> Your points are incredibly divorced from the reality most face. > It sounds like you lucked in to a company that raised a shitload early on and so had the luxury to make these decisions.

I worked for a string of them early on in my career. I was miserable and worried that I'd never get anywhere better because of the scarlet letter of working at a failed company (and several of them) would be my first impression. Rather than blaming it on luck, I resolved to figure out where I went wrong and how I could avoid it in the future.

While you cannot remove the element of timing and large scale market events outside of your control, startups are about making (and learning to make) calculated risks. Mediocre startup operators love this kind of argument (so and so can do things because they raised more money than us because they're lucky not because they executed better) because it lets them escape the consequences of their own unforced errors and ineffective execution. You won't hear this argument from effective operators because it would get laughed out of the room. They know that they have to operate proactively, not reactively from (and even before) their first fundraising event.

The most well run companies have a tendency to create exponentially more, not less, expansion and subsequent job opportunities. My advice is don't work for a risky early stage company until you learn what success looks like somewhere bigger. At an early stage startup that's on the right track, you'll see a lot of the same things just in a smaller org. But it's hard to know what you should require unless you've at least seen what it looks like to work at a well oiled machine. Folks that tell you otherwise are either ignorant or willfully trying to pull the wool over your eyes.