“I would add, that I loved working in startups, and even if it is unsuccessful, people often get 5 years of experience in 2 years because they have to do everything.”
Ditto. My past experiences are quite handy now.
what’s the other option?
I interviewed (and took the job) at a government agency. They were very honest and said they didn’t know how long the job would last. It would have been an issue if I were leaving a solid job but since I wasn’t, the ‘risk’ was low. It turned out the job lasted 2.5 years. There was no risk of not getting paid or not having health insurance.
I think it’s safe to say that he other options aren’t as attractive as this one. What I want is for my son to realize that the interview process is a two-way street.
My H has been through 4 different start ups over the years. Two he did very well with and ended up with stock and both companies were sold. The other two ran through a lot of money and ended up belly up. H loved all the start ups he worked for. I know he would say if you are young definitely go for it.
Totally agree … but I wonder how things are now. Back in the Stone Age, after I dropped out of UT-Austin, I went to work as the 10th employee of a rapidly growing small data acquisition company. Writing code, working on hardware, traveling across the country to install that hardware and software. Learned to deal with the main salesman who thought he was having “micro-heart attacks” all the time (probably because he was selling code I hadn’t written, yet)! Even went to a yearly Lahey FORTRAN convention in Lake Tahoe! That company grew to 25+ employees in less than three years. Quite an experience for a kid from the sticks in central TX.
I guess the main thing is that you don’t know and can’t predict what will happen with these things. This was back in the go-go tech world of the 1980s and 1990s and the experience at that small company led to a job at a “huge” company of 4000 people, stock options, yadda, yadda, that grew to 25+K employees by the time I quit seven years later. I used to joke that they were dog-years in terms of work and experience.
One difference between me and some of the other replies is that I was never concerned about money (started with nothing, so anything was great). All I was concerned about was solving problems, writing the fastest+smallest code possible, and beating the competitors.
Our son distilled his 10 week summer internship offers down to two. One with a well established company (in the top 50 of Fortune 100) where he would net $13k. The other offer was from a silicon valley stealth-startup where he would barely break even. The choice for him was easy - he took the startup. I like his evaluation of the startup as a place where he would learn so much more than at the established company. Our advise to our son has always been that taking risks is easier done early in one’s career - the upside possibilities for both learning and money are great.
Presumably, he is not under any current financial pressure (needing lots of student loans and parent loans to afford school) so that he can forego the greater monetary compensation in favor of probable better career development?
That is the case. Had there been any financial pressures he might have made a different decision. That would have been a much harder decision.
My first real job out of college was with a start up and the things I learned in that time was invaluable for where I am today. Being a start up meant that I had my hands in many different aspects of the company and in a very short time I learned a lot on how things worked and how the different departments interacted to either succeed or fail. The experience I gained in a short two year period would have taken me probably 7 to 10 years at a more established firm.
I was able to take that experience and leap frog my career so the long term upside was tremendous for me. It did being single and not having a lot of debt to worry about, only a small student loan and a car payment. Outside of that just normal living expenses but i was living pretty cheap at the time. Its easier to take the risks when you are young than later in life when you may have a lot more obligations to factor in.
That company eventually failed but watching it go down was extremely helpful in allowing me to avoid similar mistakes later in my career.
I worked at several extremely early stage startups out of college(5-15 employees and contractors), and didn’t feel like they were a great place to gain experience. Being the only programmer or one of two programmers(also straight out of college), there were no senior CS people to provide mentoring, technical training, or even bounce ideas off of. I think I would have learned more, if I had spent those years working for a publicly traded company, or at least a more mature startup. YMMV
Also, read up on 83b elections.
OP, if equity is a part of your son’s compensation, get him a book by this guy:
https://www.amazon.com/Kaye-A.-Thomas/e/B001KC65PG/
His Consider Your Options book was priceless back in the day for us.
My S left a Fortune 200 company (his first job out of college in 2015) at the end of 2016 to go to a start up. He couldn’t be happier. He has gotten 3 promotions since he’s been there with considerable raises each time. He was chosen, along with two others, to start a company growth analytics team last November.
It’s pretty well established though as it’s been in business for 11 years and now has 300 employees. S was their 200th. My terminology probably isn’t correct but he told me they are in the top (last?) tier of funding.
The company started out bootstrapping because they didn’t want to go after investors until they figured out how to go nationwide.
The CEO is a MIT grad and other top execs are from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, RPI, etc.
He was given stock when he joined the company.
S’s goal is to eventually go work for one of their venture capital funders and work at getting other startups they invest in off the ground.
I was very nervous when he left a very well established company to go to a start up. But then I remembered he was only 23 and the time to take a risk is now. I’m glad he didn’t tell me until after the fact because I would have tried to talk him out of it.
These comments illustrate the wide range of startups. To me, by the time a startup has 300 employees, it’s going to be more similar to a megacorp than a startup which just raised its series A.
One of my favorite cc stories is from a mom in the Class of 2010/2014 thread. Her ds was a CS major and had delayed finding an internship the summer before his senior year. He finally took the only thing he could find with two guys in San Francisco. At the end of the summer, they offered him a job. He went around and around with his parents, who were adamant that he finish his degree, saying that if the company is still around he always can work for them when he graduates. It was, he became the company’s eighth employee and now is a multimillionaire. Everyone on this thread would recognize the name of this former start-up now with a worldwide presence. He still gives his parents a hard time about how much money he passed up by becoming the eighth employee instead of the third!
A startup is usually a pre-series C company, at least in biotech.