Not surprisingly, building really fast is not the silver bullet you'd think it is. It's all about what to build and how to distribute it. Otherwise bigcos/billionaires would have armies of engineers growing their net worth to epic scales.
My current world view: for monster multiples you need someone who knows how to go 0 to 1, repeatedly. That's almost always only the founder. People after are incremental. If they weren't, they'd just be a founder. Hence why everything is done through acquisitions post-founder. So there's armies of engineers incrementally scaling and maintaining dollars. But not creating that wealth or growing it in a significant % way.
SigFig | Principal Software Engineer | Full Time | Remote (US)
We're a FinTech committed to building financial solutions that are accessible and affordable to everyone. Currently we are focused on partnering with banks such as Wells Fargo, UBS, and Citizens Bank to serve consumers where they primarily are. We did start as a B2C company though and do still have a significant user base there as well.
For this team specifically we're building a product which is like Teladoc but for financial advice. Because of the complexity of financial advice and everything that goes into it there are a lot of opportunities to do first principles thinking on how things can be done especially given the "digital window" of remote.
Great point about increased uncertainty! That’s obviously a trade off of high growth bets whereas old business is not going anywhere.
You’d likely be in high demand at other initiatives if you’re a top performer though. I’ve also seen friends incentivized to get them to stay specifically because the mission they came for became kaput.
I can totally imagine your situation play out though. Depends on the needs of the company at that stage + your perceived value.
Personally I cannot assign importance to something until I understand the structure it operates within. Hence the preamble to the simple point about promotions in the article.
I wish someone had told me when I was a starry eyed college kid entering the workforce that by focusing on this one strategic decision, I could have gotten so much more out of the many 100 hour work weeks of execution. e.g.: Someone working long shifts at a restaurant is just as hard working as Elon Musk, the scale of Elon’s impact is just much bigger.
More practically, the original title got one upvote because it didn’t focus on the value of the article.
I should have probably phrased that better. At one end your skills might get commoditized and outsourced to somewhere for 1/10th of the cost.
But at the other end, think the person in charge of when Google search goes down in Europe. Or when Azure crashes for Disney. Or when AWS goes down for Netflix. How much do you think the people who are experts there get paid? I know two people who make 7 figures doing jobs like that. They are linchpins.
Not surprisingly, building really fast is not the silver bullet you'd think it is. It's all about what to build and how to distribute it. Otherwise bigcos/billionaires would have armies of engineers growing their net worth to epic scales.