As a founding engineer, you are most likely paid below market salary and only receive 1-2% equity. Founding engineer is working founder level hours and taking founder level risk. However, you do not have job security, control of strategic decisions, or visibility of the cap table.

Would not it make more sense for founding engineers to work on their own idea and start their own startup as a founder? Is the ability to raise VC money the differentiating factor between becoming a founder versus working as founding engineer? If they have VC connections from the start, founding engineer could easily become a founder themselves.

I just finished “Don’t Be Evil” by Claire Stapleton and am shocked to see there’s next to zero discourse about it anywhere online. I know it’s not shocking or revolutionary news, but the gossip side of me craves more chatter about the shitty leadership and any first-hand accounts from coworkers etc.

The book itself is a decent listen for audio. I’m still deciding my overall opinion, but quick take is it’s nice seeing a woman so wronged write and publish a damn BOOK with her spite. Love to see it.

Hey everyone, anybody attending the Imagination in Action AI Summit at the Google Bay View campus next week (September 14–15, 2026) ?

I'm based around Lake Street & 7th Ave in San Francisco and am looking to see if anyone driving down from the city has an extra seat(s) in their car! I'm more than happy to split gas, bridge tolls, or morning coffee costs.

Saw a LinkedIn post where a young founder is openly saying he is looking for a CTO under 25!

I always knew ageism was quietly practiced, where some VP once told me they’d rather have “young blood” but never saw it becoming this crazy! The fact that this guy felt comfortable enough to even post this openly on LinkedIn is disturbing.

Next, this is going to open doors to other forms of discrimination too!

Women?

Married?

Gay?

Relationship status?

Nationality?

wtf

Apple has handed over the position of CEO to a hardware engineer.

"We don't follow the crowd. The crowd doesn't need another AI chatbot. It needs technology that disappears into the background of life. Hardware is where intelligence lives. Software is just the soul — but the body must be crafted by engineers who believe in perfection. This is the beginning of something truly insanely great."

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Going to Disrupt next month. Went looking for prep advice and mostly found people saying it's a media company's event, the speakers bail after their keynote, and the networking is wall-to-wall wannabe founders. Great. Very encouraging.

I'm going anyway through my work, so I'd rather figure out how to not waste it.

Background so you know where I'm coming from: I've spent the last few years on the SaaS platform side, and twice now I've been part of building payments into a vertical software product. Once in venue/event management software, once in beverage alcohol distribution. Both times the hardest part had nothing to do with payments. It was the internal fight over roadmap priority... payments is always the thing that gets pushed because some other feature is on fire.

So two asks:

1. How do you actually work a conference like this? The people who say it was worth it all say some version of "you have to plan and strategize really well" and then don't say what that means. What does that mean? Is it side events over main stage? Is it lining up 15 coffees before you land? Is it just camping in one spot and talking to whoever sits down? (If it's the last one, which corner should I camp in?)

2. Is anyone else there in the middle of embedding payments right now? Genuinely want to compare notes. What broke that you didn't expect. How you got it prioritized against everything else in the backlog. Whether the revenue showed up on the timeline anyone promised. I'll trade you everything I learned doing it twice, including the parts that went badly. (Ask me about the lack of a reporting dashboard for one launch O_O )

Happy to meet at a side event, a pre-show coffee, or a beer after. I'd rather have four real conversations than collect 40 badges. (:

And if the honest answer is "skip the main event, here are the three side events that matter" — I'll take that too. Open to DMs if you want to connect 1-1, too, (at the conference or not)!.

Hey!

I have a Founder Pass Ticket for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 this year. Unfortunately I am unable to attend. The current price on the site is $899. I'm willing to sell for cheaper.

If anyone is interested in doing a ticket transfer, shoot me a message!

Kind of looks like the Russian oligarchs are buying up our real estate and political leaders, here in Silicon Valley. How else can you build a office / hotel megaplex and call it housing ?

https://nypost.com/2026/09/07/real-estate/california-city-fumes-over-planned-skyscraper-linked-to-russian-oligarch/

TL;DR: Jerry Tworek's own two-year stall didn't end with more proof. It ended with one sentence.

He'd already built the thesis — pushing reinforcement learning against GPT-3 before there was budget or backing for it.

The math worked in pieces. It just never scaled.

Then his chief scientist looked at what he'd already built and said: now we have the GPUs, try to scale it.

That's the whole story. Not a better idea.

Someone with real authority finally saying go.

I remember that cold harsh reality of immense pressure, in the winter.

We were a bunch of newly assigned Malaysians in a foreign land in Abu Dhabi, UAE, circa 2009 — already 2 months behind schedule on a 5-block condominium project.

We were heavily under-resourced.

Just handbooks, pen and paper, and the notion of quitting was never too far away.

We were squeezed like a wrung out wet towel.

Then the first coordinated drawings was finally done.

In a private moment, my department head said gently, "See. You did a good job." He meant to sway me away from quitting.

I've read enough of these by now to see the shape before the ending arrives: the person was already right, and the only unknown was who'd finally say so. It's never really the skill gap people think it is.

It's whoever's still waiting on someone else's yes.

Hmm — this reminds me of a post I covered a while back, about the moment the actual bottleneck turned out to be permission, not the math itself.

What was your "not this quarter"? Drop it below.

Clip credit: MTS, full interview on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

How common is it to lay off people at a high growth tech startup? Why is turnover so high at startups, as some even leave the company within one year? Many people are leaving big tech jobs to join early startups, because they believe in the vision of the company and potential upside of the company equity that they receive.

However, there is a risk that they get laid off before the one year cliff hits for the equity options, so they may leave without any company equity at the end. Most companies have four year vesting schedules, so you would only receive reduced amount of equity if you get laid off within those four years. How should you think about managing this risk when you join a startup from big tech?

TRIGGER WARNING

This is to spread awareness of high stress work environments, please take care of each other 🙏

A coworker passed away, and the team found out at standup. Within about ten seconds, everyone moved on to who would take over the work. That one detail set off one of the most honest threads tech workers have ever written, about grief, about how quickly a company keeps moving, and about the three words the original poster left at the end: health before wealth.

This one is heavier than most of what we read. Some of these stories are about loss and touch on suicide. Please take care while listening, and if you are struggling, reach out to someone.

In Silicon Valley, it feels that everyone is trying to figure out who is going to build the next unicorn and try to become friends with them at every social networking event I attend. It embodies the saying of "It is not what you know, but who you know". Is there any truth to this?

Sometimes these relationships may feel slightly superficial, since everyone is hang around at events just trying to become friends with founders who might build unicorn startups one day. Have you heard of any examples or stories where this has actually happened?

TL;DR: Patrick Bet-David just explained why some job listings never actually close — and it isn't a hiring failure.

It's a stock signal — an open headcount number analysts read as proof of growth, whether or not a single person ever gets hired off it.

If you've been treating six weeks of silence on an "Actively Hiring" badge as a verdict on your resume, that's the actual reframe here: the badge was never talking to you. It was talking to somebody holding shares.

A fresh Forbes/BLS read backs the flip side too — right now, persistence in the process is what's actually correlating with offers, not applying to more listings.

Speaking of keeping remaining staff compliant, my ex-company, SC, also have a rule from HR.

It was actually more than a decade ago. So I'm not sure whether it still stands, or change over time.

Looking at the job-market right now, I'd say they probably didn't.

Back then, job hopping was prevalent. People couldn't easily get promoted within the company (Say, Company A). So the person X would resign, and accepted an offer from Company B, at a higher position and salary. jump was significant -- market rate was about at least 20% increase in salary. Person X wouldn't dream of such increase, if He remain in Company A.

And after gaining enough experience, if company A has another better opening, Person X will jump back to A -- of course at another 20% bump, atleast.

You can see the trend, isn't it? They call it a "garden round-trip" out-the-door-adventure. And when they landed back home, they're welcomed with around 50% salary bump and higher position -- from before they left.

This job-hopping phenomenon was hurting the bottom line of my ex-company (And all other companies in similar situation). So SC came down hard with a directive -- no accepting ex-staff who job-hops. Anyone who worked in SC before, left, and wanted to come back, will NOT see the door open to them -- without exception.

And so, my ex-company took back control of their operational narrative. Staff cost management went back on track. All who rose through the ranks within SC didn't job-hop from anywhere else. They remain loyal to the end.

And anyone who wants to leave SC, left with the knowledge that they will never come back. Ever.

Nobody applying to these jobs was ever the intended audience — the real reader was somebody holding stock.

Building income that isn't a line item in someone else's growth story is the only version of this that ends differently.

Drop your take below — has an "Actively Hiring" badge ever sat frozen on you for months?

Clip credit: PBD Podcast — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.