Being an early employee at a startup is almost always a terrible decision financially. Great if you: - Want to start your own company - Want to learn a lot and grow ...That’s about it.
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You're conflating a choice being likely to fail and being a bad decision. The former is not the latter if the expected value is high enough and you can bear the risk.
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I never said it was a bad decision. I'm just saying the vast majority of the time it will not return in financial upside. sometimes it will, and it'll be huge. not dissimilar to vc, no?
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You said it was almost always a terrible decision. You didn't mention the upside. You mentioned a couple other nonfinancial benefits, and concluded "that's about it." Surely anyone reading that tweet would infer you were saying that, financially, it was a bad decision.
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But what about everyone that took early jobs at startups that were wildly successful and they only got enough out of it to buy a new car?
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bad negotiators
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Plus new hires can sometimes do way better than random (in fact better than most investors) at predicting startup outcomes. If you knew Drew and Arash at MIT and need and can judge what they're building, huge amounts of uncertainty are eliminated.
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literally I said financially only. I never said being an early employee is a bad decision overall. it changed my life!
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It’s also addressing a single choice, when it’s actually a repeated game. Given multiple tries, the expected value decreases and so does the variance. Between my wife and me, we’ve had 9 shots in 11 years.
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Would be interesting if a data-set could be analyzed which allows for calc. of EV & shows the distribution. Anybody know if a study exists? Problem w/EV is one can't run many trials. That's why one must be able to "bear the risk." Suspect many startup employees can't.
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Even still, I think if you do the numbers financially it’s a bad bet. That’s not the reason to do it, if you’re rational. Do it to be a part of really building something and getting it into the world and learning to do that instead of doing TPS Reports.
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