The word “startup” became popular during the 1990s web craze. I do not remember it being a thing in Europe or Latin America before that time; of course that does not mean that startups did not exist, just that they were not in my radar as possible employment options for my adult life. They were certainly not in my parent’s radar, but somehow the press frenzy around the future being made in a proverbial garage called their attention.
So that is how I started my career; joining a small web startup in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, one sunny day of October 1997. Said company aimed, following the words of its founder, to create an online marketplace for the ocean fisheries market.
And so I ended up joining their ranks, first from home, and then in their offices. Let me for a moment stress the fact that I was literally working from home in 1998, with a dial-up internet connection and ICQ chat rooms, using a dedicated phone line paid for entirely by my employer. (Just think about this for a minute, and then reconsider the recent decision by your Founder & CEO who wants to build a “family” in a big noisy open space, and thereby dictates mandatory time in the office for all employees. Do not worry, I will wait.)
The first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about startups is, of course, a certain taste for transgression and breaking the rules. Working for a startup meant bending the world, for good or for worse, and trying new things bypassing a shallow hierarchy, in a way that would be unthinkable in a more standard corporate setting.
This trend accelerated during the Web 2.0 era, and later during the social media, mobile, blockchain, and (of course!) AI gold rushes. Every one of these waves brought its own flavor of startups and unheard benefits and/or colorful workspaces, filled with foosball and ping-pong tables, slides, post-it notes on every whiteboard, and (more recently) matcha latte baristas.
Already in 1997 I could feel the “agility”, the “cash burn rate”, and the “time to market” pressures on my young shoulders; mind you, none of these buzzwords had yet been invented (again, not that I remember anyway). The use of a non-compiled, typeless and shitty programming language like VBScript fit the bill perfectly well in those contexts. We delivered as much code as possible, testing be damned (to be frank, we had not yet heard about Kent Beck at the time, and we were not even using an SCM, not even CVS).
At a time when everybody else was building Windows apps in Visual Basic 6, we were building an intranet for our employer in VBScript. Can you feel it? This is exactly the sensation of so many startups at the heyday of each technology wave of the past 30 years:
- When everybody was using boring thick Windows laptops, that startup was writing their software on a shiny, thin-as-paper MacBook Air.
- While everybody was setting up servers and installing operating systems, another startup entered their credit card on the website of a cloud provider and started provisioning servers 20 minutes later, thereby replacing CAPEX with OPEX and thrilling their investors.
- Then, when most developers were restarting their Tomcat application servers, another group of idealists typed the command
rails newand bet their future on an unknown scripting language from Japan. - At a time when everybody had a BlackBerry in their pocket, some other startup was building a new “iPhone OS” application (kids: that is how iOS was named from 2007 to 2010) and hoping for Facebook to buy them.
- Later when everybody was still writing code manually, a group of friends in a garage started using Cursor and Claude Code to rewrite the world from scratch.
Ah, the sweet feeling of transgression; the essential component of any respectable startup.
I met people who worked in certain startups where a weird thing called “stock options” was part of their compensation plan. This is how they are supposed to work: instead of paying you with money, they give you a paper that states that IF the company did not go bust and IF they decided to go public in some market (most probably the NASDAQ) and IF the tight time deadlines (and other shenanigans written in small print) for such operation are respected, THEN the owner of the document was entitled (but not obliged, this is an “option” after all) to buy some stock at a fixed price, and then by selling it, finance a home, a vacation in Papeete, or, yes why not, another startup.
I forgot to mention another interesting IF in the equation above: one should “execute the option” only IF the price of the stock was higher than the strike price written on the paper; otherwise, you would be buying a worthless asset, which is never a good idea.
Count the amount of IFs in the previous paragraphs, and you will realize why you do not know many people that got rich using this scheme (outside Silicon Valley, that is). In essence, the idea of stock options on a startup seems enticing to two kinds of people: to employers, because they can discount on actual salary costs, and for junior software engineers, who did not take a minor in finance and have no clue how the stock market or derivatives work. A win-win situation for everyone.
But dreams are cheap, and everyone wants to become rich overnight.
The truth is that most startups go bust: according to Forbes, purveyor of wisdom in the science of making money, 20% of startups die within the first year, and 65% within 10 years. For junior software engineers, that means that there is a 65% chance to be jobless at the age of 35. Actually it is a bit worse than that: you will be holding a name in your CV of a company long gone, which did nothing relevant or memorable, until the day you retire (I know a thing or two about that, as I have at least 4 names in my own résumé that follow this pattern).
Why do those startups fail? There are countless Harvard Business Review articles about that, but I will not link you to any of them; instead, I will provide you with my highly questionable theory about the root issue at the heart of most startups: the unbearable hubris levels of their founders. Through the decades I have had the unfortunate experience of crossing paths with quite a few psychopaths who, in between meetings with potential investors and micromanaging their engineers, had the inner belief and desire of being the next Steve Jobs.
Reality proved some of them otherwise. Yes, not all; some were lucky enough to actually make it through their “exit” and “cash out” strategies unscathed, which can not always be said of their employees. But that is another story.
Because a sad side effect of the infatuation with startups was the slow degradation of any work security. Gone are the days when a software engineer would spend 35 years at IBM; welcome to the new age of job hopping and burnout. Too bad if your health takes a toll and you are dismissed tomorrow for whatever whimsical reason. Apparently this new state of affairs is a good thing, because the sacrosanct “free market” guarantees higher wages and new experiences. Yay!
The truth is bleaker than that. Bashing worker unions, brainwashing junior engineers with the idea that “we are a family” and other atrocities, screaming against regulation and oversight in the name of free markets; all of these ideas have caused our social tissue to degrade and decompose. The latest waves of massive layoffs in IT, most probably poised to continue thanks to the inexorable advances in AI, are the living proof that workers, more than ever, are fodder ready to be consumed and promptly discarded, for the profit and benefit of yet another Series D round that would make your startup a shiny unicorn on the top page of startupticker.ch.
Startups are here to stay. For a software developer, I do believe that working at a startup is still an excellent way to learn, experiment, and take responsibilities early. And who knows, maybe your stock options might be worth something, someday. But as always, caveat lector; try to gauge the founder intentions as early as possible. You have been warned.
Cover photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash.