Comment by ericjang
6 years ago
A lot of the comments are rightly pointing out the logical fallacy of survivorship bias in the article, but I don't think Garry intended to say that "choosing to work for Palantir in 2003 was the expected-wealth maximizing career decision and that's why you should join a startup".
I think the title and lede, "working for Microsoft cost me $200M" is intended to be provocative and encourage clicks on the article, while providing an interesting example of a "road not taken" in Garry's professional life. The dollar magnitude is unusual, but the feeling of regret is relatable to us all, even if you took the opposite bet that Garry did (e.g. turning down a LinkedIn or Coinbase offer in 2016 to work at a failed startup instead).
Since this article is on the top of HN today, I'd say Garry succeeded at sharing his personal anecdote.
On the content itself (startup vs. bigco), he is right about "you only can make a fraction of the value you create if you don't own equity" and "If you don't work on your dreams, someone will put you to work on theirs." But then it follows that everyone should start their own company if they are capable, or work for a bigco if they are not. The current SV labor market reflects this reality as well.
It's possible to sell some top-tier talent on taking less than 1% equity to work on your dreams, but they must really believe in the founder's vision and the founder's ability to provide a working environment that complements what the employee is not able to de-risk by themselves.
Everyone's opinions on tradeoffs vary. Were it me, I wouldn't be proud if I'd made the call to join the company that is directly supporting The US's broken ICE system (https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/technology/2019/05/do...), even if I were $200M richer. It seems Garry dodged a bullet on this one.
He says he ended up working for Palantir anyway, so he dodged the bullet then chased it down to dive back in front of it again.
In the case of this metaphor, he ran back to Palantir for his opportunity to shoot the gun, for a tiny share of the profits.
Apologies for the clickbait— I'm trying to build a YouTube following and having some collaborations drop this week. Just trying to make it work on that platform. The values and what is acceptable on different social networks is so different! I didn't really think it would appear on here, so tuning it for different audiences is hard.
I, for one, thought it was an excellent title. It's always fascinating to read about the eccentric Peter Thiel, and this gave me some inspiration for how to structure my own future writing. Thanks :)
We've tuned the title above for this audience. If there's a better one that represents the point of the article, happy to change again.