zlacker

>>sandsl+(OP)
I'm sure this will get downvoted into oblivion, but why should I or other engineers/entrepreneurs look at Sam Altman as a massive startup success story when his lone startup Loopt never really achieved product-market fit, and ended up in a firesale?

Across 5 funding rounds, Crunchbase lists Loopt as having raised $39 million and then was acquired (acqui-hired?) for $43 million. He didn't create any multiples of value for his investors. Loopt wasn't a breakout hit like so many other YC startups have been. It was certainly one of the first interesting location-based apps in the App Store, but soon was surrounded by other location-based apps and never really appeared to surface and gain traction.

Obviously Sam runs YC now and has dramatically improved it, but in the lens of being an entrepreneur, isn't he still essentially unproven, and not a success story in the startup world?

>>flyosi+ib
While we're at it, how about Mark Cuban? Did Broadcast.com ever work past a basic stage? Did it ever have huge, if any, positive revenues? It really sounds like he bought a domain name and fucked around a little with html and won big in the dotcom craze.

A lot of "heroes" in this world are fairly fraudulent. Worse, some went from young tech luminaries to older VC sharks with questionable ethics like Mark Andreeson.

I think coding and tech, in general, is mostly a meritocracy, but on the business end its practically the lottery. Right time, right place and other luck of the draws determine financial success just as much as the merit of the product, if not more so.

>>drzaiu+Tb
There's yet another kind of startup founder, who merely starts a successful company that makes millions of dollars per year and is still in business almost a decade later. The company doesn't fail, but it doesn't have a huge blow-out liquidity event, either. The founder remains heads-down, in the trenches, with no interest in going the VC route. Regardless, they're in a boring B2B niche, so you'll never read about them.

>>hugs+0k
So much more likely to succeed and so much less likely to make $100M. Definitely the surest path to $5-10M near the end of your career. If you only want <$5M perhaps being a corporate VP would be more optimal risk adjusted. This is my strong preference, I just wish there were more of a culture of that here. It could be the fact that this is a start-up forum but sustainable B2B niche business is really interesting and provides good opportunities to create wealth and do impactful work. It is merely less interesting to investors with large overhead and expectations. So it makes sense investors go big.

>>nibs+Cy
The problem with that approach is that getting a high level VP position at a non-trivial sized company is pretty competitive and there are only so many open slots to go around. It also requires a strict career plan and the ability to play office politics very well, which I think most techies struggle with.

Being the guy who sells a small app, service, or utility on the side and clearing $150k a year, or more, via mostly passive income is a much easier trick to pull off. Also this approach can come with a sweetheart acquisition deal from a larger company that wants your product and can run in the millions, on top of what you've earned already.