Most startups fail. Throwing some of the best years of your life away and shirking parental responsibilities for a remote chance of a payoff is simply a dangerous form of gambling.
Paul Graham is basically just talking his own book. His model is to fund a heap of cheap companies that overwork work young, naive people. Most of these companies fail. The occasional one succeeds enormously which more than covers the costs of the failures. Meanwhile, the starry-eyed young employees often don't notice the system is rotten until their thirties.
I was once in the SF startup world, and it's a pretty disgusting place. It's sexist, extremely ageist, intolerant of actual diversity, and anti-family. The sooner that particular culture dies (and make no mistake, it's dying), the better.
It's also lazy capitalism; it loads as much risk as possible onto the employees instead of those providing the capital, and many of the twenty-somethings love it. Machismo (look at how hard I work) and confirmation bias abound.
This. I couldn't but agree with every single sentence you've written (though I haven't worked at SF)!
I almost fell into this trap while I was inspired to work for a super cool team within a bigger company; a la start-up within a giant. I, unfortunately, got inspired enough that I ignored my new born, didn't see him grow up. I realized that I was being played just in the nick of time (after an year).
Irony is that now I'm in a real start up for almost two years and these two years have been best years of my life, both professionally and personally. I get to work on something that's really challenging and rewarding and at the same time I get to spend a few hours of high-energy time with my son, wife and family (I also am very active reader).
All this just because I figured out how to balance by spending sane hours at work and work at home late night once in a while when everyone is asleep!
My take away from this experience is; after your needs are taken care of to a comfortable extent never trade time for anything. Not for money, not for equity not for anything. Especially if you have a young family. Watch your child grow spend time with her; children develop emotional attachment by the time they are 5 and it only comes with spending time.
Even if you don't have family don't trade your time; go see the world, read something new, learn something interesting. But don't give away your time.
These startups aren't just targeting 20-somethings anymore, either. It's either that, or else the people who contact me (mid-30s) haven't thought about what my college (graduate and undergraduate) graduation dates imply about my age, or they have an edited version of my resume and can't see these things.
The small number of times I've been interested enough to take the discussion to matters of compensation and effort have been an effective deterrent for me. I earn more base salary and get better equity by my investments, and have much more time to spend with my family and working on income-producing side projects, working my 9-5 as a full-time contractor.
It's telling that these comments rarely solicit many replies on HN, even though they apply directly to what HN is all about. I have no sympathy for willful ignorance.
Paul Graham is basically just talking his own book. His model is to fund a heap of cheap companies that overwork work young, naive people. Most of these companies fail. The occasional one succeeds enormously which more than covers the costs of the failures. Meanwhile, the starry-eyed young employees often don't notice the system is rotten until their thirties.
I was once in the SF startup world, and it's a pretty disgusting place. It's sexist, extremely ageist, intolerant of actual diversity, and anti-family. The sooner that particular culture dies (and make no mistake, it's dying), the better.
It's also lazy capitalism; it loads as much risk as possible onto the employees instead of those providing the capital, and many of the twenty-somethings love it. Machismo (look at how hard I work) and confirmation bias abound.
You're being played, folks.