Leo Polovets, a former engineer turned venture capitalist, writes about startup risk, strategy, timing, and data on startups.
Commenters recommend his startup de-risking guide, and one credits his blog with helping build a name when moving from coding to venture capital.
I've found it very worthwhile to have a blog (https://www.codingvc.com/). Some of the benefits:
* My blog helped me differentiate myself and build a name for myself when I shifted from coding to venture capital. For context, I had no VC network at all when I got into the business, but a few good posts led to cold emails from strong VCs and founders, and a higher response rate to my own cold emails and twitter DMs. My gut feeling is that the less differentiated your skills are or the harder it is to stand out in your field, the more value there is in something like a blog or podcast or twitter presence.
* A blog sharpens your business sense: you start thinking about marketing, SEO, growing your readership, monetization, etc. It can be a mini startup if you want it to be.
* The great 1:1 connections that resulted from blog posts cannot be understated. Each post is like a bat signal: "here's how I think about some topic, and if you like my thoughts or like thinking about this topic, then maybe you should reach out." This leads to connections with people whose interests align with yours.
* Posts take a lot of time to write, but in the long run they often "pay that time back." For example, if someone asks me about equity comp benchmarks for early startup employees [1], or how VCs spend their time [2], or how to prioritize effort between funding rounds [3], I often just send them a link to a relevant blog post instead of creating a one-off answer each time. If I get a question…
Why don't we look for some concrete information?
According to the statistics reported by https://www.codingvc.com/which-technologies-do-startups-use-an-exploration-of-angellist-data/, Java looks like the fourth most commonly used language in the startup world, and its usage is not particularly well correlated with success.
Both Ruby and Python are more popular than Java, AND are better correlated with how good the company is. Your odds of being in a successful startup are improved if you are in those languages INSTEAD OF Java.
What about from the individual programmer level? Triplebyte did an article about how programming language and hiring statistics correlate. My impression is that their programmers are mostly being hired into relatively good startups, so it is a pretty good view of the startup world. That article is at https://triplebyte.com/blog/technical-interview-performance-by-editor-os-language.
Long story short, Java was the #2 language that programmers chose. Behind Python. Not so bad. But choosing Java REDUCED your odds by 23% of actually getting to a job interview. And for those got to a job interview, it reduced your odds by 31% of actually getting hired. By contrast Python IMPROVED those same odds by 11% and 18% respectively.
Apparently the startup world doesn't like Java developers either. You'd be far better off with Python.
Now I'm sure that you can trot out every successful Java startup out there. And there will be quite a few. But based…
I really liked this blog post from Leo Polovets for measuring the overall risk of a startup.[0]
Maybe in the same vein you could do it for cofounders? De-risk yourself by picking a cofounder that you know well and will be helpful. It's definitely not perfect but maybe this will help...
If you pick someone that you know well, you'll be a better judge of whether you'll have work conflicts later. I'm not a fan of working on a project together to test your chemistry. It's still a big gamble if you do that. People are too nice.
Your cofounder judgment ability:
- random person
- acquaintance
- previous co-worker
- friend
- family
You could draw up the major roles that you'll need to take on for the early stage part of the startup (UX, sales, engineering, design, marketing, management, fund raising, etc.). When picking a partner try to optimize for filling as many of the roles as possible. It helps if they have a different background but I think proven skills are more important.
Cofounder skill balance:
- they're me and we do all the same stuff
- same skills but different background
- they know some other skills but together there are still many gaps
- together you cover most skill gaps and have different backgrounds
- they know enough of what you don't that together you'll cover all the skill gaps
From the roles you laid out, how much experience do they have with each? Add up the points 1-5 for each job to get an idea of how likely they are to be good at their…
Tactical steps YC startups have taken to jump through any one of the de-risking steps: https://codingvc.com/how-to-de-risk-a-startup/ would be fantastic. Especially stories of creative jumps. You could do a poll of the YC network internally and have people share stories that then get mentioned per-problem or per-industry over time. A discussion underneath could allow others to share stories as well - beyond the YC network (that may allow you guys to spot interesting potential applicants and keep people engaged).
Generic advice is abundant and far less helpful. Individual founders could do episodes as well, but it's hard to be genuine and talk about the hard stuff when your startup's identity is affected - especially in front of customers and investors.
By focusing on a problem - the contributing founders can chose to get credit or stay anonymous with their answers. You could also do an episode on just cool "Tell us about a time when you've hacked a non-computer system." answers and it would be a great listen.
Read Leo Polovets' startup de-risking guide and start de-risking your startup.
https://www.codingvc.com/how-to-de-risk-a-startup
Also, talk to a lawyer immediately and make sure you have clear ownership given your employment elsewhere in the same industry.
What worked for me: build a savings account so I could take a year off work and a significantly reduced salary for years afterwards. Accept the required lifestyle compromises.
Also, you should be super clear about who your buyer is, pricing, and if you do sales or not. None of these have a wrong answer, but they all lead to different companies.
Here are a couple of articles that might help with regards to calculating your equity payout:
https://codingvc.com/valuing-employee-options
https://medium.com/@jamesseely/eshares-option-value-calculator-edc20c211cbf
I'd also really encourage you to talk to the founders of the company about this and ask them to walk you through their model for how much you should value your equity.
Our advice to founders is to walk every employee through a model that estimates the value of their options under different scenarios.