As much as they'd like? For me personally after having been ice burnt by the kookaid I'd be very worried if there was hand waiving and cloudiness for things I actually want to understand and get details about. In that regards show me cap tables, show me who gets what kind of preferred vesting, what impact is future funding rounds going to have on my outcomes, what stories, I mean assumptions, are your valuations predicated on? Unlike founders afaik most employees don't have the ability to sell early stock and have to wait years and years for an exit. So full transparency is the least one can do to earn trust.
Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
131–140 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, I'd never want a "what should I do?" person as an early startup hire. This doesn't apply to tanks or healers, only dps. Playing tank as an infra person I would do my team a disservice if I didn't make myself available on a dime to unblock my team. Big picture is fine for the planning meetings but on small teams I'm usually the only one, I have a bunch of cooldowns to keep track of, and don't alwa…
Healers don't go around asking who needs healing, they see low health and prioritize. That is not asking "what should I do?", that is being proactive about the needs of the team.
This framing is extremely stupid and misses the point entirely.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#133Earlier 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…
Those departments, teams, and other groupings - none of which probably exist in a 7 person company, by the way - have to interact with each other.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Healers don't go around asking who needs healing, they see low health and prioritize. That is not asking "what should I do?", that is being proactive about the needs of the team.
This framing is extremely stupid and misses the point entirely.
That's pretty uncharitable of you. I am an infra person myself and while I appreciate the parent's point about making themselves available to pick up other things on a dime, I was trying to point out that you can also proactively identify needs and address them as an infra person, often in ways that can be applied to other teams and that this is very much not asking for what they should be doing.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#135Depends on what you mean by info - founders (me included) sometimes mistake dreams and wishes for sure facts. This can backfire spectacularly if the hype doesn’t pan out.
So like everyone else I say you should most definitely over-share but only once it passes facts check. Whatever that means for you & your company.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#136Earlier 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…
> why wouldn’t one of seven employees at the company want to know about how the business is doing? If the early-stage employees have significant equity in the company, then they'll be very interested in how the company is doing. If their upside is paycheck, bonus and equity proportional to their salary (as you'd find in an established company), then one employer is as good as another. I think the question of how much…
In my experience loyalty is almost entirely a matter of who feels trusted and valued... in which sharing information freely (or appearing to) is a major factor. Especially when that information is directly relevant to them and their own financial security - even if you're just making wages it's still nice to know that your employer is stable.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
This framing is extremely stupid and misses the point entirely.
That's pretty uncharitable of you. I am an infra person myself and while I appreciate the parent's point about making themselves available to pick up other things on a dime, I was trying to point out that you can also proactively identify needs and address them as an infra person, often in ways that can be applied to other teams and that this is very much not asking for what they should be doing.
Independently of the framing being stupid, that anyone thinks this is about an infra person being available to unblock a dev team or not is a perfect example of the confusion that can happen when "what should I do?" people get "what are we doing?" context.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#138There's two categories of responses on this page: 1. people who have never ran a business and been fully transparent 2. people who've done it and recommend selective transparency because of the consequences haha
Ah yes, the wisdom of MBAs and other career managers, which is working out so well elsewhere :P
The response trend seems to be based on personal experience rather than MBA/career manager.
I'm neither an MBA nor a career manager (started biz out of college with $300, 5 years lowest paid employee, few mil run rate now, no investors) and my transparency experience has been both positive and negative. So I only do transparency that (I think) leads to positive outcomes now.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have cash and you're transparent, your employees are likely to ask for it if you have a personal relationship with them. I would say this is frequently even the case for big picture employees. I'm saying this also as the lowest compensated person at my company for ~5 years. To me it's more of an ideal world vs real world. Ideally you can share everything, in reality the outcome is likely to have a negative imp…
We have plenty of money in the bank and our company is profitable. I’ve employed over 100 people during our 13 years of business. Not once have I ever had an employee say “hey man, I noticed you guys have more than the bare minimum level of working capital in the bank! How about you give me some?” Never. If you were telling everyone you were broke, asking them to believe in the mission and endure low pay for the caus…
My team is all well compensated, above top 5 US metro average, full remote and all highly technical.
It's surprising to me that out of 100 people no one asked for a raise after seeing a pool of money, although there's a lot of industries and types of employees out there.
It's a smart thing to do from the employee perspective-- I would do the same in their shoes, I don't hold it against them, I'm actually a big fan of ambitious employees, and I've granted their requests (maybe not the full value of their ask, but at least part) every time.
Your mileage may vary.
Re: Ask HN: How much info should founders share with early stage employees?
#140Most 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?
I don't know about fully open, but I think Buffer is an example of a company that shares unusually much. https://buffer.com/resources/revenue-dashboard/
There's some sort of list at https://openstartup.tm/ but I think a lot of companies listed there are open with only select pieces of info.
Both of these are about public sharing though. Employee sharing is trickier to know from the outside. Perhaps Valve Software because of the lack of hierarchy?