You Don't Need to Be Employee Seven

The ground floor is not the only floor with meaningful upside.

🍽️ Apply here to indicate your interest in the FYSK dinners — There’s still a few spots left this summer!

The Ground-Floor Myth

Engineers often tell us they want to join a company at the ground floor. The instinct makes sense. Join early enough and your equity could be meaningful. You get to shape the product, influence the culture, and say you were there before the company had a proper logo.

But early and high-upside are not always the same thing. The ground floor comes with the risk that the building never gets built, the product may not work, and the market only exists in the fundraising deck.

There’s another compelling moment: when a company has real traction, customers, and evidence that it’s working—but still has an enormous amount left to build.

A billion-dollar valuation can sound like the party is over. Sometimes it means the product finally works and the party got a liquor license.

After the Signal Is Clear

On a recent podcast, Founders Fund’s Brian Singerman described a new perspective on venture investing: the hardest part is not only finding the winners early. It is continuing to recognize the winner after it stops looking early – Founder’s fund put roughly one-third of a fund into Palantir at a $1 billion valuation.

The same principle applies to choosing where to work.

An engineer considering SpaceX or Anthropic after the product and market were credible might have worried they missed the ground floor. But equity does not need to start cheap to become valuable. FYSK featured Anthropic in February 2023, when it was worth roughly $5 billion. It was not exactly hiding in a garage. Today, Anthropic is valued at $965 billion. Holding ownership constant, $100,000 of equity maps to roughly $19 million today. The ground floor was gone. Apparently, almost none of the upside was.

Serval and Owner are far from being companies with three people and a deck. They have products, customers, and incredible momentum. But the larger markets they’re pursuing are far from finished. It’s time to change your mindset from “What has already been done” to “How much is there left to do.”

General Matter

General Matter may be the clearest example.

Scott Nolan founded the company to rebuild America’s domestic nuclear-fuel capabilities. It is focused on uranium enrichment and advanced nuclear fuel production, one of the most important bottlenecks facing the next generation of nuclear energy. The company has secured a $900 million Department of Energy task order and raised $50 million in a round led by Founders Fund.

A meaningful amount has already been proven.

But the hard work is not over. General Matter still has to build complex physical infrastructure, develop and operate enrichment technology, navigate a heavily regulated industry, and help restore a critical part of the American industrial base.

That is not getting in after the adventure. That is the adventure.

The best startup jobs are not always at companies nobody has heard of yet.

Sometimes they’re at companies everyone can see are working—but few people understand how far they still have to run.

Apply here if you’re interested in dinner with General matter or future FYSK dinners.