Ask HN: My startup bit the dust. No other experience. What should I do now?

8 points by hapanin 5 years ago | 5 comments

It's been over a month now since the emergence of a patent owned by a large, litigation-prone competitor came to light, causing us to shut down. I'm now trying to figure out what to do, but I have no proper software or corporate experience outside my own company, so I'm not actually sure what is a realistic next step.

Here's my resume highlights:

- CEO of a 4-year bootstrapped wearable sensors company founded straight out of college.

- Shipped 3k+ units

- Built a machine learning pipeline to solve arbitrary inertial gesture classification problems, deployed working model to hardware prototype

- more info, cv, etc: matoles.com

- B.S. Materials Science/Engineering

- Location: Seattle

- Age: 26

In the long run, I would like to start another ML company. Therefore my short term (2-4 year) objectives are:

- Work in the data science / ML field

- Make a lot of money

- No regard for work/life balance

Here are my questions for the hivemind:

- How feasible are the following routes, given my resume?

- If you had my resume and wanted to optimize for the above, what would you do?

- Are there any routes not on the list that I should consider? Are there important steps I'm missing?

- What gaps in my resume can I fill in the next 3 months?

1. Become a data scientist / ML engineer at a large company

1a. Study a lot. For the purpose of this post, let's assume my technical interview skills are in the top 25% of FAANG applicants.

1b. Publish 2-3 portfolio projects and maybe a paper on our startup's IP

1c. Apply to every relevant job I can find

2. Apply for leadership/non-IC positions at smaller companies

2a. Practice interviewing with colleagues in management

2b. Apply

I am concerned that my resume does not look like that of a typical management applicant. My experience shipping hardware might make up for this at a hardware/ML startup?

3. Do software or hardware (without ML) because the economy right now is garbage

Thanks everyone.

setgree 5 years ago |

A few thoughts:

* If I were interviewing you, I'd be concerned about whether you could take orders from a supervisor, and, more generally, work well with people that you didn't hand select. (Side note: are you good at those things, OP? It's ok if you're not, but it should frame your search). Is there a way you can take on a project where you aren't the boss?

* Have you processed the grief and loss over your previous startup, and are you really ready to jump back in to another thing? I'd wonder this if I were interviewing you, thinking that maybe you were looking for a rebound job but didn't really have your heart in it. Not sure how you would assuage that, except for taking some time off and working on some personal projects, ML-related or not.

* How much work would it be to turn your IP into an arXiv paper and accompanying well-documented repo? My own bias: I would look very favorably on this kind of work, because it shows 'public-midnedness', if you will. Bonus points if you can co-author with someone and not be first author (to point #1 above).

Good luck!

galesky 5 years ago |

IMHO Pretty strong resume in case of

* Starting engineering at FAANG/other large companies

* Management at startup

In my experience, in case of large companies, if you go well on the interviews for a higher role (senior/mgmnt) you may hear "we like you but you don't have experience working at this scale". This doesn't mean you don't get an offer, just that it may not be as high as expectations.

Adding to your list:

* Checking crunchbase to see which companies recently raised money -> most of them start hiring immediatelly after and there are thousands of them

* If the company is not a giant, FAANG like, and you know some of their stack (by reading blog posts and such) you can contribute to some OSS they use and bring that up on your resume/interview. This is more spearfishing than throwing a net, but it helps if you have known 'targets'

Edit : Formatting, misspelling

hapanin 5 years ago | |

Thanks for the specific advice. I think spear fishing will be a good starting strategy since there are a few topics I am very interested in.

barnabask 5 years ago |

Did you consider going to work for the large litigation-prone competitor?

hapanin 5 years ago | |

Probably not. They solved the problem in a different way than us, but because of how patents are written their patent covers our tech too. They actually acquired the patent by buying a startup, so they even have a ready-made team to implement.