Maybe. Those posts offer preposterously low equity, so I wonder whom it is supposed to attract. Suckers?
Y Combinator sincerely wants people to succeed, I don’t think it’s reactionary or myopic like that.
That said, to fill whatever hundreds of spots nowadays, they’ve exhausted Math 55, it graduates all of 12 people every year.
They’re dipping into a far greater supply of nepo babies than ever before. Those jagoffs can’t do anything - not programming, let alone sales - so whom is this advice really for? Those companies will “succeed” anyway, I mean they won’t fail. You can make a ton of money as a technical cofounder, but for the minimally intellectually stimulating problems of some moron's meaningless app, for that moron to get all the glory? Just to polish life off by marrying your subordinate and sending the kids to Day School? And shoveling all that money right back into meaningless angel investments?
This is a stylized comment of course, but it's just to say, yeah, you need a technical co-founder, really easy for Y Combinator to say. I too would like extremely talented people to give everything and take nothing.
Do you mean the “founding engineer” jobs? It can be misleading, but those are not founder roles. They are regular employee roles where the “founding” part of the title is just an honorary indication that the person joined the company early.
YC won’t count someone as a founder unless they have at least 10% equity in the company. Founding engineers are typically getting 2% or less (from what I understand).
Founding Engineer = Engineer making under-market salary for tiny sliver of equity who can be laid off anytime because the company is fledgling, works 70hrs a week, puts in major % of work a founder would contribute, but has little upside.
To be honest, for someone who cant land market salaries (e.g. non typical background), who finds a good team, this might be a good opportunity.
So, is this post correlated?