Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv
2 years ago
Yeah i was more so thinking of first time founders. Second time founder is a different thing, though I dont think early employees ("founding engineers") get much respect.
2 years ago
Yeah i was more so thinking of first time founders. Second time founder is a different thing, though I dont think early employees ("founding engineers") get much respect.
They do - they just have to have had larger successes.
"Founding X" doesn't count for shit.
Being part of a team that built a hugely successful product teaches you a lot - it teaches you about the counterintuitive dynamics of superlinear growth. That is a very important mindset to bring to the table if you want to create a successful VC-funded startup.
I had to look up "superlinear growth" because I've never seen that term used under posts with VC related topics. If you're as confused as me, Paul Graham wrote a blog post about this last October (figures):
http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
tl:dr: Just make a product that's so cool it'll go viral in it's respective market.
so basically exponential but fancier.
4 replies →
“Founding ____” is not “founder”. It’s just a fancy way of saying “employee”. This is always been the case.
Do they still call themselves founding engineer at Series C? Just seems like a cute way to convince graduates it's worth being paid 1/4 what Google/Meta could cough up.
Is there any real benefit to taking ~$160k and 1% as a “founding” engineer? We’re not even close to series C yet but it’s starting to feel like I need to be more aggressive about compensation or a role change.
If you don’t become a +$100mm company (and have the ability to cash out at that position) it seems to be a pretty rough deal honestly.
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Seems sort of clearly misleading at any rate.
Never said it was, its a scam title. Only time it holds relevance is again if the founder already had a success. Then the chances of the equity being worth something are higher