Teen Battling Down Syndrome is a Successful Entrepreneur Fighting Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://cameronkeng.com/teenager-battling-down-syndrome-is-a-successful-entrepreneurs-fighting-piracy/

<comment><USER2> > I actually didn't realize that he was handicapped at first glance, so I > lowered my head and walked a little faster hoping he wouldn't bother me.

> I thought that Jimmy was just another guy on the street wheeling and > dealing!

He is. Isn't the only difference that he's got a higher hurdle to clear?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not trying to say that he's any less of a person. I meant that I didn't even notice him being different at first and it was something I only realized after interacting with him on a personal level.

More than anything I thought it was inspiring meeting him because he's done better than most of us who have it easier.</comment></comment>


Talk to Voxli (YC W09) for YC interviews - <AUTHOR>

Hey YC applicants,<p>We are going to hang out in voxli.com/hackernews this Monday in the afternoon (~3-6 pm PST, 4/13).  We'll be happy to answer questions about the interview / attempt to give advice. If you're not applying, feel free to come by and chat but applicants will have priority! <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone - unfortunately we had an important meeting scheduled right over this time today so we're going to have to cancel this. I don't know if we'll be able to reschedule but feel free to email me with questions (email in HN profile)!</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to recruit developers during a conference? - <AUTHOR> We are platinum sponsors in a major software developer conference, which means we have unlimited freedom (and for the sake of argument, budget) in order to come up with ideas to approach candidates during the conference.
What is the best way to recruit developers during a conference, approach them or get ourselves noticed? Put up banners next to the main stage saying We're hiring? Having girls in costumes walking around scanning badges? Setting up a kiosk and inviting people in for interviews on the spot?
I am looking for original and effective ideas to make the best of the event. <comment><USER2> From a developers perspective, if I'm not actively looking for a job I almost never want to talk to companies that are trying to recruit. The one time where I actually went out of my way to talk to a company was when they held their own event. They rented a space with an open bar and brought their engineers with them. You could just go hang out and talk with the engineers and see what kind of stuff they worked on what not and it was a great way for us to vet the company and decide whether or not we could see ourselves on the team.

</comment><comment><USER3> Swag is always good. Stickers are a given.

One conference I attended had a company handing out cards with a puzzle on it (encoded message). Decode the message and email it to them and they tell you to drop by their booth for a free t-shirt. Clever way of collecting email addresses for recruiting and they mention that they're hiring when you get the shirt. They never did spam me via email, so I didn't think it was too intrusive.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you say swag, can you give 1-2 examples in mind?

The puzzle card sounds a great idea. Do you remember roughly what the puzzle was?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Accessible W3C conform es6 JavaScript accordion - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oncode/handorgel <comment><AUTHOR> The demo can be found here: [https://oncode.github.io/handorgel/](https://oncode.github.io/handorgel/)

Features: \- ARIA accessible \- Keyboard interaction \- Animated collapsing \- Fully customizable via CSS \- No external dependencies \- Lightweight (~3.5kb minified and gziped)</comment>


Mozilla could end losing big time - <AUTHOR> https://techpinions.com/is-firefox-search-worth-375myear-to-a-yahoo-buyer/45144 <comment><AUTHOR> Yahoo deal could end for Mozilla losing big time if it would be cancelled</comment>


Introduction to Photoshop Generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.leebrimelow.com/introduction-to-photoshop-generator/ <comment><USER2> So what exactly could one develop with this? Not sure I understand the use case.</comment>


Vote on Amash amendment to defund NSA domestic call data collection - <AUTHOR>

The latest news is that a vote on the Amash amendment (#100), which would remove funding for the NSA's collection of US phone records, is due to happen this afternoon.
This the first vote in Congress on the NSA's surveillance programs.
As a result, every House representative will have to go on the record either voting for, against, or abstaining. The number of votes for the amendment (and abstaining) will set a strong precedent for future conversations.
You can watch the debate and the voting happen live here: http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN/
And if you haven't yet, now is a good time to call your representatives to tell them you want the amendment to pass. Calling takes just a couple of minutes: http://DefundTheNSA.com <comment><USER2> This vote is happening _today_ , wednesday July 24th, so if you believe that this is an important issue, please upvote this thread so people will be aware and actually make the calls. Congress is surprisingly responsive to such calls, so there's a chance that we could actually have some impact.</comment>


Ask HN: Feeling lost and defeated. Need career advice. - <AUTHOR>

Background: I graduated last May, and started working for a BigCo. I've only been there 6 months, and I've been less than impressed with my experience so far. At the BigCo, I'm in a 2-year program that consists of 4 six-month cycles where I'm placed in different divisions of the company. For my first one, I'm doing development, but my background is in marketing and design. Here are my questions:
- For the first six-month cycle, I'm unable to get any work done. I just don't enjoy coding, and there's a real possibility that I won't finish my project. How should I approach this? I've got about a month left, and I think I can get about 50-60% of it done. In college, not finishing isn't that big of deal since you get do-overs, but how bad is it in real life? And what can I do if I don't finish? How should I approach this with my manager? Should I be worried about getting let go before the 2nd cycle starts?
- Is it too early to switch jobs? I've interned at smaller companies, and my experience so far has shown me I'm not meant for a big company. But how bad does it look if I switch after only 6 months? If you're a startup founder, would you question someone's loyalty if they switch jobs after only 6 months?
- How do I approach smaller companies if I want to work in business / product / design / marketing related roles? Most job positions I see say they require 2-3 years of experience. I did stuff besides my classes in college - fundraisers (raised $3500+), conferences (400+ people) etc. and I know I can get shit done. Even if I stay at BigCo, I doubt I'll have any real experiences that can apply to smaller companies.
Thanks! [I contribute to HN using another username, using a throwaway account because some of my colleagues could be regular readers] <comment><USER5> If you are not able to finish your project on time, you need to tell your manager as soon as possible. You may not have the experience to get it done, and that is fine in my opinion, but if there are deadlines, your manager needs to know sooner than later for damage control. As you said, there are possible do-overs when in college, but you need to do what you can to make a project succeed, even if that means admitting failure - it's a life lesson, failure should be acceptable, just make sure that your own failure doesn't affect others.

You are almost at the end of your coding stint cycle - is the next six-month cycle more along your lines of what you want to do? If not, then I would look for something else. You have a goal of what you want to accomplish, and working on something that isn't even your field does not make sense for your future.

I'm not a startup founder, but I do at times question when people have tons of short stint jobs - but if it's only one, then no big deal - a history of short stints here and there can raise concern, but even then it won't be an ultimate deciding factor when I choose to hire someone.

Make sure your resume reflects your additional activities while in college - they may not be as necessary on there when you have more of a job history, but when you are first starting your resume, you want your potential employer to know what you are capable of - and this will get you callbacks where you can go in to more detail.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice Elliot. Throughout the process, I've been open about my technical skills with my manager, but he keeps saying he has full confidence I can get it done; without any real advice. Luckily, its more of an independent internal project that replaces a process that's more manual right now, so it doesn't affect anything else.

Yes, the next cycle is more related to what I do, but I don't want to get a reputation as someone who can't get stuff done; it's just that I feel 6 months is not enough time to learn a completely new language, especially when it took 3 months just to figure out the project requirements.

<comment><USER5> It's not necessarily your fault if you can't get it done in time - you were thrown in to a position you weren't familiar with - though I stand by the fact that you should tell your manager you are in need of help with it - <USER2> it's internal or not. It will show that you are able to handle a project even when it has potential to fail, which is a real world scenario - it's just as important of a skill as being able to get stuff done.

If you feel that BigCo, and companies of that size are really not your thing, then you need to do what will make you happy. It's a fact that you will at times have to do work you will not like, that's just life, but if you are sure that the larger company environment is not for you, which is fine - it's not for everyone, then you need to make a decision... if you feel that your lack of experience will hamper your progress though, then it might be in your best interest to wait it out and gain that experience at BigCo which hopefully is a big name that will look good on the resume. This is a big decision, make sure you read mine and everyone elses advice and really contemplate what you will be doing - even if it's early in your career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First, you don't realize how lucky you are: there are thousands of posts across the web about people complaining that their employers give them no training at all and you're basically getting 2 years of "apprenticeship" training right off the bat.

 _Make the most of it. It will never happen again!_ This is old-skool training and more companies should be doing it.

Second, your manager needs to know ASAP that you can't finish. Whatever the consequences of not finishing are, they will be much worse if it's a surprise to him at the deadline. Just walk into his office and TELL HIM. Don't sugarcoat it, just explain what's going on. I've had to deal with exactly this situation in the past month. It happens, we deal with it.

People not being able to do the work isn't new to any experienced manager, he'll figure something out: that's his job. Yours is to keep him up to date.

How bad is it in real life? In real life, not finishing a project on time can be the end of a company. I sincerely doubt you are doing anything that crucial, but you asked. _Things get a lot more important when people are paying you to do them_ We all do shit that we "just don't enjoy" but we're paid to do them well anyway. It's not like they expect you to do this for the rest of your time there.

Don't switch jobs unless you are otherwise a _fantastic_ candidate and you can come up with an amazing excuse in the interview for why you only lasted 6 months. And it had better be along the lines of "the boss beat me daily with a stick because I wouldn't wash his car." No, I'm not kidding.

What college did you go to that you got "do-overs?" Friggin' lucky. If we were late on an assignment, it was an automatic 50% off and got worse with each passing day (sometimes hourly).

This isn't a rant, and I'm not picking on you. I read inexperience in your post and I think you have a great opportunity you're about to throw away. Think carefully before you do.

<comment><USER5>
        Don't switch jobs unless you are otherwise a fantastic candidate and you can come up with an amazing excuse in the interview for why you only lasted 6 months. And it had better be along the lines of "the boss beat me daily with a stick because I wouldn't wash his car." No, I'm not kidding.

I completely disagree with this statement - a job needs to go both ways, and just like some companies will make the wrong decision in the hiring process, a job applicant will make the wrong decision in which job to accept. It happens. Just don't make it a pattern - because then it's an issue.

<comment><USER6> It's perfectly reasonable to leave a job after six months. Hell, it's reasonable to leave after the first day if you can see that life is going to suck.

But in real life, the next person to interview you will want to know why you left so soon. If your answer is along the lines of "I was being rotated through different departments for training and I didn't like the first rotation" that person will probably not hire you, expecting that you'll leave the first time things don't go your way.

You are correct that an applicant can make the wrong decision, but that's not what matters. What matters is how he responds to making that decision.

<comment><USER5> If the company is rotating him to positions that aren't his line of work, or what he studied for then I think it's a perfectly reasonable reason - <USER3> should be prepared to explain it more than "I didn't like it" - because that would be an issue, but otherwise I don't see the harm. In the end he needs to be sure that he is making the right choice in leaving and deal with the consequences if it's the wrong decision - or possibly be happier else where if it's the right decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I mentioned previously, the 2nd cycle is more along the lines of what I studied for. More than that, I think I realize that I'm not meant for a BigCo and startups want a certain level of experience, and rightly so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consider the coding project at work an investment in yourself. You're right, this isn't college anymore. Your performance at work and in groups directly affects your co-workers perception of you. Sure, if you truly hate the place then you probably won't care, but people are very good at detecting when other people truly dislike their job. This has a full circle impact. Getting yourself into this mentality will only make your experiences at that company less enjoyable for all the wrong reasons. If you actually cannot handle the task that you have been assigned, then speak up. Tell your project manager how you feel. Somewhere along the way you obviously gave them the impression that you were fine with the programming tasks, so they most likely are just not aware of your feelings towards programming. I would just advise against "giving up" and subconsciously forcing yourself out of that position or company.

And of course you can always change jobs. If you dislike this company and can already tell that the big corporate life style isn't your thing then start looking for new jobs. Too early to switch jobs? I'd rather find one that I like now instead of 5 years from now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was open about my previous experience when I started; I told them first-day that I have limited coding experience, and had not used the language they wanted me to develop in.

In terms of switching jobs - I'm worried about appearing disloyal, and how it will look on my resume down the line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why you're in a development position when you know you don't like it. And you're working for BigCo when you don't like it.

Don't worry too much about switching after six months at this point. You just graduated and you're finding your place in the world. Explain yourself as you've done here, and don't make it a long-term pattern. The best way not to make it a long-term pattern is to find the kind of company you want to work for, doing work you like and are good at.

As for how to get in somewhere... I had heard that if you really wanted to work somewhere then you should let them know, and also follow up. Once I picked a place that I wanted to work and I applied. They turned me down, saying there were no openings (I just cold applied, not in response to a job listing). Every few weeks I checked back with them. Yes, they hired me. ;-) I only did this once, but that makes my success rate 100%. YMMV.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds awesome dwc, I'm definitely with you on the power of persistence. Thanks for responding :)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're coming to the end of your cycle at the end of this month why are you thinking about leaving anyway - why not see how you find the next placement before you make any decisions?

Talk to your manager and explain that you're not going to make the deadline, you're not going to be the first person to have missed a deadline and I doubt you'll be the last. It's highly unlikely that you'll get fired.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for replying Imran. I'm definitely going to wait to see how I like the second placement, but I was worried about how companies generally deal with < 100% success with deliverables.

<comment><USER10> Projects going over schedule are, uh, not exactly an uncommon occurrence. In fact if you've been honest with your manager about your level of skill (as you said in another comment) and assuming you've been keeping him up to date with progress and he hasn't done anything to get the project back on track (like getting you a mentor to work with), then it's really more his responsibility than yours if you don't finish. (That's not to say he's doing it wrong - <USER4> may be a deliberate strategy on his part; it's obviously not a life-or-death project.)

On the other hand, if you wait until the last day before announcing that you're only 60% done, that _is_ your responsibility. Don't be that guy. You should be talking to your manager now about how far along you are and what is an achievable state to leave the project in for somebody else to pick up (actually you should have started this some time back if you haven't already). e.g. you mentioned a lot of work went into gathering requirements - if you are not going to finish the project then that work probably needs to be captured.

Communication is the key, and that's got nothing to do with whether you're doing coding or marketing. Nobody is going to make any inferences about your marketing abilities from your coding abilities or vice-versa, but if you prove yourself incapable of communicating with your team in either placement then, well, that would be the time to start getting worried.

Failure is not always bad, but trying to cover up failure always leads to very, very bad things and it never, ever works. Remember that and you'll be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You are raising two distinct issues. First, a situation in which you cannot finish your project on time. Second, the fact that the job/company does not meet your expectations.

Before doing anything about the second point, deal with the first. Normally managers should only assign tasks that are possible, relative both to the timeframe and to your skillset. If you have the right skills and enough time, then you should do whatever it takes to finish, even in your own time, otherwise your self-confidence will suffer. If the time is too tight and/or you do not have the necessary skills/experience/training to do the job, then raise the issue with the manager more forcefully and asap. Repeat your message in an e-mail so that your complaint is officially registered and acknowledged. If there is a mismatch between the job description, as spelled out in your contract, and your actual work, this is also a legitimate issue.

Once the first problem is out of the way, and you are again feeling comfortable at work, deal with the second issue. It is always legitimate to seek better work. The best way to switch jobs is to find a new job while still holding the old job. It is a catch-22 fact of life that no-one likes to give a job to someone who does not have one. Also, you will be in a much stronger negotiating position if you are still receiving a salary. When you go to an interview, argue along the lines that the job is going fine (do _not_ criticize your old company/manager) and everyone is happy with your performance, but that you feel you need more challenge/less routine/a better fit to your skillset/a smaller environment etc.

Good luck. Starting out in the world of employment is always a difficult time in life. Things will work out.

</comment><comment><USER12> About switching jobs - 2 great articles from Mark Suster's 'Both sides of the table:

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/22/never-hire- job...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/22/never-hire-job-hoppers- never-they-make-terrible-employees/)

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/25/job-hoppers- re...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/25/job-hoppers-redux-an- employees-perspective/)</comment>


Agda by Example: Sorting - <AUTHOR> http://mazzo.li/posts/AgdaSort.html <comment><USER2> Learning Agda has quite an academic feeling to it, not because it's not widely used, but because the ressources are so scattered around, often out of scope for beginners, and so on.

For that reason, I really appreciate these "let's do a simple task with no prerequisites" kind of posts about it. It shows me (and probably many other Haskellers, functional programmers, programmers) that simple problems are manageable, and provide plenty of catchwords to read up on. Thanks for that!

</comment><comment><USER3> Does Agda provide tools for program extraction? I'm curious where the state of the art is for using proof checkers/dependently typed programming languages to derive correct-by-construction programs in lower-level languages like C.

<comment><USER4> Agda has a compiler that can extract Haskell or JavaScript, yes. But Agda doesn't seem to be very heavily used for this purposes - Coq on the other hand seems to have very mature extraction capabilities for Haskell/OCaml/Scheme and has been used quite a bit for this purpose.

You could also of course use Idris, which directly compiles to executables.

<comment><USER5> Or ATS, which compiles to C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find this stuff really interesting! I'm curious though, how much is Agda suited to prototyping and the like? Do all of these layers of proofs and definitions build up a foundation which eventually allows you to program "like normal", or does pretty much everything come down to writing a ton of proofs, which seems like it would be academically interesting but burdensome for real- world applications? Does Agda encourage modularity and abstraction as much as Haskell does? More so?

Also does Agda have any support for mutation? How does it deal with IO?

<comment><USER7> I use Agda for prototyping all the time, but the things I'm prototyping are typically type-astronautics, etc. It's easier to build something in a sane type theory like Agda's and then figure out how to shoehorn it into Haskell than the other way around.

Agda is not so good at prototyping many other things. I just use it when I need it. I often end up using it as kind of a kludgy logical framework for my research in Linguistics and Type Theory, since I haven't yet figured out how to use Twelf.

Agda deals with IO and mutation in the same way that Haskell does (the IO monad and the State monad); with special directives, these can be compiled down to plain Haskell code. But Agda's support for extracting Haskell implementations is pretty wacky and not really mature enough for use (for instance, I have many times had it spit out unbuildable code which I needed to preprocess to get it to work). Idris is a somewhat similar language which is compiled and very easy to run, however.

Agda has more support for abstraction & modularity than Haskell by virtue of having a more advanced module system (it has both structures and structures parameterized by values & types, but lacks clean ML-style system of signatures, structures and functors). However, if you are not careful, you will often leak definitional equalities in very dependently-typed code, leading to fragile module boundaries. There are a number of ways to get around this, though; it's still an open question how to achieve modularity in the large in an intensional type theory. Homotopy Type Theory clarifies the situation somewhat. Of course, if you're just writing Haskell in Agda, then you have strictly more modularity here; it's just the interaction with dependent types that can prove tricky.

Agda does not support "Type Class Prolog" in the way that Haskell does; it has a limited support for implicit resolution which suffices for overloading, but not so well for doing Haskell-style type class stuff. Eventually, you may find that Modules Matter Most(!), and end up missing Haskell-style type classes much less.

<comment><USER8> Why would you use Twelf over Agda? Honest question—I've never examined Twelf.

<comment><USER7> Most of the things I want to do end up meaning that I need a logical framework in which to build a type theory. I use Agda for that, but this is not its strength (try building a non-trivial term language with binding, for instance).

<comment><USER8> I never realized it could be much easier than Agda, but I've been playing with Twelf now for a little bit and am getting a feel for how LF and HOAS work together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry for the OT but what is up with that background? It makes focusing on the article difficult.

<comment><USER10> Wow, it's really quite offensive. It's almost as if it's been deliberately crafted to mess with one's peripheral vision while attempting to focus on the article.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I had to hit f12 and disable the background with Firebug.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pendulum – Python datetimes made easy - <AUTHOR> https://pendulum.eustace.io <comment><AUTHOR> It's been months since I first showcased Pendulum on HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299013)). At the time it was not stable but I received a lot of valuable feedback to shape it to what it is now.

It's now stable (since January actually) and has gain traction since I first introduced it, so I thought I'd share it here again so that it can be of use to more people.

For those wondering, Pendulum is a library for Python to ease datetimes, timedeltas and timezones manipulation.

Each Pendulum classes are subclasses of the standard classes so you can use them as drop-in replacements in your code (some exceptions exist, see [https://pendulum.eustace.io/docs/#limitations](https://pendulum.eustace.io/docs/#limitations))

Link to the official website: [https://pendulum.eustace.io](https://pendulum.eustace.io)

Link to the official documentation: [https://pendulum.eustace.io/docs/](https://pendulum.eustace.io/docs/)

Link to the github project: [https://github.com/sdispater/pendulum](https://github.com/sdispater/pendulum)</comment>


Worst time to join a startup is right after it gets initial VC financing (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2009/08/24/the-worst-time-to-join-a-startup-is-right-after-it-gets-initial-vc-financing/

<comment><USER3> This post is short-sighted and simplistic. Worst in what sense? The decrease in equity is countered by the increased stability because the company has money in the bank.

There are people whose risk profiles make it unacceptable for them to join a company before it reaches a certain degree of stability. For those people, the second the company has closed a VC round might be the best time to join. I've hired people in that exact situation; they only made the leap to a startup when I was able to guarantee that we'd have enough money to pay them for a while.

<comment><USER4> He's arguing that there's a discontinuity. It's better to join just before a major funding event vs. just after. It becomes steadily better as time passes after the funding event (assuming the company makes progress at the right pace), until the next funding event.

Joining right before the series B is probably better than right after the A, from an equity maximization perspective, weighted for risk. Of course, being an early hire right after the A makes it more likely you'd be in a senior role, or at least get a lot of great work done before the B, but your equity grant is not likely to increase.

<comment><USER5> I would have expected the worst time to join to be right before a funding round because of your value getting horribly diluted. I know there was lots of talk of this some months back (and scumbag companies like Zynga trying to one up the evil) and assumed this practice would get even worse. Has that not happened?

<comment><USER6> In absolute terms, but the comparison is not what you personally gain and lost before the VC, it's a comparison of what you have now and what the next person hired will get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The error he's making is that personal risk is different from the company's risk. Just after receiving funding the company isn't any less likely to fail (well, maybe slightly less), but a job with this company now offers a steady income for longer than was guaranteed prior to greater funding.

So, in fact, just after funding might be a great time to join a company.

<comment><USER8> If you're looking for a steady income for a while, why not join a big company or research lab where that's guaranteed?

<comment><USER9> That's an important question to ask yourself. And the converse is equally important: "if you're willing to work with a low and very unreliable income stream for a while, why be someone else's employee?"

The "early employee" in the middle can be a tricky spot. There's a phrase I read on HN a while back "the founders get rich, the early employees get screwed, and the late employees get paid."

I think this phrase does a better job identifying a risk than an inevitability, but it is worth thinking about.

<comment><USER8> Right, which I think is the point of the article. The "after series A" point is sorta in no-man's-land, where if you're optimizing for potential returns it sucks, and if you're optimizing for stability it sucks.

<comment><USER9> There is one potential difference, though, which is in the value of a full paycheck in the short to medium term.

Some people may feel they just can't afford to forego a standard, market rate salary, and they wouldn't want to join a company that has a high chance of disappearing next month or failing to make payroll. But beyond that, they're not terrified of the idea of losing their job and looking for a new one. I think we may overstate at times how easy it is to get a job here on HN, but clearly there is a large population of strong programmers who can be picky about what they'll take and still get a decent job offer within a month or two of looking.

I remember Marc Andressen writing about this on his blog a while back - <USER2> in a very tech dense place like silicon valley, startups aren't quite as risky as they might sound. A total meltdown in hiring is an outside risk (like the couple of years immediately after the first dot com bust), but otherwise, people often build up such a strong network and skillset through startups that they may have more "job" stability, if it's defined as the ability to _get_ a job (I hear this referred to as "career stability").

None of this necessarily means that _post series A_ is quite the right spot to be in. That might still have too poor a stability vs opportunity ratio. But some sort of "early employee" be the right spot for people who would like to optimize for potential returns under a strict constraint of earning a market- level (or close to it) salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think there's a fairly important consideration that he misses, especially if you lack experience. Right after the Series A is when you're most likely to gain useful experience and work on interesting stuff. Before the funding, you're often just in survival mode, and just building the simplest things possible. Later on, job roles become more rigid, and most of the design/architecture has solidified.

Correspondingly, this might be the most fun/interesting time to be at a startup.

</comment><comment><USER11> Another thing that's missed, that doesn't seem mentioned in the comments thusfar, is that we're not looking at the odds that this company succeeds; we're looking at the odds the investment I made pays off. The odds that a company that already deserved investment succeeds should only be increased a bit by getting funding now (as opposed to later or as opposed to getting by without it). However, the fact that they raised the money means that someone else thought they were at least so likely to succeed (and bet on it) and that should increase _my estimate_ that this company will succeed more than the cash infusion will increase their actual chances.

</comment><comment><USER12> >I've met a lot of entrepreneurs, but even the smartest are usually barely on par, intellectually/analytically/etc, with average/mediocre hedge fund analysts (just from my own personal experience). There is a reason for this; make startups more compelling for smart people to join; value human capital at its intrinsic worth, and pay accordingly; after all, that's what the VC money is for half the time, right?

-from his comments

<comment><USER4> Haha. I hope that was a troll, or at least someone who is now unemployed in either the hedge fund industry or startups.

<comment><USER13> "being a pretentious asshole" is often confused with being smart in the financial industry. hence the disconnect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> note this post is from 2009 [edit -- now reflected in the title]--

I think the top comment makes a pretty solid argument

 _You're an entrepreneur, which means that your risk profile is high. Mine too! That's why we're leading companies, not joining them.

I look at our current economy and see instability everywhere, which has made me even MORE risk tolerant. Being in an entrepreneurial company that's trying to do something new and/or differently seems safer than almost anything else, but few people seem to share that perspective.

Most people just aren't cut out for the inherent instability of an early-stage start-up, and the lousy economy has many people clinging that much more tightly to what they know. _

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd say it's a best time because then the poor blokes finally have some money to pay you properly. Also it's not their own money so they may feel generous.

Unless you are working for startups only for the hope of hitting a jackpot. Then the OP is probably right.

</comment><comment><USER16> He forgot: "...all other things being equal", which would make his point practically useless.</comment>