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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?

#141

Post by sasquatch69 »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #87
sasquatch69 wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

They don't frame it as “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?”

It's a "coincidence" that occurs a short time period after seeing the information.

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

#142

Post by sasquatch69 »

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…

If you can't think of a level of transparency that was a hindrance to the company, then the company is not fully transparent.

No company has ever had 100% smooth sailing.

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

#143

Post by sasquatch69 »

sanderjd wrote: post #56
sasquatch69 wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

I don't relate to this. It seems like there may be a lack of understanding of or alignment on the long term path if this is a problem. I'm at a very transparent fairly early stage company right now and when I see how much money we have in the bank, I think "that's great news for our roadmap and long term path to profitability or further investment", not "how can I get me more of that sweet cash".

My company would widely be considered as stable, I'm personally 100% long term on our company. So it's past the "great news for our roadmap and long term path to profitability or further investment" phase. Although we're not massive either (few mil, rapid growth). Also bootstrapped from $300, so I could see it being different for venture funded situations.

Different companies/team compositions might have different best paths.

It's more "why are you hiring someone, when you could give everyone a bigger bonus" vibes. Where my goal is to say, give 2x the bonus in the future via the hire instead, but an employee could justifiably, for their own reasons, want more money today.

I'm saying that^ in the context, of, in my opinion, big picture employees as well.

I agree there's sometimes misalignment, everyone has their own goals/aspirations/career, and they sometimes aren't the same as the company goal/timeline. At the end of the day, that doesn't mean that they aren't capable of making valuable contributions or that we don't want to support their goals. That is ok, it's impossible to be everyone's everything.

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

#144

Post by Ken_At_EM »

sasquatch69 wrote: post #139
Ken_At_EM wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just don’t understand that point of view.

Why aren’t employees at Apple asking for a piece of their massive cash horde?

If the only thing keeping an employee from asking or demanding they be given some of the companies property is the knowledge that property exists then you probably don’t want them in your company.

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

#145

Post by metadat »

no-reply wrote: post #101
ljfp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is what I have seen at Amazon.

Doesn't Amazon do blackout periods for most grunt-level employees?

Usually only executive-level and higher employees have access to information considered material to the business trajectory at large. Emphasis on usually; all that boring bigcorp training covers the ins and outs.

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

#146

Post by Ken_At_EM »

SnowHill9902 wrote: post #126
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.

Ok sure. Better for me - weak competitors.

What would make a competitor weak, exactly?

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

#147

Post by rmk »

yAt8Pirng5fSxax wrote: post #133
rmk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and trust plays a huge role in that more than anything else. Information sharing is unlikely to make a huge difference for a close-knit group that likely knows one another quite well to begin with.

Even in a 7-person company, there aren't many direct interactions between disparate functions that are called for, or even desirable, for that matter. Employees and founders/co-founders have massively different incentives and need for information. Some functions, such as HR, actually rely on keeping a lid on certain types of information to function properly!

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

#148

Post by WaitWaitWha »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #93
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean where a technology was stolen then reproduced, impacting the inventing businesses? I ran a quick brave search and came up with a few articles about knock offs[0][1][2].

There are myriad of other examples, or different scenarios where an NDA or non-compete failed, and another company just puts out a product faster and cheaper. Happens with software, hardware, and of course business processes.

[0] https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/amusing-knockoffs-popular-tech...

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/30-knockoff-products-tha...

[2] https://www.liveabout.com/hilarious-knock-off-brands-4767601

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

#149

Post by borski »

rmk wrote: post #67
jon-wood wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

I would argue that the specialization you’re referring to is what causes very many early stage startups to fail. Before you’ve found product market fit, you need everyone to be thinking about the whole product, even if they’re not working on the whole product.

Also, give “Range” a read. It’s a fantastic book and may help change your mind.

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

#150

Post by w10-1 »

Reliance.

Mutual dependency in a small business, or depending on a critical component, is a kind of risk that's mitigated with sharing, both first-order (knowing) and second order (knowing you'll know when you need to know).

It's the same for technology development as for partnerships or funding. If a partnership or technology is not really key to the mutual reliance, there's no big driver for sharing. If sharing would create more uncertainty than silence, that's a blocker.

I find it comes down to scheduling when to address an issue. When trouble is brewing, I try to ensure people have the skills and background they need before I bring things to a boil (or it boils over on its own).

My goal is to have people face an issue, manage it properly, and move on. After lots of battles like this, even if we lose, we still know we're in it together, we'll be ready to face things as they come, and it's be ok, even if we lose one or two.

The solution to the uncertainties of mutual reliance is experience in the trenches together -- particularly scaling focus, effort, and alignment (only) as needed.

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