You should ask other founders about this. I wouldn’t leave important decisions up to HN’s crowdsourced truth-seeking.
Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
51–60 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I rarely find the "people will be confused by full transparency" line very convincing. To me it seems like there is some other, unstated reason to be less transparent - because confusion is easily remedied by prioritizing certain information while making the rest just accessible if someone wants to look.
> To me it seems like there is some other, unstated reason to be less transparent Hiring, mostly. If you hire people that don't want, care, or are able to understand the full picture, the transparency won't pay off. But at small sizes, you generally want to hire people that both can and are eager to understand the whole picture.
If you have cash and you're transparent, your employees are likely to ask for it if you have a personal relationship with them.
I would say this is frequently even the case for big picture employees.
I'm saying this also as the lowest compensated person at my company for ~5 years.
To me it's more of an ideal world vs real world. Ideally you can share everything, in reality the outcome is likely to have a negative impact on both employee satisfaction and profit. Ie most likely giving employees a raise and them still thinking they aren't getting enough due to them seeing the big $ in the bank.
My preferred approach is budget level (we can spend x on y, I am open to your ideas) and number light executive summary (we have x months runway, not we have y in the bank). You can also give someone a smaller piece of transparency and see how they react if you think the employee could be someone with the skill set to manage a budget in the future.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#53Here are things that I would consider significantly more important than wanting to pump up employees by giving them information on partnerships: - making sure your business model is viable - involving employees in the software development process so they understand the user's perspective when developing the product - paying people fairly - helping employees structure work/life balance - having clear and scoped value…
Your explanations for why employees at an early stage startup might care about upcoming business deals seem to be missing the obvious one to me, that you’ve employed people who are thinking about the business as a whole rather than their tiny slice of the picture. The single most vital thing in an early stage startup is acquiring customers, and these deals are how that’s done, why wouldn’t one of seven employees at t…
> why wouldn’t one of seven employees at the company want to know about how the business is doing?
If the early-stage employees have significant equity in the company, then they'll be very interested in how the company is doing. If their upside is paycheck, bonus and equity proportional to their salary (as you'd find in an established company), then one employer is as good as another.
I think the question of how much information to share is heavily dependent on how loyal the employees are to the company, and loyalty is almost entirely a matter of how much equity they hold (and more specifically how much equity they hold relative to the founders.)
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#54I'm also in the full transparency boat with two exceptions:
1) if the partnership requires NDA or another type of secret/security then keep that limited.
2) many deals fall through, so I choose to delay worthless detail on those till the deals are more mature.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#55I have worked for small companies that shared virtually everything. It did not go well when senior people found out their bosses where making n times their salary, among other stuff. The lesson is that you should only share what you can afford to share. If you do share stuff, share it async instead of spamming meetings.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To me it seems like there is some other, unstated reason to be less transparent Hiring, mostly. If you hire people that don't want, care, or are able to understand the full picture, the transparency won't pay off. But at small sizes, you generally want to hire people that both can and are eager to understand the whole picture.
If you have cash and you're transparent, your employees are likely to ask for it if you have a personal relationship with them. I would say this is frequently even the case for big picture employees. I'm saying this also as the lowest compensated person at my company for ~5 years. To me it's more of an ideal world vs real world. Ideally you can share everything, in reality the outcome is likely to have a negative imp…
I don't relate to this. It seems like there may be a lack of understanding of or alignment on the long term path if this is a problem. I'm at a very transparent fairly early stage company right now and when I see how much money we have in the bank, I think "that's great news for our roadmap and long term path to profitability or further investment", not "how can I get me more of that sweet cash".
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#57Startups are largely a financial vehicle to shift value created by employees to founders and investors
If you believe that and you're still an employee, what's holding you back from founding a company?
Moving from low-paying job A to high-paying job B not only benefits you, but causes average pay for A to increase and B to decrease, following a supply & demand curve. As more people switch from employee to founder, the value transfer and inequality you observe will decrease.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#58Share it all. Complete transparency. Show them the cash flow. At your small size you will benefit from the additional trust and alignment this will bring. You may find yourself delighted in finding that many of your team can see and solve problems that you may have missed. You can be super secretive to combat the BigCo mentality like Apple when you have the first class problem of being a BigCo.
Not everyone wants all the information and with many business plans, knowing the full version might be confusing to people working on today's stuff. I advocate balancing full transparency (I certainly don't mean to hide any info!) with a culture that can create a time and place for conversations that might go beyond today's work.
I have never had anyone become negatively confused by our transparency.
They ask for clarification, you provide it, and they are that much more effective.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone wants all the information and with many business plans, knowing the full version might be confusing to people working on today's stuff. I advocate balancing full transparency (I certainly don't mean to hide any info!) with a culture that can create a time and place for conversations that might go beyond today's work.
> knowing the full version might be confusing to people working on today's stuff. Are those really the sort of people you want joining your <10 member startup?
Yeah, I’d agree with you and say absolutely not.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#60There's two categories of responses on this page:
1. people who have never ran a business and been fully transparent
2. people who've done it and recommend selective transparency because of the consequences
haha