this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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"I work 80 hrs for my own business and I expect everyone else to do so...on a regular salary"
CEOs think their time at restaurants count as working hours
They think that responding to emails every now and then is "working"...
No, on a startup salary. Which might be minimum wage (on a 40h basis). His advice is solid: for someone who looks for work life balance a startup is not the right employer. They will be much happier in a big boring established company. If someone is in their 20s, little family obligations, wants to have a high risk high reward experience, go for it.
People used to start family's in their 20s, cunts like this CEO are the reason they can't and we've developed this garbage mentality.
People can start a family in their 20s today, but not working for a startup. For instance, getan engineering degree, a job in a big company with a good union (IG Metall is the one im familiar with) and you can start a family at 25. That won't get you a yacht like a startup could, but it will give you stability and a very comfortable life.
startup gets you a yacht if you are the lead engineer or the one who starts it. if you are one of the initial employees maybe you get some shares that you can't cash right away and a somewhat a better position and possibly a thanks.
I know personally people with a 3 digit employee number at a company (hard to call it startup at that point) who are millionaires. Anything pre-IPO is serious money, the first 100 employees usually in the high 7 figures.
High risk high reward jobs are rarely a good advice for someone trying to establish their own life in their twenties especially if you don't have a safety net. It is like suggesting math PhD students to go after the biggest unsolved problem of the century. It is much more sane to try to do such stuff when you are established in your career. Also I am not sure what is the rewarding part even if the start-up becomes wildly successful best you get out of those are some shares with lots of strings attached, it is not like CEO makes every initial employee a high end partner.
I'm not suggesting they do it, I'm saying if they do it they should demand a lot of equity.
Well then that startup will likely move to the next candidate (among hundreds) with their ten stage interview. I can understand owners and leads of startups wanting to work their ass of to lift their company and dreams off the ground. But if they expect a regular employee to do the same for a low salary and barely any extra benefits then they are delusional. If they use sentences like "we are a family", "this is our dream", run.
Yep. Add "work hard, play hard" to the list.
But yeah, at least in tech one of the motivation tools for employees is equity, even post-IPO you get RSUs and some form of ESPP. If you don't offer big equity for an early stage startup why would someone work for you instead making mid 6 figures at a FAANG?
I'm at the start of my career and decided to join a startup now. I'm at a point in my life where I don't need to support anyone other than myself, and can afford to work a lot for relatively low pay because it's fun to build something new from scratch. I can afford that this flops.
In ten years, I'm hopefully in a place where I want/need more stability, free time, predictability, and better pay. Either the startup works out, and I can have that, or I'm hoping that the experience I get working on it will allow me to get a "normal" job when I need it.
Edit: What's with people downvoting me for saying that I personally have joined a startup because I personally think it's fun and rewarding? Jesus...
Honestly if I am going spend my years on building something from scratch and sacrifice so much for its growth, I would like to have some say on its further development and future course and a fair share of its success too (acknowledgement and financial wise). That rarely seems to happen in startups, apart from top engineers and executives. Even if you come up with ideas that transform the company, best you get is some sort of bonus and maybe sth you claim you have done in your next job interviews.
If you want such rewarding stuff then work in the academia for somewhat a better salary and much more freedom and ownership of projects you develop and supervise (even as a postdoc).
I'm getting cheap options for a decent share of the company as part of my contract, so I will have a say in future development :)
well that sounds like much fairer treatment than the experience of many people around me. do those shares come with strings attached?
Only string attached is that I'm required to sell them back to the company if I quit. I think that makes sense, since we're not publicly traded, and want all shareholders to be people actively invested in the company.
yea that doesn't sound bad. I have heard couple stories where by the time people were allowed to sell their shares, they were barely worth more than supermarket coupons.
This is the worst advice I have seen in a while. Academia is the absolute worst for salary, with an eternity actuelly not earning anything (or if in the US, having to pay yourself!) plus the stress of constant chasing of funding, politics that make big corporations pale and whims of reviewers that have no idea about your niche. I didn't even consider a post-doc, went straight to industry. Best decision ever.
Only go to academia if it's truly your passion and you don't care about money for some reason.
I am comparing academia to working as an initial employee in a startup though, not to working as an employer in industry in an established firm.
In this case salary is likely better, you still build stuff from scratch on topics that interest you, you don't work so that some guy can achieve his/her dreams, you have a higher chance of getting credit for the stuff you do (though wouldn't say %100 because yea fucking humans...). It even comes with the same levels of future uncertainty that a startup does lol. That being said as with anything luck is the major determinant here too. If you end up with a group of immature people and a bad PI you may live hell on earth (as you would anywhere). But I believe your chances of ending up with a fun gang of intelligent people is quite high, including the PI.
I respectfully disagree. The potential reward in a startup is orders of magnitude higher than academia. The percentage of time dedicated to useful work is higher in a startup (funding proposals suuuuck). The time you start earning money is years earlier in a startup (no need for masters or PhD). I agree about credit (which unless it's Nobel level is almost worthless, and usually the department chair gets the most credit anyway) and luck.
While I don't regret my years in academia, it's only because it helped me land my first industry job which would be super difficult without that background. Academia itself as a career path was a big no for me after my first two published papers.
My experience in startups is quite limited, it is some 5-6 friends who applied early on worked and got disappointed. It seems to me that if you are not a founding member, even if the startup makes it through (against quite bad odds), you don't get rewarded enough for working quite a lot for a low salary. Even in one case a friend of mine who came up with quite a good idea that was useful to the company got sacked later on without a second thought or a thank you, let alone a share or a bonus (because of bad financial situation). Also the politics drama (that is abundant in academia yes) also exists for startups on a higher level. Where there are rich shareholders and funders, you are always at the whim of politics between people. Many startups go under because of political decisions by shareholders to stop supporting a certain sector (or even a shareholder being assassinated during some sort of gun fight, in Canada, yea this is a real experience). So that is not special to academia, politics unfortunately exists in any place humans do. It is surprising that it is also so entrenched in academia but yes it is.
Proposals, oh man, nowadays that is the same level of bullshitting involved in AI determined industry interviews, I completely agree. However, if your group is of medium+ size and your PI has some sanity, then odds are you have some project administrator that writes the proposals mostly but I do realize that is not the generality in research groups.
Mostly agree, I guess it's subjective. The startup has the advantage that you could negotiate or go to a different startup or big corporation, academia is basically just the one path.
Yeah, started out like that. First employee in a startup (when I started it was me and the four co-owners). I helped build that thing up from the ground. I created the whole IT and software development aspect of the company. I did so for the salary of a supermarket worker, even though I was department lead with 7 people under me at the end. Yearly bonus was a €50 Amazon voucher.
I helped raise the company from 5 guys up to 50 in 3 continents. Never got anything for it.
Boss threw a big hissy fit when I didn't want to come into the office during lockdown even though it was against the law to do so.
After I handed in my resignation, the boss never even talked to me once.
Working at a startup is not high risk high reward. It's high risk, high work, no reward.
Anyone who thinks there's reward in it for the workers is naive. Unless the worker gets paid in undilutable shares of the company, all the reward goes to the owner. And unless an owner pays me like an owner, I'm not going to give half a shit about the company.
100%
These startup bros got real "I need an army of desperate folks who can be paid in motivational speeches to make my dreams come true because I bring nothing to the table." Energy lol.
As I always say. With these types, freedom does not mean freedom from tyranny but rather freedom to become a tyrant.
"I'll hustle and work really hard, then one day, I'll get to wear the boot! "
Yeah, it was my first real job in the field. It was a hard lesson learned.
Don't give more than what you get paid for. Don't be more loyal than the company is loyal to you.
If you don't get undilutable shares, why on earth would you work for a startup??? Unemployment has been at an all time low for the last what, 20 years? Plenty of jobs out there, the only argument for a startup is the lottery ticket.
You are exactly the person this advice would have been great for. Only accept the low salary if you get a big chunk of equity in the company: that's the big reward part of the equation. Otherwise you could have been working for a boring multinational going home by 17:00 and have a house with a picket fence by now.
Yeah, I was young, it was my first real job in the field and I didn't have the experience to do better. It would have been a decent job for the first year or so, just getting my feet wet in real-life work to find a better job afterwards.
But idiot me drank the kool-aid that the owners were talking all day ("It's good that you are here, you'd never make it in a corporation", "Remember all the benefits you have here, like e.g. being able to take vacation on only 1 month's notice", "Corporations are so evil, they'll rip you off" and so on) that I was too afraid to look for something better.
Wasted 7 years there. Then I moved to a corporate job, doubled my salary and have never looked back. Corporate work environments are so, so much better than startups.
I received a few job offers for tech lead at startups and therelike, sometimes even with higher pay than I had at a corporate job, but I'll never ever join one of these mini-dictatorships in a startup again. Just far too much power concentration in a single person.
Does this go against some sort of law?
It's not inherently the case. For instance, my best job ever work-life balance-wise was a start up.
They were a really down-to-earth group, but they were also aware enough to realize that having a good work environment is how you keep your best people when you can't necessarily compete on salary/prestige with the big guys.
That's awesome, but also rather the exception, at least in my experience.
Good advice is if you sacrifice work life balance, make sure you have undilutable shares. I made that mistake already. Never again.
Yes, good distinction. Never happened to me, but I saw it in the Facebook movie.