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

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

#21

Post by sgallant »

chrsig wrote: post #14

The best way to ensure your employees wont be honest or transparent with you is to not be honest or transparent with them. Or maybe to put it a bit more harshly: You're not important enough to be hiding details Be open, honest, and realistic . Say what you hope will come to be as a result of your actions. Be clear when things aren't set in stone. Be transparent so that they can all work towards the same goals. If you…

+1 to this comment.

Before I founded my company, I worked for another startup that wasn’t very transparent. It was not a healthy/empowering environment.

Now, when dealing with things like partnerships, customers, and finance (runway, burn, revenue, fundraising, etc) I ask myself “what type of company would I want to work at?” and I always lean towards transparency.

Having said that, this needs to be done carefully. Instead of pumping everyone up about a potential partnership that could fall flat, you should try to be realistic and objective about it. “I’m really excited about a potential partnership with X. Even though this partnership will require we invest some resources doing Y, I see the possible benefits to the company as Z. From my perspective, this is a good opportunity for us. This isn’t finalized so I’ll keep you up to date on our progress. Let me know if you have any concerns or questions about this.”

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

#22

Post by bagels »

aintmeit wrote: post #2

Here 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…

I think the motivation of early employees can be quite different from what you propose. I can speak to my own motivation:

Knowing what partners are in the pipe lets me contribute to landing the customer in the first place. I can work with exec to team on how we can improve the product to appeal to the customer. I can provide costing estimates to see if the customer is worth acquiring.

A big part of startup compensation is tied up in equity. If there is no insight in to the business health, I am not able to accurately value my employment.

One of the opportunities in a startup is in learning how you might eventually run your own business. Learning about customer acquisition, about corporate structure and strategy, and about fundraising are all things I expect to be exposed to in exchange for much lower compensation.

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

#23

Post by kareemsabri »

aintmeit wrote: post #2

Here 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…

Perhaps they care cause early stage startups are hard and it can feel like a Sisyphean task, so encouragement / interest from outside parties helps drive their motivation.

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

#24

Post by kareemsabri »

I don't think I'd worry about the risk of them leaving (unless you have some highly lucrative IP, and as a fintech you probably don't). The thing with sharing potential deals is mostly just they will usually fall through / not happen, so do you want them to ride the ups and downs with you? I'd probably share while keeping their expectations realistic, cause otherwise it can feel like working in a vacuum.

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

#25

Post by Ken_At_EM »

Share 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.

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

#26

Post by dataflow »

kareemsabri wrote: post #24

I don't think I'd worry about the risk of them leaving (unless you have some highly lucrative IP, and as a fintech you probably don't). The thing with sharing potential deals is mostly just they will usually fall through / not happen, so do you want them to ride the ups and downs with you? I'd probably share while keeping their expectations realistic, cause otherwise it can feel like working in a vacuum.

Yeah this is the biggest issue to me. Don't voluntarily give out news that might not come to fruition. Crushing high hopes is worse than not giving them in the first place.

If a particular employee seems keen to learn more, and you think they might benefit from knowing, you could privately let them know there are tentative things you're pursuing, and give an example or two, while being cautious with them and telling them it might fall through. But no need to announce things that haven't happened yet.

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

#27

Post by Ken_At_EM »

mamoriamohit wrote: post #3

"What if we train our people and they leave?" "What if we don't and they stay?" Forward-looking entrepreneurs are building in public. In my opinion, sharing news and information with core team is overall a positive investment. If there's a lack of trust, maybe, there are bigger problems in the startup to fix?

Not investing into your people is a sure fire way to be ineffective and signal to people that they’re not worth training and should leave. Couldn’t agree more with you.

I have made the claim in support of transparency before that it matters little if even my competitor would be able to get ahold of my road map as an extreme example of transparency. My forecast is that sure, they might zig or zag a bit differently but the reality is that their road map is already full of the things that they need to build next as well as their best ideas. They are my competitor, and generally they are going to consider their ideas superior to my own, so why would you expect them to change and copy my road map?

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

#28

Post by enra »

I’d default to transparency and share things that can be useful for people to know, consider not sharing things that can be distracting.

Customer or partnership deals can be useful to share because the team can help with those but talking about future fundraising might be just distracting and the team might not be able to do anything.

We do monthly business review with the whole company (25ppl now), going through growth, revenue, cash flow, customers etc.

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

#29

Post by Ken_At_EM »

We have a company scorecard that shows sales funnels, bookings, production numbers, cash and collections info, etc, all completely open to any employee at the company.

A soldering technician on our team can literally see how we’re doing on cash and collections at any time.

We have company-wide updates 2-4 times a month where we brief all employees on important ongoings for 30 minutes.

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

#30

Post by rufius »

If you trust them enough to work on your product at such a crucial time, then you should trust them enough to give them full transparency.

Siloing info rarely benefits anyone. At best it builds incompetence and distrust (lack of full picture), and at worst it dooms best laid plans.

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