I don't know you personally, but am trying to understand your perspective and tone, which is extremely negative. I read the whole comment I'm replying to, and also another blog post that you linked in another reply here, titled "Don't waste your time in a crappy startup."

In that post you write:

1.

> "The most credible appeal of working at a startup is the opportunity to learn a lot, and one can, it’s not a guarantee"

For me, it is quite clear what "a lot" might mean, but could you clear it up? For me, a startup is in the business of executing on market opportunities to create equity value far in excess of the value that can be attained by the same resources allocated elsewhere. For example: someone around here said that he couldn't fathom how Twitter could possibly employ 1000 engineers! That is way too many. But Twitter has a market value of around $31B. So in effect, the per-engineer market cap of Twitter is $31M. That would be an example of utilizing resources in a way to execute on an opportunity. How this is done would be what you "learn", by seeing it done in practice. Is this what you mean? Or did you mean something else.

2.

When instead, you are among the first people to join a company, the opportunity is even more clear: if you see an opportunity by yourself, you can spend $50-$150/hour, whatever your personal salary equivalent, and personally code up a solution to it, owning 100% of the resulting value that you build. In other words, you can build a $1M company for $300K in personal labor, and would do so as a 1-person startup. If you lacked some skills, you would only contribute your part of that share, while someone contributed other parts.

This seems to me the essence of a startup. However, it seems you don't share this perspective in the least? You say in one part of your comment "not fucking de-risked at all." But 'de-risked' would mean that we no longer match the definition of a startup - as we are no longer utilizing resources to generate value far in excess of what the resources can generate elsewhere. In effect, we are utilizing the resources (in a "de-risked" context) as a commodity. So, it would be an example of NOT being a startup - like working at a cashier at a 2 year old business. Just because it's only 2 years old, doesn't make it a startup. It doesn't really matter if the business is 2 years old, 20, or 200 - there is no real difference if you are working as a cashier, and if the 2 year old business closes you would just work somewhere else. Cashiers are examples of labor used as a commodity (I say this as someone who has been one in high school), rather than stake-holders in executing on a market opportunity to build value in excess of the commodity value of the labor.

3.

I would also like to ask about the following:

>I lost about $300k (opportunity cost) bootstrapping a startup over almost 3 years.

Do you simply mean, that these are the wages that you would have earned at the commodity value of your technical labor in the larger market?

Personally, the first time I read this sentence in your comment, I thought $300K was very low for 3 years - because I misread it. I thought you were saying that, because the startup chose not to take VC funding, the startup missed its chance to execute on a market opportunity, by being undercapitalized to do so: in other words, that the market opportunity the startup lost was worth (only) $300K. This would be the normal way to think about a startup's "opportunity cost" in continuing to bootstrap. If you were approaching it as a stakeholder in this process.

Please don't misunderstand me, I am trying to understand your perspective. As you reflect on my personal definition of a startup, would you agree that you do not really have an interest in using your labor in this way? For example, it sounds like you haven't tried to personally execute on market opportunities all by yourself without any cofounders: would you do so, if you happened to identify one? Why or why not?

I am simply trying to understand your perspective, please don't take this the wrong way. It sounds like, in contrast with most readers here, you are more interested in using your labor at its commodity price-value, rather than to execute on an opportunity in excess of its commodity-value. To use an analogy: if you were a construction contractor, you would prefer to dig foundations and help build houses for other people who are building them as new constructions for sale, while being paid at a fair market value for that construction work: but you would not build your own house to sell, for free, using the same labor. That is just outside of your interests. (This is the analogy, since clearly a real estate construction company wouldn't build a house if the commodity price of the construction costs exceeded what it will sell for when it's finished.)

Is this true? If not, please don't jump at me for misunderstanding you. I am trying my best. Perhaps it is possible though that you are just not interested in working with startups, irrespective of compensation. i.e. even if you were a millionaire from a startup, you would have preferred to have done work under more certain terms for the same financial result, rather than by participating in the business the startup is in. Is this true?

I don't mean to offend you in any way. I am just trying to understrand your perspective here. If you could elaborate on the above points it would help me to understand your perspective. I am open to your experiences.