The two aren't mutually exclusive, you could've easily started out with salary + stock options that would've put you in a better position to start a side gig.
Then you might actually be driving a lambo now too ;)
tarsnap is a one man show and he's not building a startup. he could've easily worked at Google, take advantage of the rising stock prices AND continue work on his SaaS. Lot of us do exactly that because it doesn't make sense to leave a good paying job at a large company to take on tremendous risk at as you said, consuming endeavour with small probability of success (+90% failure rate).
I don't get why people are so upset at my comment or why that should warrant ad hominem attacks.
I merely mentioned that parent could've had a job at Google and benefited from it. He made it sound like it was a power move, it really wasn't. My argument is only that he took on even more risk by not taking advantage of Google's offer and growing stock prices to fund his passion. He doesn't seem like the type to get distracted by a day job either.
By '06 Google was already public so you weren't going to make life changing, never work again in your life money from stock awards/options. At best you'd be sitting on a decent nest egg that maybe bought you some property or better investments if you were smart (and a $250k supercar is not a smart investment).
This was before Facebook broke the SV no-poaching ring, so the offer probably wasn’t that spectacular. Also, in 2006-2010 any RSU’s would be rather horizontal.
I don't know why people think that the SV no-poaching thing really had a large effect on people hired at Google when it was active. It didn't.
I don't know what "horizontal" RSUs are, but they were options back then, and every year, you got a bigger (more value) pile of them. My total comp doubled without me getting a promotion in roughly 5 years.
yes, but you'd get more stock each year (a larger count). Also the stockw as definitely not "horizontal". Google outperformed the market in each of the tech bursts.
if you owned stock options and invested it in Google with portion of your salary going to it, you absolutely would be looking at extreme returns. The power of compounded returns is still not clear to some I see.
With that money you could've funded any side project that generates recurring revenue.
I don't get why you should quit your job, take on tremendous amount of risk for a highly improbable outcome with heavy survivorship bias.
> I don't get why you should quit your job, take on tremendous amount of risk for a highly improbable outcome with heavy survivorship bias.
For someone like you? I'd say you shouldn't. The correct option for the vast majority of people is to stay at a stable, low risk high paying corporate job and live a comfortable upper-middle class life.
For other people...it's not that much risk if you're good at fundraising, hiring and executing. For those people, the sky is the limit.
Do you know each other or is this a judgement of character based off the few words in the above comments?
What they wrote sounds like good sense in general. A bit materialistic and generalizing perhaps, I wouldn't want a dino juice sapper and I have a lot of trouble doing pointless work let alone outright manipulative like adtech (but that's just me, evidently there's plenty on the other side), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be generally smart to accept a 4-day work week offer for presumably a high salary in addition to starting something with a high failure chance. But we don't know about savings or aspirations or industry knowledge or investors cperciva might have had, hence it's a bit generalizing, even if it's generally sensible.
I actually touched on this in my comment. I didn't disagree with you.
> The correct option for the vast majority of people is to stay at a stable, low risk high paying corporate job and live a comfortable upper-middle class life.
Building any size of a durable business is not for everyone. Well-resourced, intelligent, trained people fail for all kinds of reasons, and that's while working on it full-time.
Unless it's not important to you that it ultimately succeeds (and it's essentially a hobby production), eventually, your business will be subject to competition and market pressure -- to gain and retain market share.
What odds do you think you have of building and holding on to that if you're trying to squeeze it into your down time from your full-time job that presumably already requires your full mental energy 40 hours a week? Why put that energy into something that is going to fail in what is ultimately a competitive market? Why not just put those resources into an index fund or real estate?
Until you have significant experience bringing new products to market (and even then), achieving any kind of a durable go to market success with a new one is never trivial, whether you're building a niche product or a venture backed scaler.
the small percentage of survivors will lay it out like there's specific sequence of steps but its 1) very tough to find market product fit 2) even if you do, theres no guarantee you will be chosen 3) your immediate circle, your economic class, education, race impact your perceived social credit 4) luck (even all three are met but some still do not "make it"
It's pretty foolhardy to tell people to go out and gamble and brush off survivorship with vanity. Back to the original parent's comment, they could've easily taken that Google job and continue development of their side project which didn't raise any money and grew organically, anyways.
I think that there is a much deeper track to entrepreneurship than the false, oversimplified binary of
1) either do a side project purely in the spare time of one's bigco job and surviving
2) go full-time into a company whether one may fail (and ultimately starve) or not
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional social media influencer.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional musician.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional basketball player.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional politician.
Not everyone is (or should) become a professional founder.
But plenty of people do.
What you're talking about as being "so risky" can really be as mundane as becoming a competent mid level manager at a large tech company. One do have to make certain moves in one's career to prepare for management, and there's a certain level of progressive, targeted professional maturation that has to take place before one can be put in charge of others in some kind of a management capacity and not mess the whole thing up completely. But it's ultimately something which can be (and commonly is) trained for. Moreover, it is something most people can accomplish in their lifetime with training -- not that it means it's something most people should do or would enjoy doing.
It can take 6-10 years of practicing how to find and get into the top 1-10% startups to get any good at it. Or to get the skills one would need to run one. Or to find the right colleagues to build a network of peers and mentors one likes.
But if someone puts the full time in and don't get even decent (never mind best in class) results, they probably need to be more patient, and/or they screwed something very specific up, which they could probably fix; it's not because they aren't capable of it.
So it may require a different much more personal playbook than one may be used to, and if one has not fully developed theirs yet, it may seem delusional or unattainable. But much of that, if that's in the case, would be in their head. It would be like saying "I can't be a manager." That's probably not the case. What is likely more the case is "I like being an IC more than a manager" and "I prefer the working environment of established big companies over small startups."
People tend to prefer what they're good at, and they tend to be good at what they prefer. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Then you might actually be driving a lambo now too ;)