I had the opportunity to join some former colleagues as their first Founding Engineer at their early-stage Y-Combinator start-up. I was excited to join them and help build something from the ground up. I was also excited to learn more about the start-up world and see if it was something I wanted to pursue further.

After about 5 months, that start-up is no more as I was told it was shutting down and I was let go. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts and experiences from my brief time there because it wasn't all bad.

Why I Joined

I already had an amazing job at Palantir, and although I've had many recruiters reach out to me during my time there, nothing really caught my eye enough to give up what I had at PLTR. But when my former lead reached out to me about their start-up, I was intrigued. It mitigated some of the risks of joining a start-up because I knew I enjoyed working with my lead and the product they were working on was something I had experience with. It was super early stage and they were already part of Y-Combinator, so I thought it was worth a shot. I didn't expect such rare opportunities to come by often.

What I Learned

The driving force for learning things at a start-up is necessity. You have to wear many hats and do things you've never done before. The problem with this is you might not end up doing them well - but you still get to expose yourself to new things. Here are just some of the things I learned:

• Using Systemctl to manage applications on our EC2 instances (I used to use PM2 or Docker but this works too)
• A lot of AWS (Wow does the UI suck. I feel like you could make start-ups for each AWS service just to make the UI better. That's kinda what Vercel is lol.)
• Publishing NPM libraries (pain in the ass to deal with all the different JS versions)
• Go (pretty cool language actually! I've heard Rust has some similarities. I liked how easy it is to compile and run and the static type checking)
• Some Docker

Non-technical:

• Talking to investors
• Finding and talking to (potential) customers
• Thinking about start-ups and products

My biggest mindset shift would probably be that I no longer have an aversion to working on ideas that I deem to have already been done. Before chatting to founders at YC, I would discredit many potential ideas because I could find examples of it being attempted already. I no longer think of that as a valid reason not to attempt something by itself.

My Advice

Although my time at the start-up was brief, I do have some general advice/stuff I wish I heard:

• Make sure you know who you are going to be work with and be sure you are happy to be working with them closely. If you have any reason to doubt that working with them will be unpleasant, do your research and ideally avoid it. It's not worth it.
• When leaving your current job, make sure you have a clear understanding of what you are giving up and what you are gaining. I underestimated what I was giving up and overestimated what I was gaining. I was lucky that I was able to return to Palantir after the start-up failed, but I know that's not always the case. Make sure you leave on the best of terms.
• Don't feel guilty - however the way things turn out, you cannot have known the future. You made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time. Don't beat yourself up over it.
• Trust your network/mentors and talk to them about your decision. They can provide you with valuable insights and advice.

Although my time at the start-up was brief, I'm glad I took the opportunity. Super excited to be back at Palantir and I'm looking forward to what's next :)