161–170 of 209 posts
I've been in both camp, founder and employee in a startup. From my experience, sharing is mostly bad. Very often, you'll be tempted to share good news too early, and very often it won't materialize (startup life is a roller coaster) This alone will erode the morale of your team. But there is an other factor, many humans, when presented with data and problems, tend to at least think about solutions, and they dislike b…
Obviously there's some stuff which simply must be confidential, like HR stuff, as well as early stage negotiations. But otherwise the default should be transparency.
But what you should really worry about is risk appetite. Your employees will have different appetite for risk to you. That’s why you’re a founder and they are not.
That’s neither good nor bad. It just is.
Be conscious if this when you share things. Even if you can control the message, different people will respond to events differently.
For example:
- You have 6 months of expenses worth of of cash in the bank, and you are spending 110% of MRR each month. Is that plenty of runway, or not much at all? The answer depends on risk appetite.
- You decide to bid on a contract that’s way beyond your current product’s feature set. If you win the pilot you’ll need to build a stack of features fast and might neglect other customers while you do. Is that exciting or awful? Depends who you ask.
- You turn down an acquisition offer. If you accepted, the other 6 folks could have each put a deposit on a nice house. But you believe you could be 10x bigger than the offer. Will everyone else share this belief or would they rather cash out? Depends on their… you guessed it.
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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.
Share 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.
While I agree on the benefits of sharing information and always being transparent, one should be mindful on how to communicate strategic and sensitive information internally, specially with regard to junior staff: - Avoid generating too much expectation, which can lead to frustration if things don't materialize, and impact team morale. - Always provide context so the team can better understand how/why events took pla…
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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.…
I don’t see any out there that indicates they beat the original idea to the market by way of breached NDA or non-compete.
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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…
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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 be…
Or even "we just invoiced $5k for that project, I didn't get $5k, that seems unfair". Some people find it difficult to see all the different places that gross revenue has to go in order to keep the lights on and the wheels turning.