[Translation] Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup

Recently I shared an article criticizing Lean Startup — this is becoming a hobby. The great Alexandre Porcelli shared a talk by no less than Alex Payne.

Alex Payne was one of the oldest engineers at Twitter. I know him because of Scala and his posts on NoSQL and other tech subjects. But besides being a programmer and book author, he’s also an experienced startup investor. His view on startups at this point is similar to mine. I recommend watching the talk, which originated from a post he published on his blog whose title is the same as this post and whose content I decided to translate into Portuguese because I think Brazilians need to hear more of the other side of the coin.

Without further ado, from here on follow Alex’s words:

I regularly receive emails from young people, usually those interested in programming, who are trying to make decisions about school and/or their professional futures. This post is for those young people.

If you’re in your late teens or early 20s, you’ve grown up in a world that idealized startups, their founders, and the people who work at them.

If you’re in school, you may have felt pressure or have been encouraged to drop out and join or start your own company. If you’re already out in the working world, you may feel that your non-startup job is somehow inadequate, or that you’re missing out on valuable experience and potential wealth.

The generation you grew up in has, in recent years, teetered on the brink of becoming “lost.” Jobs are scarce, entering a university offers no guarantee of employment. Big, old corporations are no longer a guarantee of safe harbor for building a career. Startups appear, through the lens of the media, as the only sign of life in a dying world. I understand the appeal.

Everyone’s background is different, and your choices are only yours. That said, you’re not making decisions in a vacuum. Here are some things to consider that, in my experience, you’re less likely to hear about if you’re working in startups.

A startup is only a means to an end.

I recently interviewed a young guy. I asked him where he saw himself in four years. “Running my own company,” he said without hesitation. I asked him why. “Because entrepreneurship is in my blood,” he answered. There was no mention of what his hypothetical company would do, what problems he would solve for people. His goal was a company just for the sake of having a company. That’s what he studied for, after all.

People are satisfied in their jobs when they operate with a sense of purpose. So much of our understanding of the psychology of success revolves around goals and keeping those goals top of mind: visualizing the moment of achievement, tracking progress, having others hold us accountable to reach them. Goals shape our individual futures.

Maybe a startup is the best way to reach that goal, and maybe it isn’t. If the goal of the young guy described above is to own a business — any business! — then maybe a startup really is the best path. For others, however, I always wonder if they’re adapting their goals into the shape of a startup because that’s the most applauded, admired, and easily understood (if not easily achieved) approach.

Maybe the best way to reach your goal is starting a non-profit organization or going into politics. Maybe it’s doing research at a university or making art. Maybe the answer is joining a large, stable company with formidable resources you can leverage to reach your goal. Maybe your goal is best reached by building a stable, pressure-free career that leaves enough time for your family, friends, community, and self-improvement.

A startup is only a means to an end. Consider the end, and try not to celebrate the means. What do you care about? Who do you want to help? Does a startup make it easier or harder to reach this goal? Where will this leave you when your goal is reached? Where will it leave you if it isn’t?

A job at a startup is the new office job. Startup culture is the new corporate culture.

Startups are portrayed as being exciting, risky, and even subversive alternatives to traditional corporate employment. Startups are seen as freer, more open, more flexible. Some companies really do start like that, but some interviews at late-stage startups make it clear how fast they ossify into structures that resemble the organizations that came before them.

Just as in the first dot-com bubble, there’s currently a proliferation of startups, incubators, accelerators, angel investors, and so on. In order for the “startup community” to replicate itself, nanobot-style, the mechanics of “doing a startup” have been reduced to an easily transportable sequence of actions accompanied by a shared set of values, norms, and language. As a result, the culture of most startups is uniform, even in style of dress and accessories that help “startup guys” — and they’re mostly “the” guys — stay with their herd (so they’re not preyed on by cougars).

Business school graduates like the young guy I interviewed are going straight from university to startups, and that’s if they even finish school. Business graduates, traditionally risk-averse, now say they don’t want to work for big companies. But startups are the new big companies. They are, as I’ll describe below, the office cubicles of a distributed workforce aggregated by venture capitalists and their associated institutions.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an office job. Just understand what you’re joining. When the company-supplied beer kegs run dry, when the free snacks are making you fat, and playing Xbox in the chill room isn’t as fun anymore, what then? When you find out you now report to a politicking middle manager and not the inspiring CEO who interviewed you, will you still want to be there? Is it an environment with enough toys and novelties to sustain you? When every place you consider working looks more or less the same, how long does the novelty last?

Startups have been systematized, mythologized, culturally and socially de-risked; reduced to formulas and recipes. And yet, there is no sustainable formula for creativity and rebellion. When we try to industrialize innovation, we tear out exactly what we’re trying to cultivate: the creative destruction that keeps the fire of capitalism burning.

Startups are part of the system, not a rebel wrench in the gears.

Funding for startups — that is, the money that pays your salaries — comes from somewhere. Wealthy individuals and institutions invest in startups like any other asset class. The futurist Bruce Sterling recently joked that “startups are full of young people working hard to make other people rich — Baby Boomer financiers, mostly.” Even though this may be a generalist and cynical statement, it’s by no means untrue.

In broad strokes, and excluding areas like biotech, venture-backed startups are a machine where relatively small amounts of capital are inserted on one side and, ideally, a lot comes out the other side. (In reality this machine seems to not work anymore, although the effectiveness of VC as an asset class and the VCs themselves is open to discussion). The salient point: what’s in the middle of the machine is you. You make it run.

The machine isn’t interested in you. In fact, the machine is designed with the understanding that most startups will fail, or at most offer mediocre returns to investors. Most companies in many VC portfolios are recognized as straw men. One or two “10x” companies are what give value to the portfolio. In the best case, founders of failing startups get another push at the slot machine. In the worst case, their failures lead them to despair.

There’s nothing inherently disruptive about a venture-backed startup. The startup system is just another system; an alternative to the corporate ladder but with as many rungs. Some startups may end up dramatically reshaping the market, but so can any other operator already in the game or active regulator.

The now perennial celebration of startup-driven disruption raises the question: if we accept that disruption is indeed happening, are we better off in the resulting disrupted market? Did we solve a problem, or did we just move the problem around? Are we creating value while increasing fairness and equality, creating positive change that will last? Or did we just make one group of rich people a little richer at the cost of another group of rich people? Are we creating a better future, or just reshuffling the present?

Startups have an ongoing interpersonal cost.

No startup story is complete without a scene or two of macho heroes: nights spent programming to exhaustion, weeks away from home trying to raise money in humiliating pitch after humiliating pitch. Startups appeal to a desire for daring that is lost in many forms of modern work, and we hear stories of the rewards waiting when personal lives are sacrificed on the altar of the launch schedule.

Less often we hear about the damage startups do to people’s lives. In extreme cases, like with the entrepreneur whose story of failure and suicide is linked above, the “community” may take a day or two to reflect and lament in blogs and tweets. Then they’re back to “the grind,” and more importantly, making a public show of how hard you’re working to satisfy the investors and the intimidating competition.

I’ve seen firsthand the damage startups can do to relationships. I’ve seen marriages and friendships destroyed, I’ve seen children and partners being sidelined, and I’ve failed those in my life in every way when work came first. I would listen as people who are the picture of a successful startup — visible in the press and social media, leading conferences, eternally founding and exiting — confided their total loneliness despite seemingly being the social center of the entrepreneurial community.

When you’re young, relationships seem like a renewable resource. Friendships exist in abundance and come easily. Just leaving home and into the world, you’re eager to escape the constant presence of family. Being pulled into work makes you feel important, independent, an adult. The work itself provides a new community and new friendships, and the bonds formed during intense collaborative work are strong.

I made many friends through work at early-stage companies. Ironically, these relationships are easier to maintain and enjoy when I’m not working at a startup.

Parting Thoughts.

I’ve worked in startups for half my life now. This work has brought me financial freedom, and I’ve put money I earned at a startup into other startups. If there is, as I’ve argued above, a modern “startup system,” I’m part of it.

I won’t mince words: I am deeply skeptical of this system. I’m skeptical of this system’s slavery, self-congratulatory fetishization of “disruption,” while at the same time becoming so obviously the kind of impassive institution it wants to replace. I’m skeptical of the short-term vision of the startup community. And I’m particularly skeptical of its disregard for the lives of the people who participate in it and the lives of those who live in the world that startups seek to reshape. Let’s not even start to discuss the collusion, cartelization, and other market corruption activities that are so common in the VC world. The point being: it’s a bad game, and a fraudulent game.

And yet. There are startups I wouldn’t want to see disappear. There are people working at and founding these startups who are good, kind, with balanced personal and professional lives, concerned about the impact of their work. Just as we throw slander and accusations of corruption at other systems like politics, mass media, entertainment, and professional sports, we must also admire those who operate ethically and effectively in them. We should celebrate even more those who pioneer new and alternative systems, because they work in the shadows of the community that has a constant hand on the crank of the publicity machine.

Now, you could say that I’m laying too much responsibility at the feet of the startup world. Although this system spreads every day over itself as the savior of everything, from capitalism to culture, of course we can accept that business is business and ideals are better left at home. As a VC from a top firm on Sand Hill Road told me during a pitch many years ago when I was describing a conceptual feature in Simple that would make it easier for users to more easily and regularly donate a portion of their savings to charity, “let’s not waste time on that stuff, we’re here to make money.”

You may be able to stomach that conduct, but I hope your idealism hasn’t been worn down while still so young. I hope you want your work to have meaning, purpose, and value no matter what form that work takes. More than that, I hope you want your life to be defined by more than your work.

Young programmer, I urge you to consider both sides of the startup coin. There are so many ways to leave a mark on the world.

A Note about Feedback

If you are part of the audience of this post, I’d love to hear your feedback and answer your questions, preferably by email. My address is easy to find on this site.

If you are not part of the audience of this post and are really, really angry that a stranger on the Internet has a different opinion from yours, I encourage you to direct your energy into an alternative argument that someone young (or, really, anyone at a career transition point) could benefit from reading. They are your future employees, coworkers, or founders. They are the ones you need to convince, not me.

— May 23, 2013