image-title-here Source: Catalin Avram - photo taken in Munich, Bavaria, Oct 26, 2022

The Promise

Significant number of software engineers that are fresh out of school dream of being cofounders of a hot tech startup that makes it on the cover of Techcrunch. It’s an understandable excitement. The usual scheme is the following: you accept a job at a startup which will pay you a little bit under market value, but will offer you a piece of the company (something like 0.5-1.5%) and co-founder title. The percentage points usually come with the promise that goes along the lines: “When we will make 100 billion trillion in sales, your share will be worth fifty billion dollars and you’ll be set”. That could be true, but the assumptions are huge. And the price you pay is hidden. Let me explain…

The Reality

In reality, what happens is that because you are awarded “co-founder” title, you will be expected to act and work as a co-founder. In the high-tech world that means long hours, always be reachable, etc. Since it’s a startup, the project will most likely be understaffed and you will have to do a lot more than just programming. This is where the problem lies. You are expected to put in the time and effort as a “co-founder” but you will never, ever be part of crucial decisions in anything important. And by that I don’t mean only financial decisions or company direction, but even work culture and so on. On top of this, you will also not get any kind of mentorship or have time to develop your skills as a software engineer. There will never be time to automate tests, to implement best practices, to do hackathons or anything that makes working in the tech sector cool. You are basically a slave to that 1% share in the company. Sure, you MIGHT make it big and get a huge amount of money, but statistically speaking that is a very very low probability. Most of the time you will either get nothing, or some small sum which was not worth the effort in the end. Which brings me to the real cost…

The Real Cost

The real cost for you, as a software engineer, is that you will miss out on the following:

  • No mentorship from a senior developer
  • No experience in proper software engineering practices which are used in serial production projects (ie testing and deployment infrastructure, etc)
  • You will make less money than working at an established company.
  • You will work as hard as the real co-founders (the ones that have 30-40% or more of the company, but your share is much smaller and you will have no say in pretty much anything other than which bugs to fix first
  • No time for techy stuff - everything you do will be done in a rush - copy/paste from Stackoverflow or clone some repo from Github - use it if it seems to do the job. These things might not seem important at first, but imagine you give up 3-4 years of your working career on this. After 3-4 years, you will still be a junior developer (compared to real world standards) or an intermediate one at best. You might think you have done so much because you might have done some backend, front end, a bit of mobile, etc., but in reality you have only scratched the surfaces of those technologies. You will be an EXPERT at the startup product you are working ON, but that feeling is delusional - it does not translate into the industry outside your start up.

Advice

My advice is to work at an established project at first so you can get a good feeling of proper software engineering principles without the stress of delivering features continuously. Once you have this solid experience, the experience that propels you from Junior to Intermediate or Intermediate-Senior, then it’s a good time to jump in a startup and do the whole co-founder thing. It’s much more productive - and sane!