&quot;And if you go in with this mentality, even when startups fail, you succeed. If you put five years into building a company and team, you will end up with a great network of talented and motivated people, lots of first-hand experience, and often some management experience as well.
Worst case, your next step could be going into Google at the VP level it would’ve taken you 15 years to get to joining out of college to “inject some startup DNA,” and catch up on salary within a few years. Unless this internet thing is a fad, that job will always be there for you.&quot;<p>This advice is quite precise about where it applies. If you&#x27;re at a startup that is undercapitalized, working you 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week, with poor management and no opportunities for anything but building and maintenance, you can actually wind up worse off than when you went in: no built-up network and nothing that would make you &quot;VP at Google&quot; material, and in the case of startups doing pay cuts (in an environment of ever-rising rents), even less money than when you started(!) He is referring to working at &quot;decent or better&quot; startups; problem is, you may not know you&#x27;re not working at one of those until you actually work at another one.<p>The rest of his advice is probably worth listening to, but the above part should be considered very carefully.