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On surviving at a startupNerdbjedikanbaOne day you may work at or be asked to join a startup company I have been fortunate to work at several and at least one, Ember Corporation was successful. So I have a lot to say about startups and will have to break this into several lessons of which this is just the first. Ember was a rough ride. Startups can be like this. You work your ass off pulling all nighters to get demos up and running and the like so that is hard but also fun and exciting. the hardest part of surviving at Ember was just getting through all the way to the Exit. The Exit is when a startup transitions from being a startup to being a real company. It can happen very quickly or it can take many years. Generally the quicker the better. There are several ways an exit can happen but there are two that are most popular: the startup can get bought by a larger possibly public company or the startup can go public itself by selling shares on the stock market. This is when the Venture Capitalists or VCs make their money and scurry away. I say scurry for reasons I will make clear in a future episode.Either of these exit scenarios can* be good for the employee. I say can because not all exits are good exits and I’ll talk about that in more detail in a future podcast too because this one is just about survival. Before you can be part of a startup’s exit you first have to survive within the company to the Exit. Startups often go through periods of growth, when they bring on new investors and their capital and new employees and also contraction when they realize they have overspent and have to lay off employees. All kinds of employees can get laid off during a period of contraction. Even the founders can fall victim to a period of contraction. This is not uncommon so don’t think that just because you’re in a startup that you’re safe. Nobody is safe from layoffs in a period of contraction. But there are ways you can help yourself and give yourself a better chance of not getting laid off. I survived 7 layoffs at Ember corporation over 11 years before we were finally bought by silicon labs on July 4, 2012. Even the founders were gone by then. So I know something about this. How did I do it? Well let me tell you a story.In like 2010 during what I think was our last layoff I was sitting around with a bunch of engineers. Some of us were getting laid off and some were not. I fell into the were not category. And as he was packing up his stuff, one of the engineers lets call Dave asked me point blank. Ezra how did you survive all these years? In effect like why me and not you.I was offended by this but I took it in stride. I simply said Dave I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you. I left it at that, no further insight or anything. I reality if he had been kind about it and asked for my advice I would have given it to him as I am now. But he was pissed and being a dick so I left him hanging. Like fuck you man you think it should have been me instead of you? Go fuck yourself that kind of thing.It’s true though I wasn’t the best engineer. Everybody knew this. It’s not something you can hide when every commit to the SW repository is seen by all. In all reality Dave was a better engineer than me but that didn’t matter because all along I had something Dave didn’t. I had a strategy for survival and he didn’t. That was the difference. My strategy was simple, but if it was employed by all it would have lost its power so Im giving it to you and you alone and the strategy is this: Always stay close to the money. The money is everything in a startup. It sits in a bank account (or investments) and slowly or quickly dwindles according to the “burn rate” of the organization. The burn rate is the rate at which money is disappearing from the company coffers. The runway is the time the company has until the money is gone. Unless you are working for free which I hope you are not (compensation a later episode) you are part of the burn rate because the burn rate is directly proportional to the number of employees and their individual comp. you can quickly calculate all this for yourself by asking how much money they have in the bank and how many employees they have. If they are paying you shit chances are they are paying everyone shit. But in a SW engineering startup 200k per head fully loaded (salary health insurance etc.) is a good estimate. You can ask them how much runway they have. But in reality it is quite easy for them to lie to you or in a lot of instances only the CFO knows this, so just do the math for yourself. This company has 6 months or one year before they either need an exit, a new influx of cash or a serious contraction. But that is not even what I mean about staying close to the money. In addition to all that you would hope that the company has at least one good customer. That customer is also adding to the bottom line, they are hopefully paying for shit. If they are not you ...