Why should you join a startup if the probabilities are not in your favor?
Startup L. Jackson writes a great note as always.
Mr. Mehta does an excellent summary.
And then there is this article
And they capture the essence of the theory, joining a startup is a lifestyle choice and an opportunity to short-circuit the career advancement ladder. Or a way to learn new skills.
I joined Zynga because I wanted to work on hyper-scale infrastructure. And I got that opportunity in spades.
Without going into it, into too much detail, I lead a web-property, built out a 200 person dev-ops function, had a team that delivered many products that were used to operate games. And under my watch, we had less than 30 minutes of planned down time and delivered over 4 9’s of infrastructure availability. And got to build out a 3rd party API platform and kicked started an effort to create a gaming optimized mobile programming language
And I met a whole bunch of amazing people who are friends.
You don’t get that kind of crazy experience in 4 years at a large company. And I made the choice to go to Zynga to learn and I got that.
And this might make the backers of these deals happy that the employees got a first class education, and it doesn’t change the reality that there is something fishy with those deals.
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