line: "In the world of startups, the only winning move is not to play."The reviewer says the book gives the required substance behind the punch line, of that I have no doubt, but this reminds me of the "War Games" (1983) punch line, almost word for word.

评论 #7622400 未加载

001sky大约 11 年前

The interesting part of the analysis is the way this is mitigated; social status displays are often re-source irrational. The issue is whether or not the latter can be capitalized upon. All evidence points to "yes".

pjkundert大约 11 年前

Not everyone is cut out for high risk R&D. News at 11:00....Ok, sorry if that was subtle. If only a minority of the population values risky behavior such as software/hardware R&D highly, and someone in the vast majority who cannot understand how anyone with the requisite skill-set wouldn't be happier earning a high, stable salary at Google writes an article implying that the group in question must be delusional or maybe insane, don't you think a bit of sarcasm is in order?-- someone who turned down a Google offer to do R&D