Ugh. This article confuses being a founder of a poorly run startup with being an employee. At least as a founder, you probably learn something of use. Aspiring to be a employee at a company where no one knows what they're doing is soul-killing career suicide.
> Make a mistake at the bottom of the spectrum, and there’s so many people making so many mistakes that it’s unlikely your mistakes will give you a bad reputation. On the other hand, screw up a company with $41mm in funding, and those mistakes are likely to follow you.
No. Totally wrong. Work for a startup that no one has heard of, and they will never care about your successes any more than your failures. Work for an startup with a great team and you'll build relationships that help down the line regardless of how badly the company does. Barring gross incompetence, hardly anyone holds business failure against founders, much less employees.
True in Silicon Valley, but I've witnessed people (in publishing specifically) who were spectacular screw-ups at publishing /startups/ and they screwed themselves over professionally.
In Silicon Valley, screwups don't follow you. In other industries, I think they can / do.
I'd also emphasize that I know my share of YC founders, and I have a pool of people who want to work in startups but don't have a ton of skills, nor any real resume from which to speak from... and for people who aren't willing to pack up and move to SF for some reason (family, money, etc.) joining a crap no-shot startup is at least something, compared to the nothing they're going to get by working at a gas station.
Is that rational? I can see why, for example, airlines don't get a second chance. If you even give off a whiff of cluelessness in aviation, nobody will want to touch you again - there's too much at stake.
Other industries are less risky, but a lack of professionalism can still be expensive - people are relying on you to help carry their project.
On the other hand, there's plenty of cases where management is just too thick to deal with risk.
In either case (risk is bad, or management can't handle it), screwing up can be a career limiting move.
With publishing at least there can be a high opportunity cost in partnering with a startup. Content providers might be losing access to exclusive publishing channels that bring a lower risk. If you get exclusive rights to my content for 18 months and don't make me any money with it then you might just have burned a bridge.
The article focussing on startups that "don’t have a shot at VCs [or] the top engineers in the world." -- which makes it likely that the company had very little ability to offer much of a salary, if any. Sounds to me like they were finding cofounders more than they were hiring employees.
The author mentions this advantage: "I was able to literally try anything, as long as I could somehow justify it to my coworking brethren." -- This is probably a lot less likely to be the case at a brand-name startup. It's a lot less risky to screw up when no one's really watching.
Even at tech giants like Google or Facebook, you can usually try anything as long as you can justify it. (Google also gives you 20% of your time to try things you can't justify.)
I can't help but get the sense that the author has never worked anywhere except places that are terribly managed. The reason lots of employees don't have the freedom to try things out usually isn't because they're working on important problems or have brand-name cofounders. It's because their boss is an idiot.
Of course, looking for companies without a prayer of success is one good way to select for bosses that are idiots.
Actually, I think the main point - and the most important take away from the entire article is that working at a startup as an employee - whether its a small struggling one, or a superstart that was born with 100k in seed funding, is a better idea than being a minion at a large corporation - if what you want to do in the longer run is be an entrepreneur.
Also regarding failure - the "its okay if you screw up" attitude is not universal, maybe in Silicon Valley, maybe even in the United States in gneneral - but in most of the rest of the world, people unfortunately tend to not let go of failure very easily!
Really depends how the boss acts. If you work at a company with less than 10 people and the founder says "No, you can't do that" and insists on doing it himself, what else are you gonna do?
Of course, you could argue that you're still "doing it wrong" by continuing to work for a company where the boss won't actually let you do your work to the best of your ability. This is a fairly large percentage of small companies, though. It is harder to manage people effectively than it is to found a company.
> Make a mistake at the bottom of the spectrum, and there’s so many people making so many mistakes that it’s unlikely your mistakes will give you a bad reputation. On the other hand, screw up a company with $41mm in funding, and those mistakes are likely to follow you.
No. Totally wrong. Work for a startup that no one has heard of, and they will never care about your successes any more than your failures. Work for an startup with a great team and you'll build relationships that help down the line regardless of how badly the company does. Barring gross incompetence, hardly anyone holds business failure against founders, much less employees.