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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.
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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.
In corpspeak of companies I've worked for, "this will cause confusion" is a codephrase for "we want to prevent someone complaining and making a fuss about shadier parts of our work". It's the ultimate "let's hide this because we know people won't like it" phrase.
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…
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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…
7 person startup, right? Presumably they hired people who can wear lots of hats and who can deal with uncertainty.
> they start wondering "are we failing?", "am I not doing a good enough job?", "is our product a failure?" etc etc.
Good. Questions lead to answers where there's transparency. I'd hope that the people making the product would understand the product, the business, and the customers.
It's very nice to be able to say you have a partnership that is being discussed - it's less nice to "pump them up" on a partnership that's not a sure thing.
So if you disclose (and I think most times founders should) - disclose responsibly.
That means - don't bullshit them about how real the partnership is. If it's "Just in the discussion phase" (or frankly, anything other than a signed deal) make sure they know it's not a sure thing.
"We're working on a partnership with ____. We think it can provide some great opportunities, but it's not a done deal. We're still trying to figure out the details, and there's a chance it may not happen - but right now it's being discussed".
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In corpspeak of companies I've worked for, "this will cause confusion" is a codephrase for "we want to prevent someone complaining and making a fuss about shadier parts of our work". It's the ultimate "let's hide this because we know people won't like it" phrase.
How did you verify this was the case every time you heard it?
Excluding private HR data obviously.
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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.
If they're confused you've hired the wrong people
If they think their people will be confused, they don't trust their people.
That's not necessarily the same thing as hiring the wrong people.