localcrisis (u/localcrisis)

localcrisis commented on Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer? brex.com/support/why-am-i... · Posted by u/tvjames

duped · 4 years ago

How do you distinguish between a tech startup and small business?

Not to doxx anyone but I'm familiar enough with the financials of several businesses that would call themselves either depending on the context, and the only meaningful distinction I can think of is venture funding

localcrisis · 4 years ago

bank account. tech startups have huge balances compared to lifetime

localcrisis commented on Introducing a16z START a16z.com/2022/04/18/intro... · Posted by u/picture

nharada · 4 years ago

Can anyone who has applied or completed YC in the last couple of years speak to the class sizes? The idea of a much smaller cohort is attractive, but not sure if YC has felt large?

Ideally would also like to hear from people who didn't get in or decided not to go through the program, since I recognize that asking for YC founder's opinions on a forum paid for by YC is not a neutral location :)

localcrisis · 4 years ago

I was in YC >5 years ago when batches were in person and in the large-two-digit range. The experience of YC is completely different. The class sizes are in the hundreds and many times I've spoken to founders who didn't know another company in their batch existed.

It's a highly optimized assembly line for getting a company to give a 1 minute pitch. They said they'd never do remote, for good reason, then (understandably) flipped when the pandemic happened. But the downsides of remote didn't disappear when covid appeared...

This doesn't mean that founders don't love YC or that it's not worth it. It doesn't mean that parts of YC haven't gotten better over time. Again, highly optimized. It doesn't mean YC isn't a huge boon to your company's reputation.

But if you're looking for small, focused mentorship then YC is no longer the same place.

localcrisis commented on On Leaving Facebook frantic.im/leaving-facebo... · Posted by u/earthboundkid

pm90 · 4 years ago

Why would you need several offers if the new job will be paying less than your current position? Can’t you just tell them how much you make and ask them to match that in equity?

localcrisis · 4 years ago

You can, but when you're making that much above what a series A or B company pays, it's not a useful number. Having multiple offers that are comparable is what matters. A company can go ±5% but it's not like they offer you $180k and you give them your $800k Facebook total comp then they're like, "oh, I guess we'll give you $800k then."

localcrisis commented on On Leaving Facebook frantic.im/leaving-facebo... · Posted by u/earthboundkid

localcrisis · 4 years ago

> I also talked to a few fintech companies. I entered the discussions with pre-existing biases that these places are stressfull, not innovative but well paying. The conversations confirmed these biases (except the salaries, which were lower than I expected).

That's interesting. I wonder which companies these are?

localcrisis commented on Rethinking Triplebyte triplebyte.com/blog/rethi... · Posted by u/Harj

cinquemb · 5 years ago

in the comments:

dev)

> I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree.

employee at Triplebyte)

> To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most common one!).

So there 1000 job matches and at most (("hundreds of thousands of engineers on our platform" / 3) - 1000) who were incentivized to answer these contrived problems, did so correctly and still couldn't be matched.

So even among the large pool of engineers who have gone thru the process, met some arbitrary threshold of engineer-ness, there's still a huge mismatch between corporate/prospective employee expectations, that I'm not sure will be able to be overcome quickly even with these new initiatives, but it's interesting that they are being pursed now (not surprisingly after the shift in working environment after massive government restrictions on freedom uber alles).

localcrisis · 5 years ago

I agree. We tried using TripleByte for hiring but what they screen for and what matters are entirely different. A founder we knew got an angry missive from one of the TripleByte founders because they’d rejected candidates during a final culture screen. Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!

localcrisis commented on Rethinking Triplebyte triplebyte.com/blog/rethi... · Posted by u/Harj

ctvo · 5 years ago

I can't remember the last time I was ghosted. The problems you listed aren't problems that I experience. I don't care what part of my resume recruiters look at. I don't care what they do with it.

Sure, having metrics on how often a company ships code, etc. would be helpful, but frankly I have about 10 companies on my list that I'd work for, and I doubt any of them would give you this data.

What I'd really like is not having to practice leet code problems for 3 months before I interview. The older I get, the less motivated I am to do this. I've worked in senior engineering roles at big tech (FANG) with 3+ years tenure. I don't think I managed to not be able to do my job and fooled people for that long.

I've interviewed people I KNOW could do the job, but they didn't get the optimal solution, or were nervous, or N things in the loop, and we ended up not hiring them. There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives.

localcrisis · 5 years ago

I have had this exact experience with Triplebyte both as an engineer and as a hiring manager.

I simply do not care about things like, “what does malloc return”. I do not care what people know about bloom filters in Postgres. The 99.99% of web developers don’t have to know these things. I do not care if you can implement Tic-Tac-Toe.

It’s poor interviewing, which is the entire product they’ve been offering.

localcrisis commented on My startup journey johnjianwang.medium.com/m... · Posted by u/mkx

itsmemattchung · 5 years ago

> Just before launch date, we stayed up the entire night fixing polish items. I remember going to sleep in a phone booth and waking up early in the morning to try to finish out some last edits while Michelle worked on the blog post

God damn, I'm old. That start up scene used to sound appealing to me but now makes me cringe.

localcrisis · 5 years ago

Not to mention the preceding paragraph:

> When I started at Stripe, I asked to delay my start date until after a family vacation, but my manager just told me to start sooner and take time off later (Stripe was just shy of 100 employees and moving incredibly quickly). I now had an artificial deadline of one month to ship my first project.

That’s a reasonably sized red flag. Asking someone to miss a family vacation so they can go after some arbitrary deadline?

Yikes.

localcrisis commented on Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project intuitiveexplanations.com... · Posted by u/raxod502

marcinzm · 5 years ago

I've seen multiple tweets from you the last day regarding this where you definitely showed no regret and simply kept trying to prove you were in the right. Even this response tries to make people feel bad for you and divert empathy away from the person you attacked. And also implies the only reason you are relenting is because it's making the company you represent look bad.

So apologies are good but this seems the weakest sort of apology possible.

localcrisis · 5 years ago

His reply is after hours upon hours of getting torn apart for doubling, tripling, twenty-times-ing down on his power trip.

And he still believes that some ethical line was crossed.

localcrisis commented on Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project intuitiveexplanations.com... · Posted by u/raxod502

CheezeIt · 5 years ago

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a competing company or open source when it comes to the question of whether IP got stolen, unless you want to make a novel fair use argument.

localcrisis · 5 years ago

What IP was stolen? The idea of running code from a web editor? The _button placement_?

There’s nothing here that says he’s stolen code or any IP. The CEO doesn’t even claim that he’s stolen real IP. Everything that’s similar is public knowledge and the burden of proof is to point out what’s been stolen.

Which the CEO could! Because the work was open sourced. So he could reply and say, “hey, you implemented this part in a way that is in code you worked on. It’s also a pretty atypical solution to this problem, so it seems reasonable that you took that from us.”

He doesn’t.

Instead, he gets insecure that a kid implemented a similar product in a couple days and decides to rail on him, then offer a half-apology well after it has blown up.

localcrisis commented on VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality thebolditalic.com/vcs-hav... · Posted by u/gammarator

anotherfounder · 6 years ago

I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names!

As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least interested in that aspect (Hi Spero Ventures!) All of that, along with a healthy dose of rudeness.

In our experience, those at the very very top of the totem pole gave us the fairest chance, and those below them, were the very worst. In the end, it was hard no to feel that an investor's Twitter persona was a sham, in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler.

FWIW, I know my experience was not alone. There are tons of now well-funded female founders who will echo this sentiment. I just wish there was a way to have a public list of those who walk the talk and those who just tweet the walk..

EDIT: Adding something from thread below to focus more on solutions, and providing perspective on why what is happening is not enough.

>...What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?

> Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.

localcrisis · 6 years ago

had the same experience with Aileen.

Many VCs, founders, and DNI leaders have echoed that All Raise is primarily a way for VCs to improve their personal brand around women in tech. They don't make investments, don't run substantial programs, and spend much of their time/money on PR.

If these VCs were serious, they would commit X% of investments or X% of investment dollars to the groups they publicly support in panel after panel after tweet after TechCrunch interview.