Last time we were in Japan, we were walking around in Hakone and thinking the same thing. Then we stumbled upon a (literal) video game treasure chest. Inside there was a journal, stamps, and stickers to contribute your stories to.
Making less money isn't really the risky part about founding a startup. The risky part is missing out on years of other life experiences, stressing (or losing) your closest personal relationships, failing and feeling personally responsible for disappointing everyone you convinced to believe in you, and developing an anxiety disorder (or worse) from chronic long-term stress.
Author's suggestion that they could have taken a "similar level of risk" as an early employee by taking secondaries as a founder is way off, IME.
Having been employee #10 a couple times now, there is a lot of that even when you aren't a founder. It would be nice if the 'de-risk your life' stuff this article describes for founders was also available for early employees.
Work a high salary job and buy lottery tickets or 0DTE options instead. Half joking. Look at the success rate of outlier comp through liquidity as an early startup employee. If professional stock pickers can’t pick better than index funds, what makes you think you can do better picking startups, spending non renewable time, working for years vesting common shares that you might get liquidity for eventually, assuming they have any positive value.
If you want to get wealthy, there are more efficient, less effort ways. If you want to suffer with low chances of success based on all available data, well, help yourself to the firehose of startup jobs.
You're not just "picking a startup". That early, you're also a big factor in whether it succeeds. Betting on yourself is different than buying a lottery ticket. (Maybe just as irrational for a lot of people, but still.)
Advanced sports stats have the notion of "contribution above replacement value", the idea being it isn't just what you do, it's what you do relative to whoever they could (relatively easily) replace you with.
The startup failure/success rate already have some level of "smart, motivated staff" baked in. So you're really making a bet on how much better you are than the average early stage startup employee.
You (not “you”, but the persona for this discussion) are not special and will likely fail, based on startup failure rates. Certainly, you will put effort forth, but that is only tangential to odds of success. If you enjoy the experience and don’t need monetary resources, sure, knock yourself out. Just recognize the opportunity cost, that the odds are stacked against you, and if you succeed, you were as lucky as you were skilled.
I’ll take the lottery ticket over me any day, not because I suck, but because I am human. Even exceptional humans fail. I don’t drink the exceptionalism koolaid.
People, especially sw devs, love this narative but it's just not true. It's not all luck like the lottery but the combination of things outside your control might as well make it so for early employees at a startup. But hey, you did get that vp of whatever title...
When you work for a startup you have a ton of insider information not available to outsiders, even investors. If you think your startup won’t be successful then obviously just find a different job.
> I have been an early or first engineer at five different companies and have had three liquidity events in a 9-year career.
A "big" success is a 10+ year journey. For an early employee, it is perfectly acceptable to give a few weeks' notice and move on to the next lotto ticket. This doesn't work for a key founder-exec -- they're likely going to commit to a decade working on one big problem, and investors want to incentivize them to shoot for the moon & stick with it for the long haul.
It's definitively not the same for an early employee.
Having been a key early employee at a failed startup, horseshit.
The employees bear the burden too, if they're working their asses off at an early stage startup they believe in the cause just as much. Viewing founders as somehow magically special is a symptom of the broader misguided hero worship the US has right now.
I'm sorry this isn't true. Your name wasn't on the line when you took the investment, and the OP pointed out with his "5 startups in 10 years" line, it's very easy for early employees to walk away. That isn't as available to founders.
There is much more burden (reputational, financial, emotional) on the founders.
I've been a founder, and I've been a key early employee. It is very different.
It's unfortunate that subjective well-being was left out of this, because that's the one that looks like it might be getting worse. Arguably, it's also the most important.
The study that looked at subjective well-being in 16th century Spain concluded that subjective well-being mirrors subjective economic inequality. Without going too deep, it seems that relationship continues to hold in the modern time period of which you speak. Subjective economic inequality has increased, and subjective well-being has declined.
But that does question just how important subjective well-being is if all it is is your perception of how much better off someone else is.
FF7 Remake and Rebirth are both incredible, but Rebirth's sales are significantly lower. I'm hoping this doesn't make them reduce investment for the third installment.
My guess is dinosaurs holding onto the "good ole days" of the "console wars".
Remake and Rebirth were both seriously, and needlessly, kneecapped by their own parent company.
The exclusivity deals are to blame.
One year exclusive on console(and in terms of Rebirth, a console that few people own because of short supply at launch and lack of games throughout its now apparently finished tenure), then one year exclusive on a single pc game store(the one I refuse to use), then, finally, wide release, but by then everyone excited about the game has heard about their friends playing it or watched a streamer and so once they are finally ALLOWED to play the game the purchase is less of a intriguing prospect.
I think the original moved a lot of CONSOLES, but to think that sort of purchasing power STILL exists is a fever dream that is dangerous to the parent company's own goals. (pun intended ;)
You can definitely tell while you're playing it. It's probably the best-looking game I've ever seen and it has a pretty unbelievable amount of content.
Let me reply again, game development in my eyes is insanity personified.
If it's engine or interop, it's wild. It always has been.. We used to have memory and space limits, now we have no limits but time. I adore and praise every game developer. It's a tough field.
Regardless of the answer here, the fact that there's still a debate about what basic functionality requires a cookie banner is really a testament to how bad this legislation is. How long has this been around, 20 years? And there's still widespread debate and lack of understanding as to what specific functionality requires a cookie banner?
> consent is not required [for] cookies that are strictly necessary to provide an online service that the person explicitly requested. e.g. […] when your customers use a shopping basket
So shopping carts (user clicked to add to cart) and notification preferences (user clicked to indicate preference) don’t require consent. Same for authentication cookies.
The page is quite clear; the confusion likely arises from how companies implement it.
i think it's worth noting that those cookies keep track of whether you have filled out their feedback form and to count the number of unique visitors to the page, or cookies from third parties the website may present embeds from https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en
Your lawyers are playing it safe. Their job is to make sure your company is not getting into lawsuits, and having a cookie banner that is not needed won't get you into a lawsuit, so that's what they suggest. They don't care about annoying your users.
If you really care about not annoying your users and don't intend to track them more than what's absolutely required for the service to work, then talk with your lawyers more. Of course, it is not free as it requires extra work, and it may carry some risk (which your lawyers should minimize) but it may be worth it, many people press the "back" button as soon as they see a cookie banner and try their luck elsewhere.
Yes, and if you ask the CFO about the best way to increase profits, the answer is always to fire all your staff. That doesn't mean that that answer is the most optimal solution.
> You don’t need a banner for the data that is necessary for the service to work at minimum level.
We were advised by our lawyers (a top SV tech law firm) that we should include a cookie banner in the EU even if we're only using cookies for functions like login. After eventually switching legal counsel (for unrelated reasons), we were told the same thing by our new counsel.
Either EU law covers cookie banners that use cookies for routine functionality, or it's so (deliberately) vague that even top tech law firms would rather everyone add a cookie banner than risk running afoul of the law. Either case validates PG's argument here.
It is indeed quite complex. I would argue that just the login does not need.
1. There are users who will come to your website with specific purpose or expectation of your service.
2. Then there are users who came to website by accident and might just try out things without understanding what is happening.
The banner recommendation from the lawyers is likely for the 2nd case. The users haven't subscribed to the service with certain expectation or knowledge what is expected from them to service to provide what they want. Or they have zero expectations about the service to provide something for their needs.
For example, the login case, the group 1. probably wants to stay logged in if they came to service with expectation of personal service, which cannot be linked to the person without an account.
Or the lawyers just did not understand your service well enough and just said that put the banner be done with it.
For group 2. it is unlikely that someone did not expect or want to stay logged in all the time, but that is for minority and arguable case whether is fair to assume that.
If the lawyers don't recommend you add the banner, and you somehow run into trouble because of it, the lawyers will be blamed. However, if they do recommend that you add a banner and you follow their advice, then they can get some more billable hours by recommending some verbiage for the banner, checking your website to make sure the banner is displayed in a compliant way, etc. And even if you don't follow their advice - people rarely fire their lawyer for recommending caution.
So, how did you ever expect the lawyers not to recommend adding the banner? That's like going to a plumber and ask them if you should DIY or not some installation. Of course they're going to recommend you get a professional...
I think this applies not only to startup founders but also to early-stage engineering teams. We distilled this into our company's engineering values:
Real work is work that improves our product or makes our users happy. This includes writing code, helping others write code, and helping hire people that write code.
#fakework is work that seems like work, but is mostly just vanity. Examples of #fakework include thought leadership, migrating things to shinier new technologies, and going to conferences. #fakework can be fun (and fun is worthwhile, too), but it doesn't count towards anything here.
Why is everything "real" about writing code, when one of the standards is making users happy? Users presumably are not simply enthralled by your GitHub repos and might like to have interpersonal interaction about what the software is intended to do for their real contexts... And writing code writing code writing code is not obviously the way to satisfy that.
https://i.imgur.com/VIPkCZr.png
Wish I took better pics, but here it was in the middle of nowhere. Japan is awesome.