If a large enough chunk of the information, that happens to be what you'd give to your employees to be frank about the direction your start-up is going, is stuff that your competitors can use, then why aren't you making these employees sign an NDA?
Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
111–120 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#112Share 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.
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.
In my experience, people that actively don't want full info are usually not the same people who are interested in being early employees at a startup.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not necessarily about anything shady though, it can just as easily be legitimate differences of opinion, too many cooks in the kitchen, bikeshedding, or landgrab concerns.
You are right, I'm a bit cynical here. But that's what makes the phrase brilliant - it can be used for both and it's hard to figure out which one it is on the spot.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your explanations for why employees at an early stage startup might care about upcoming business deals seem to be missing the obvious one to me, that you’ve employed people who are thinking about the business as a whole rather than their tiny slice of the picture. The single most vital thing in an early stage startup is acquiring customers, and these deals are how that’s done, why wouldn’t one of seven employees at t…
It's not beneficial to have every single person at the company thinking about the business as a whole. Now more than ever, we live in an age of specialization and it's counterproductive for all the people at the company to be thinking about the business as a whole. That is why there are departments, teams, and other groupings with discrete responsibilities: the separation of responsibilities and focus on small, manag…
thinking about =\= working on
I can learn about my company’s deal flow and benefit from that without needing to spend six hours in Quickbooks
It’s good for me to know the feature I’m building is important to a prospective customer who has an emphasis on security, even if I don’t sit on a call with them
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#115Transparency is great, and I think the main balance that might be missing in this context is how much frequency/latency there is between events that are taking place. I see it more like a stock ticker. There are ups and downs, some big swings that happen at a micro scale, and then overall trends.
It’s good to identify how much frequency your team can handle and where to dial that in.
E.g. Monday: really hot lead, Monday afternoon: just got off call, lead upset about missing feature - not sure if deal will happen, Tuesday: contract sent. Wednesday: Lots of red lines, not sure if we can do this. Thursday: Deal signed. — This is very high frequency reporting with lots of ups and downs. It can be hard for a team to even focus with this amount of thrashing.
Another example: Monday: Prospective client, Next Monday: Contract won/lost, and these are the reasons.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#116Most up-voted comments seem to be of the opinion that companies should be fully open with their employees. Most companies I have seen do the opposite, they control information to a need to know basis. May be it's a result of where I am coming from.
Would be really grateful if anyone would share a list of companies that are fully open with their employees?
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you verify this was the case every time you heard it?
What sort of information could cause confusion in the workplace, exactly? Excluding private HR data obviously.
You go from focusing on executing a well defined strict set of tasks that closely fit your brag worthy skills to pondering a partially defined set of fuzzy "more important" goals that poorly fit your skills while unsure if your noob input would either make you look like an idiot or be very valuable.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#118My 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…
Exactly. Thinking back the transparent places correlate to the places I felt more at home. I only just made that connection now. It is a way more interesting all hands meeting in a transparent company too. All though the opaques tended not to have them.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#119Transparency is great, and I think the main balance that might be missing in this context is how much frequency/latency there is between events that are taking place. I see it more like a stock ticker. There are ups and downs, some big swings that happen at a micro scale, and then overall trends. It’s good to identify how much frequency your team can handle and where to dial that in. E.g. Monday: really hot lead, Mon…
This is about knowing your audience. Sales manager would want all this info. Engineer probably doesn’t. Same way sales person doesn’t need “looks like bug is fixed” “failed a CI test” “getting help from platform team” etc…. Just “the SSO bug you raised last week is now fixed”
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#120Startups are largely a financial vehicle to shift value created by employees to founders and investors
If you believe that and you're still an employee, what's holding you back from founding a company? Moving from low-paying job A to high-paying job B not only benefits you, but causes average pay for A to increase and B to decrease, following a supply & demand curve. As more people switch from employee to founder, the value transfer and inequality you observe will decrease.
I’m working on my own startup