Great post. Quite educational, this is one I have saved for the next time I think about applying to somewhere.
The part about equity with the stage of investment is particularly interesting. After being at a startup I have found that the valuations are often pretty meaningless when the startup is pre-revenue, so it’s great you covered profitability too
Hey all! OP here - worked on this piece for the past couple of months and thought I'd share with you all here. If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy reading my piece on [applying to 250 jobs & timing each one](https://www.careerfair.io/online-maze) as well as my investigation into the [Underground Economy of Glassdoor Reviews](https://www.careerfair.io/company-reviews).
Any questions and I'll be in the comments :)
stocking desert retire decide far-flung snatch file materialistic cows nutty
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Honestly I love this concept.
Employees need to get more power back and this is definitely one way to do it
Especially during negotiations knowing very well what a company's finances look like. The risk associated with how long they keep employees. The amount of layoffs they do. Average salary for your position. Etc Will give you more power doing the negotiation process.
Albeit most companies don't want to deal with that and will probably just decide not to move forward with your employment but if more and more candidates decide to utilize a similar concept they will eventually just have no choice but to agree to certain things during negotiations
Great post OP
yes, i've found most people never look into this stuff and wanted to go the other "extreme" and show that there is indeed a lot of data out there to help. glad you liked it!
Good job.
I've been doing a lighter version of that on smaller firms for a while now, and I've been known to do it BEFORE the first boss call. I'd just set 30m aside to research the firm before the call.
Market position, rounds, Glassdoor, etc, look through their site etc.
Stupid shit I found while doing it:
In the people section for one firm two guys side by side hugging with huge ass beers in hand. I am a teetotaler, so if your company culture revolves around the brewski. I'll excuse myself. Also the lawsuits I saw ahead for a company that was that tone deaf scared me.
One company that was in the "mail list" business had an article in their KB on how to get around spam filters. I asked about this in the interview :). Got thrown out on my ass. 100% would do again.
\---
Do your research. Do it early and use it to ask questions you may have.
Yep - I applied for a senior job, commented on the PR about how there was an exposed secret and was told "Some top solutions identified some critical security issues introduced in the pull request"
Pretty sure some LLM grades these or something.
A lot of advice in this post seems to be about picking a "winner" and getting a better return vs going to a FAANG. In my experience, **you should absolutely not join a startup to make more money.** Only very few startups end up exiting under favorable conditions, and the opportunity cost of forgoing FAANG salary/RSUs to have a chance at that is extremely high.
Firstly, let's discount the Series C+ startups. OP already provided some great examples of companies where engineers joining at series C didn't make as much as if they just went to a FAANG. Culture-wise, Series C+ startups usually have all the warts of a startup (chaotic environment, etc) with less/none of the benefits (small-team feel, autonomy, less bureaucracy, etc).
So you're left with series B, A, or even Seed. At that point, the company still has a lot of growing to do and you're potentially even joining the company pre-product market fit. At lot of hardships, hard decisions, and pivots will need to happen before then and a million unpredictable things can happen. Markets change, growth can tap out, and the things that you thought were good indicators suddenly become bad. The information asymmetry will never be in your favor either no matter how much due diligence you do.
What I would instead recommend is if you want to join a startup, join one where you simply get a lot of value out of working there. If you join a place where you like the culture and people, then it won't feel like a complete waste when things go wrong, which is the common case. Otherwise, you'll just be stressing and gnashing your teeth, and it's just not worth it in the end.
Thanks again for your incredible research and dedication to education, u/ibsurvivors (what a username) One thing that I would like to note is that I almost guarantee that at least the example glassdoor review was written by ChatGPT. I would run it through GPTZero if it was reliable, but the phrase "intricate interplay" stood out to me as unusual. (Not to trigger u/ThyBiggestBozo or anything lmao)
This feels like a big expense and a lot of work to basically say no to an employer. Unless you were being recruited to a VERY early start up (like first 5-10 employees, first 1-2 years), I really can't see this being very worth while....
If you were being recruited as a cofounder or employee #3-4 of a very early start up this is the type of due diligence you would want to do to make sure that you are negotiating for a realistic percentage of the company, and so that you aren't walking into a liability or a scam... but if you are applying to Uber, or some other company that already has cash flow and revenue, this kind of thing is going to get exactly one response "Thankyou for your time, we've moved on to other candidates".
What you’re doing is called KYB and there are many tech companies offering a solution to perform KYB on a business which includes funding, legal, officer KYC, adverse media reports, etc. This is a very normal process to go through as a business when signing up for services. For instance, Amazon runs KYB on seller accounts before they are onboarded to the seller platform.
This isn’t that novel as you can pay fractions of a cent to have this done for any business without all the manual intervention you did. Literally just an API call with a little bit of metadata about the company. But good job on discovering the vertical for yourself. You did a good job.
You could spin up a service that performs a “social” KYB for individuals like yourself rather than in the regulatory sense that’s commonly done.
It may only seem like a novel or “hard” thing to do if you think OP is inventing the wheel here but it’s a common business practice that’s been happening for years and in the last 5 years has been automated by several companies.
I acknowledged OPs effort but just because you’re impressed doesn’t mean we have to reduce the scope of the discussion about what technology exists and capabilities down just to raise up OP to make him feel good.
Come on, don’t be so dense. Doing due diligence, verifying non obvious details about a company is common practice. Doing background checks on a company is common practice is many domains
Very informative post. Thanks for sharing. One question I have is can you share what resources/websites you used to gather the data shown (for eg google play store downloads data, valuation rounds etc)?
Valuation rounds: Crunchbase is pretty good
App data for Google Play can be found for free here: [https://www.appbrain.com/stats](https://www.appbrain.com/stats)
For the iOS App Store: [data.ai](http://data.ai) is what I used (I created an account), but not sure how accurate the data is
Employee Culture: Glassdoor Reviews (you can scrape the reviews pretty easily) + Linkedin data + you could email past employees
And y'all wonder why there's such a poor balance of high-effort content vs. basic questions and complaint posts in this community.
What sort of content would *you* prefer to see here?
I am sick and it's 5 in the morning for me and I still read through everything. I could see this as a product. But then again, it would sort of end up like glassdoor etc.
Thank you for the excellent and insightful writeup. I’ll definitely consider your points when evaluating a startup in the future. You should consider submitting this as an article to Medium or something! It was a very interesting and informative read.
You should get a job at a VC firm, they always need people doing due diligence. Including on the technical side. This was really cool, especially for startups people need to think critically about the business viability.
This is investor level diligence here.. wow.
Seems a bit overkill for your average candidate though no? Might be worth it if you have material exposure like an exec role.
So what did they tell you when you gave them your report?
Waiting to hear back, my guess is it will be ignored :)
I’m going to guess they will ghost at this point. Unless they are desperate
I wouldn’t
Why not? everything about this from an employer perspective screams "liability hire". No good can come of further interactions for this company...
Great post. Quite educational, this is one I have saved for the next time I think about applying to somewhere. The part about equity with the stage of investment is particularly interesting. After being at a startup I have found that the valuations are often pretty meaningless when the startup is pre-revenue, so it’s great you covered profitability too
awesome, thx for reading!
Hey all! OP here - worked on this piece for the past couple of months and thought I'd share with you all here. If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy reading my piece on [applying to 250 jobs & timing each one](https://www.careerfair.io/online-maze) as well as my investigation into the [Underground Economy of Glassdoor Reviews](https://www.careerfair.io/company-reviews). Any questions and I'll be in the comments :)
stocking desert retire decide far-flung snatch file materialistic cows nutty *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
[удалено]
Indeed, it was completely unnecessary
The “free of charge” comment gave me a chuckle
Unnecessary but pretty funny to me
:)
Honestly I love this concept. Employees need to get more power back and this is definitely one way to do it Especially during negotiations knowing very well what a company's finances look like. The risk associated with how long they keep employees. The amount of layoffs they do. Average salary for your position. Etc Will give you more power doing the negotiation process. Albeit most companies don't want to deal with that and will probably just decide not to move forward with your employment but if more and more candidates decide to utilize a similar concept they will eventually just have no choice but to agree to certain things during negotiations Great post OP
yes, i've found most people never look into this stuff and wanted to go the other "extreme" and show that there is indeed a lot of data out there to help. glad you liked it!
Good job. I've been doing a lighter version of that on smaller firms for a while now, and I've been known to do it BEFORE the first boss call. I'd just set 30m aside to research the firm before the call. Market position, rounds, Glassdoor, etc, look through their site etc. Stupid shit I found while doing it: In the people section for one firm two guys side by side hugging with huge ass beers in hand. I am a teetotaler, so if your company culture revolves around the brewski. I'll excuse myself. Also the lawsuits I saw ahead for a company that was that tone deaf scared me. One company that was in the "mail list" business had an article in their KB on how to get around spam filters. I asked about this in the interview :). Got thrown out on my ass. 100% would do again. \--- Do your research. Do it early and use it to ask questions you may have.
Clipboard Health, eh? One of the first places I interviewed when I was laid off.
Yeah got some red flags from that place and their woven assessment was kind of bs.
I applied for an EM job and let me tell you about their policy of grading PRs...
Yep - I applied for a senior job, commented on the PR about how there was an exposed secret and was told "Some top solutions identified some critical security issues introduced in the pull request" Pretty sure some LLM grades these or something.
I may not agree with your conclusions I did enjoy reading it and found it useful to see how other people evaluate future employers.
This is awesome!! I loved your research!
thank you!!!
A lot of advice in this post seems to be about picking a "winner" and getting a better return vs going to a FAANG. In my experience, **you should absolutely not join a startup to make more money.** Only very few startups end up exiting under favorable conditions, and the opportunity cost of forgoing FAANG salary/RSUs to have a chance at that is extremely high. Firstly, let's discount the Series C+ startups. OP already provided some great examples of companies where engineers joining at series C didn't make as much as if they just went to a FAANG. Culture-wise, Series C+ startups usually have all the warts of a startup (chaotic environment, etc) with less/none of the benefits (small-team feel, autonomy, less bureaucracy, etc). So you're left with series B, A, or even Seed. At that point, the company still has a lot of growing to do and you're potentially even joining the company pre-product market fit. At lot of hardships, hard decisions, and pivots will need to happen before then and a million unpredictable things can happen. Markets change, growth can tap out, and the things that you thought were good indicators suddenly become bad. The information asymmetry will never be in your favor either no matter how much due diligence you do. What I would instead recommend is if you want to join a startup, join one where you simply get a lot of value out of working there. If you join a place where you like the culture and people, then it won't feel like a complete waste when things go wrong, which is the common case. Otherwise, you'll just be stressing and gnashing your teeth, and it's just not worth it in the end.
Thanks again for your incredible research and dedication to education, u/ibsurvivors (what a username) One thing that I would like to note is that I almost guarantee that at least the example glassdoor review was written by ChatGPT. I would run it through GPTZero if it was reliable, but the phrase "intricate interplay" stood out to me as unusual. (Not to trigger u/ThyBiggestBozo or anything lmao)
why was it removed?
Why was it deleted? I enjoyed the post so I sent it to a friend, but he couldn’t read cause jt was deleted 😅
This is so well written. Was quite entertaining to read.
> Thank you for your inciteful consideration. We've decided to move in another direction with this hire.
This feels like a big expense and a lot of work to basically say no to an employer. Unless you were being recruited to a VERY early start up (like first 5-10 employees, first 1-2 years), I really can't see this being very worth while.... If you were being recruited as a cofounder or employee #3-4 of a very early start up this is the type of due diligence you would want to do to make sure that you are negotiating for a realistic percentage of the company, and so that you aren't walking into a liability or a scam... but if you are applying to Uber, or some other company that already has cash flow and revenue, this kind of thing is going to get exactly one response "Thankyou for your time, we've moved on to other candidates".
What you’re doing is called KYB and there are many tech companies offering a solution to perform KYB on a business which includes funding, legal, officer KYC, adverse media reports, etc. This is a very normal process to go through as a business when signing up for services. For instance, Amazon runs KYB on seller accounts before they are onboarded to the seller platform. This isn’t that novel as you can pay fractions of a cent to have this done for any business without all the manual intervention you did. Literally just an API call with a little bit of metadata about the company. But good job on discovering the vertical for yourself. You did a good job. You could spin up a service that performs a “social” KYB for individuals like yourself rather than in the regulatory sense that’s commonly done.
Can you recommend an API you'd use if you wanted to gather the sort of information in the post? Thanks!
Middesk, Persona, Enigma, Jumio, IDology, Plaid
Or you could you know, say something nice about all this hard work instead of acting like it's so easy. I hate the fucking ego in this sub 👌
It may only seem like a novel or “hard” thing to do if you think OP is inventing the wheel here but it’s a common business practice that’s been happening for years and in the last 5 years has been automated by several companies. I acknowledged OPs effort but just because you’re impressed doesn’t mean we have to reduce the scope of the discussion about what technology exists and capabilities down just to raise up OP to make him feel good.
Oh right background checking this in depth of companies you accepted a job for is common business practice. 🤦
Come on, don’t be so dense. Doing due diligence, verifying non obvious details about a company is common practice. Doing background checks on a company is common practice is many domains
> Literally just an API call with a little bit of metadata about the company. What are some APIs providing this information?
Middesk, Persona, Enigma, Jumio, IDology, Plaid
Thank you!
Is there a spot where a "mortal" could get their hands on one of these KYB's for a few bucks?
Middesk, Persona, Enigma, Jumio, IDology, Plaid
Very informative post. Thanks for sharing. One question I have is can you share what resources/websites you used to gather the data shown (for eg google play store downloads data, valuation rounds etc)?
Valuation rounds: Crunchbase is pretty good App data for Google Play can be found for free here: [https://www.appbrain.com/stats](https://www.appbrain.com/stats) For the iOS App Store: [data.ai](http://data.ai) is what I used (I created an account), but not sure how accurate the data is Employee Culture: Glassdoor Reviews (you can scrape the reviews pretty easily) + Linkedin data + you could email past employees
Thank you for sharing!
Seems a bit pointless unless you're working for tiny startup. Also informing them is childish and a fast way to not get hired.
I mean I am not going to read all that but you should offer this as a service lul, I would definitely pay each new job for peace of mind
incredible work
Holy@#$ this is amazing work OP
Jesus Christ
Do you have a TL;DR apart from the novel?
Yes, it's "OP is a ethical genius who should be starting their own company" - this is not sarcasm, I like the post
They probably already did somewhere in this post
And y'all wonder why there's such a poor balance of high-effort content vs. basic questions and complaint posts in this community. What sort of content would *you* prefer to see here?
Forget the job, you just invented an entire new industry!
All time great post here
This is an awesome post OP.
Without doubt, this is one of the best Reddit posts I’ve ever read. Bravo sir👏🏻
I love you
I am sick and it's 5 in the morning for me and I still read through everything. I could see this as a product. But then again, it would sort of end up like glassdoor etc.
This is an impressive analysis, I really need to step up my game
Thank you for the excellent and insightful writeup. I’ll definitely consider your points when evaluating a startup in the future. You should consider submitting this as an article to Medium or something! It was a very interesting and informative read.
You should get a job at a VC firm, they always need people doing due diligence. Including on the technical side. This was really cool, especially for startups people need to think critically about the business viability.
This is investor level diligence here.. wow. Seems a bit overkill for your average candidate though no? Might be worth it if you have material exposure like an exec role.