Thoughts on breakout/rocket ship startups vs big tech

Well if you can get into OpenAI or Anthropic, absolutely. But if you're part of the 99.99% that can't get in, it's okay. I knew someone who got into Midjourney and he had to be so so proactive to even get noticed.

Taro can give you all the resources in the world, but the harsh reality is that there is very little outside information on private companies. So if I were in your shoes, I'd try for big tech simply because there is much less unnecessary risk.

You never know if your startup

• is about to hit a major down round
• doesn't have product-market fit
• has 2 weeks of payroll left
• even has a good engineering culture

Especially if you're looking for a quick cashout, founders will totally sell you that dream to get you to join.

Some harsh truths:

• Work-life balance is worse for sure, unlike FAANG there are tighter deadlines because you should have shipped yesterday
• TC doesn't mean anything for you, it's only for your employer to rationalize paying you less
• Chances are, nobody has heard of your startup. And 99% of the time they never will.

If you think this would never happen to a break-out startup, it can at any moment. Meta is absolutely killing every other open-source LLM startup, including Mistral (which had the world's best cost/performance LLM for a few months).

Now, reasons to work at a startup despite all the instability:

• you get to ship fast, features take 1 week instead of 4 months
• you can impact the startup's success
• you get to work on a variety of things (infra, features, maybe even some ML)
• your coworkers are likely to enjoy their job
• unlike big tech, they won't sunset your project after you've sweat blood finishing it

Ultimately, nothing from the startup will likely remain. The equity can be worth pennies, nobody will remember how many all-nighters you pulled, and people don't care about the startups that never made it. What remains is your skills and experiences.

Well, at least that's what I tell myself so I can sleep at night

I feel like this question is bit off as companies like OpenAI and Databricks are clearly not really startups anymore. OpenAI in particular isn't as it's going to raise at a $150 billion valuation, bigger than 95% of large tech companies (literally 2x bigger than PayPal which is a storied, legendary, huge tech company). I had a coworker who described these companies well: These companies are "pre-Big Tech" as everyone knows they're going to reach that $10B+ scale someday with similar pay/prestige.

You would obviously go to these companies over FAANG - They will almost certainly pay more in the medium/long-term, and you'll have way more scope. I would recommend the same thing in the past if an engineer had a Google offer vs. a Series D Robinhood offer or something. Same with pre-IPO Uber, DoorDash, Pinterest, Airbnb, etc. Notion is another great example of a unicorn that is almost certainly going to succeed - Definitely take that over Amazon/Google/Meta if you have a Notion offer as a new grad.

Where it gets tricky is when you're outside the super, super top tier with hot Series A/B/C companies that haven't raised at a +$1 billion valuation yet. So they clearly have a lot of potential, but they're not as proven as something like OpenAI. At that point it really go either way, but I would recommend Big Tech. Even among Big Tech, there are layers: I personally consider Meta the best FAANG compay and it's a considerable amount better for early career growth compared to something like Microsoft.

A question I have is how big is the difference in the brand value between your average breakout startup and a big tech? Is it negligible?

This is a tricky question as a "breakout" implies non-average. So I looked through the first ~35 companies on your linked spreadsheet and used that as an average.

If we're using that as the measuring stick, I do think there's a big gap in Big Tech's favor. For example, I have never heard of ClickHouse (which is on that list), and if I haven't heard of it (it's literally my job to keep tabs on the overall tech scene and I'm a Silicon Valley native), there's a good chance many recruiters haven't either.

That spreadsheet is pretty wild as it has companies like Notion (probably 2x stronger brand value than FAANG) and then stuff like ClickHouse. Huge variance, haha.

Funnily enough Sam Altman laments that someone picked big tech over a breakout startup.

Sam Altman is one of the most biased and privileged people to say this LOL. Dude literally runs OpenAI. The second ChatGPT launched, the brand value of getting an OpenAI offer instantly jumped to 5x that of a traditional FAANG offer. OpenAI is the most exciting company to work for right now, and it's not even close. It's reflected in their compensation too as OpenAI pays 50%+ more than Meta and Meta is already known as a company that pays top-of-market even within FAANG. That combination is just so incredibly potent. Literally nobody in Silicon Valley thinks that a Google/Meta offer is better than an OpenAI one due to them being more stable/traditional.