Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

Historically Stream has grown rapidly and the equity grants have been very significant compared to the base salaries. (who knows what the future brings, but hopefully that trend continues).

So a significant part of our team's compensation is equity, I think it's only fair to be transparent about those topics. Also important to share the last round valuation and the revenue, since many startups that raised at too high prices are currently deeply underwater on their employee's equity.

We do lunch and learns on equity, evaluating startups etc. That is important since most people don't have prior experience with evaluating startups.

A friend of mine didn't exercise his stock options when he was early stage at a company that had an exit above 1B. I think that shows how hard it is to evaluate how startups are doing. But sharing the data is a good starting point.

This doesn't apply to tanks or healers, only dps. Playing tank as an infra person I would do my team a disservice if I didn't make myself available on a dime to unblock my team. Big picture is fine for the planning meetings but on small teams I'm usually the only one, I have a bunch of cooldowns to keep track of, and don't always have the context because I have a separate workstream that has to telegraph out ahead of the dev work.

I am always asking what I should do that has the most impact for my devs.

I definitely think that CxOs need to be aware of most of the things. I recently was asked to join a start-up in the C-suite, but had to turn it down. Too coy with details for my taste. If you trust me enough to invite me to take care of mission critical elements, do not hide things from me.

But, there is such a thing as over-sharing. Not every role is mission critical. If the role does not need the information to make business decisions there is no reason the share, in my opinion.

>Should I share info on upcoming behind-the-scenes partnerships, etc with employees to pump them up?

Will it directly impact their work? If so, share it with them. If not, what is "pump them up" mean? Are you looking for a Steven Ballmer presentation reaction?

I will presume you have an NDA and non-compete with all of your employees.

That said - full strategic insight into the vision and what‘s done to achieve it and welcoming input will engage employees in a very productive way, but requires free flow of information.

Usually, the benefits outweight the problems _by far_.