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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?

#91

Post by mupuff1234 »

kbos87 wrote: post #81

My experience kicks in quite a bit north of where you are, but for what it’s worth, I joined a company as employee ~150 that practiced near total transparency on everything. We went public, are now north of 8,000 employees, and it’s still nearly as transparent as when I joined - financials, product metrics, anonymized employee trends/HR data, major decisions… the list goes on but pretty much everything is done in the…

How does that level of transparency for a public company not lead to insider trading?

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

#93

Post by Ken_At_EM »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #83
outside1234 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few startups that need to be in “stealth mode”. If anything, startups need to be more vocal to get themselves on the map and to do way way more customer development.

Are you sure, specially in easily copied technology domains? In my experience, software, business processes, and hardware are best kept close to the vest until sufficient momentum and maybe market saturation is reached. It does not matter if the item holds a copyright/patent/trade mark; they are post even re-active solutions. It's like an ambulance after a car crash. Excellent if there are good doctors in the ambulan…

Please provide examples of “easily copyable technology.”

Putting together a team of competent engineers, developers, etc and having them create something meaningful is hard enough as it is. Trying to copy someone else’s tech doesn’t lower the bar all that much.

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

#94

Post by Ken_At_EM »

outside1234 wrote: post #74
SnowHill9902 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great way to have leaks and create lousy hygiene around information security. Culture is most difficult to revert then. The default should always be on a need-to-know basis. Anything else should be justified.

There are very few startups that need to be in “stealth mode”. If anything, startups need to be more vocal to get themselves on the map and to do way way more customer development.

I agree with you, I only remember, maybe once thinking that “yeah, those guys needed to be in stealth mode, that makes sense”

I think anyone who credits stealth mode with their success probably doesn’t realize they would very likely have also been successful without it.

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

#95

Post by cpitman »

whimsicalism wrote: post #32
musingsole wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

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.

Here's a non-conspiratorial reason: many engineers are not used to the uncertainty involved in day to day business negotiations and sales, and allow themselves to be stressed out what they see how the sausage is made. The reality is that lots of deals fall through, and that is normal. But if someone hasn't had a front row seat to that, they start wondering "are we failing?", "am I not doing a good enough job?", "is our product a failure?" etc etc.

I say this as someone who leads a team that handles the promotion and enablement of engineers into a role where they have a lot more visibility into sales and strategy, and have learned that they really need to have someone reassure them until the point that they realize that things are working out just fine.

That being said, I'm not sure of the wisdom of inflicting that stress on employees that don't have a need to see the Backoffice negotiations. Is there anything productive they can do, other then getting stressed?

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

#97

Post by etothepii »

webmobdev wrote: post #36
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…

This is great advise - if everyone could be a businessman, all of us would be and nobody would be an employee. Employees only care about their salary / stock options and professional growth and fulfilment. If an employee isn't confident in your ability to manage the business, they will jump ship (which is their right to do so, just as it is yours to fire them when the business falters). And so it is best to keep them…

Have you run a startup? Are you a senior dev? Have you managed a team?

I'm not asking to be rude, but if you are 45 having run a couple of startups (even if they both failed) I'd be really interested in this opinion and what experiences got you to it. If, however, you're still at college and this is "pure philosophy" it's of much less interest.

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

#98

Post by ljfp »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #91
kbos87 wrote: post #81

My experience kicks in quite a bit north of where you are, but for what it’s worth, I joined a company as employee ~150 that practiced near total transparency on everything. We went public, are now north of 8,000 employees, and it’s still nearly as transparent as when I joined - financials, product metrics, anonymized employee trends/HR data, major decisions… the list goes on but pretty much everything is done in the…

How does that level of transparency for a public company not lead to insider trading?

They can put in place some things to mitigate/prevent this. One example that comes to my mind is the use of trading windows for employees. I.e: you can buy company stocks only during some specific time windows announced at the start of the fiscal year.

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

#99

Post by LadyCailin »

IshKebab wrote: post #38
musingsole wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

You obviously don't have to force people to care about it. Just share the information. They can ignore it if they like. I have no idea why you think anyone would find this sort of information confusing.

Yeah, this is an extremely weird take.

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

#100

Post by rozenmd »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #91
kbos87 wrote: post #81

My experience kicks in quite a bit north of where you are, but for what it’s worth, I joined a company as employee ~150 that practiced near total transparency on everything. We went public, are now north of 8,000 employees, and it’s still nearly as transparent as when I joined - financials, product metrics, anonymized employee trends/HR data, major decisions… the list goes on but pretty much everything is done in the…

How does that level of transparency for a public company not lead to insider trading?

most folks don't want to go to prison?
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