I’m out ❤
After six great years building forecasting systems for Google Ads worth billions of dollars, my yearning for the startup world took over again. Just like after the university, when I decided to start a company instead of going for a PhD, it happened again and this time we got the recipe right: a kickass team with tight networks, deep domain and tech expertise; a maturing problem space; and a product that will transform the way companies engage with their networks.
Let’s be friends on Twitter @svonava, we are hiring!
But first, let me explain how I got there:
Heavy heart
A job at Google should be a compulsory part of every software engineers curriculum - it’s just the neatest package of inspiration, learning and networking one can wish for after school. Despite the free food and beanbags, Googlers often quote ‘the colleagues’ as the biggest work perk and I’d have to agree - for my Goodbye email I’ve assembled a list of 94 people with whom I have been through an epic story…
Engineers from my orientation class now at the helm of hugely impactful & insanely complex systems. Product managers that crushed intern parties with me now spinning up 50 person teams to topple whole industries. Salespeople who actually care about long term sustainability of a business and the entire ecosystem around it…
We must have drank a hectoliter of Goodbye coffees during my last month. Some tried to talk me out of it. Some looked into the distance and muttered ‘One day I too will fly out of this nest’. Throughout the six years and in their parting words, they have given me a heap of knowledge nuggets, TOP 10 of which I’ve summarized in another post here.
From outside of the company, most naysayers (‘Are you crazy leaving Google?!’) use a monetary argument. Being the quant nerd that I am, I ran the numbers. My analysis shows that the cost of job safety eats into the value you generate, making it an irrational decision to stay at Google for more than about seven years. (Check out the appendix at the bottom.)
Value capture
How does one capture the value they create? In finance, there are jobs like buy-side quants in hedge funds, for whom the bonuses are tied to their impact on profits and losses - you get approached by these a lot if you work at Google.
However, you will have a tough time grabbing more than 1% of your value minus trading fees and the salary of your boss. It’s similar in other roles in finance and elsewhere; your boss will always pay just enough to dissuade sufficient percentage of people from leaving.
I believe that timing is key - if you can, wait for the right chance and then jump on it with both feet. I have always wanted to own a large chunk of what I’m building. After over six years at Google, I can afford to face the startup mountain with a smile and I’d be crazy not to.
What’s next?
When I realized that the AI winter (or a ‘slowdown’) is upon us, I figured it’s time to expand my horizons back in 2017. At the time bitcoin and blockchain entered mainstream. I got my feet wet writing a HFT bot in Rust with a few colleagues for one of the crypto exchanges (they had FIX protocol and looked legit!).
After we realized that the exchange technology is not ready for HFT yet (even though having a fully off-chain order book sets them up right), I switched to a market index-like portfolio automation and played with a bit of real money.
Eventually, through a Crypto group within Google and through Google Ventures I stumbled upon two cool folks I’m now proud to call co-founders. We set out to build infrastructure for investment funds of the future, where capital gets allocated to innovation efficiently, regulatory compliance is a feature of the technology and the access to a previously privileged asset class is democratized. The vision is incredibly ambitious (as we are reminded of regularly by our amazing advisors), but our vision of the MVP is bite size. We will change the way early-stage investment has been done for the last 60 years or “die trying”.
We are still semi-quietly building but if you are itching to jump off the corporate wagon and try your luck at a startup reach out!
If something seems possible, that’s probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can’t possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.
– Joel Spolsky
Appendix
Job safety vs. upside on value generated over time at a big high-growth company:
- As a fresh grad, during the first years at a company like Google your net worth is increasing by a substantial fraction year by year (blue line).
- However later on, the % net worth increase diminishes (even if you keep getting promoted, which I have been but it gets harder and harder as you progress).
- On the other hand, if you are not working at a hedge fund with a revenue-share comp model, you are not really participating on the upside created by your work (red line, risk adjusted).
From the figure above, we see that ~7th is the optimal year to leave Google (spreadsheet - check all my assumptions there).
A key point is that to get promoted to trace the blue line, your value-add more or less has to trace the red line - these are strongly coupled.
Eventually they just flip and you are better off chasing the red line, instead of staying comfy on the blue line. Furthermore, due to the marginal utility of money, the blue vs. red line battle matters less for getting out of your bed in the morning. One has to work on something inspiring and impactful to keep the fire burning.
Combine that with coming across a great new opportunity and leaving “the mothership” does not seem as crazy anymore:)