Adgrok

As someone who works in finance, even a lower grunt than the quants, I basically do programming to build/maintain a high frequency trading platform, I was more interested in your other post on why you didn't like the Wall Street culture and decided to quit.

http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-with-zero-revenue-is-better-than-working-for-goldman-sachs#identifier_3_195

Is it the perceived lower status accorded to the geeks as opposed to the traders/sales-guys? Also likewise for compensation? Or is it the monotonous and/or political nature of the work?

What do you hope to gain by moving to the startup scene? To hopefully make it big and make more money than your former position at GS? Or is it simply to move to an environment where geeks are respected by peers and women?

Plenty of guys in bulge-bracket firms decide to quit their hectic lifestyle but choose the "middle-way." That is, take a job at a 2nd-tier prop shop for less (relative) pay but more reasonable hours and stress. Or some software-dev's go work for a startup for awhile and then transition back and forth to consulting/finance when things don't work out. What made you decide on a "all-or-nothing" kind of move?

These questions aren't meant to be personal interrogations, but rather reflects my feelings about working in finance; and I'm just curious to hear your takes on these issues as well.

Ex-Employee:
http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-with-zero-revenue-is-better-than-working-for-goldman-sachs

"At the risk of getting sued, let me throw you geeks a bone and part the Goldman veil a bit. The Goldman Sachs risk system is called SecDB (securities database), and everything at Goldman that matters is run out of it. The GUI itself looks like a settings screen from DOS 3.0, but no one cares about UI cosmetics on the Street. The language itself was called SLANG (securities language) and was a Python/Perl like thing, with OOP and the ORM layer baked in. Database replication was near-instant, and pushing to production was two keystrokes. You pushed, and London and Tokyo saw the change as fast as your neighbor on the desk did (and yes, if you fucked things up, you got 4AM phone calls from some British dude telling you to fix it). Regtests ran nightly, and no one could trade a model without thorough testing (that might sound like standard practice, but you have no idea how primitive the development culture is on the Street). The whole thing was so good, I didn’t even know what an ORM really was until I started using Rails and had to wrestle with ActiveRecord. The codebase was roughly 15MM lines when I left, and growing. I suspect my retinas are still scarred by the weird color blue SecDB was by default. "

I'm one of the founders of http://AdGrok.com -- we're in the current YC batch. I just turned 40 (one week before demo day!), have a wife (we just celebrated our 16th anniversary), and two kids (8 and 10).

I'd look carefully at your situation. Through this whole experience, my wife has been amazingly supportive -- there were no hesitations on her part as to whether I should go for it or not. She's been just as important for me in keeping the AdGrok ball rolling forward as my co-founders have.

Make sure all parties involved know what they're going into. It's my fourth startup (the second I was a founder in), so she knew I was going to be "heads-down" for a decent duration, frequently coming home after she was asleep (or just sleeping at the office). Make sure she's expecting crazy-long work days. You don't want or need her surprised by anything in a month or two.

I've worked with hundreds of hackers through the years, and there's only one common regret voiced by the older of my hacker friends: it's the soul-tearing sadness of not spending enough time with your kids. Just try to keep that in the back of your mind -- you'll have to try to decide what "enough" means.

Good luck!

as I point out in the other HM #6 thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856078

since the debate PDF is free to download, Cheng Soon didn't make a clickable table of contents for it on the site, but here are links to original articles:

Programming Languages?
http://postabon.posterous.com/why-i-chose-common-lisp-over-python-ruby-and
http://thecleancoder.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-clojure.html

Key Decisions Google Founders Made?
http://www.quora.com/What-were-the-4-or-5-key-decisions-that-Larry-Page-and-Sergey-Brin-made-in-the-early-days-of-Google
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502765

New York or San Francisco?
http://adgrok.com/new-york-will-always-be-a-tech-backwater-i-dont-care-what-chris-dixon-or-ron-conway-or-paul-graham-say
http://kellysutton.tumblr.com/post/901431677/choosing-new-york-over-san-francisco

Git or Mercurial?
http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/still-hatin-on-git-now-with-added-actual-reasons/
http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/13/common-git-workflows/
http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/05/why-i-switched-to-git-from-mercurial.html

Author here. It's not ass-kissing, it's a genuine compliment -- Antonio is a good writer.

Also, I think his success with the blog posts is instructive. Antonio freely admits that he's writing "linkbait blog posts to get us free PR" (http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-with-zero-revenue-is-better-than-working-for-goldman-sachs). I wouldn't advise trying this unless you have something genuinely engaging to say. But you have to admit it's an inventive, low-cost way to get your startup off the ground.