> never underestimate the amount of money the FAANGs have to poach your talent. I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's a loaded word with negative connotations, but what it really means here is "offer someone a better situation than you offered them". Employees have agency, they aren't wild elephants who need your "protection" from "predators" who just want to pay them more.
But the FAANGs have a huge unfair advantage over startups - their size gives them monopoly power that disadvantages small companies. That's a failure of American governance. Economists used to all know that markets needed to be regulated to make competition fair --- and efficient. But the American right has pushed for 50 years to deregulate everything, and the FAANGs have benefited from this rollback of anti-trust. I…
If you, as a founder, don’t want to give up equity, who’s fault is that? You’re expecting employees to work for a pittance of what they can make elsewhere and take on the risk without upside.
If employees are look at your business and decide the probability of their equity being worth anything is too low, who’s fault is that? You’re trying to dupe them into taking a bad deal, or failing to communicate the opportunity.
If your company cannot scale to provide market-rate salaries, whose fault is that? You’re expecting your employees to give up their salaries and their financial security to subsidize a non-competitive lifestyle business that suits you, not them. You’d better figure out some incentive where that equation makes sense.