201–209 of 209 posts
At Stream with our team of 140 I like to share runway, burn, cash balance, revenue, burn multiple and CAC payback. Historically Stream has grown rapidly and the equity grants have been very significant compared to the base salaries. (who knows what the future brings, but hopefully that trend continues). So a significant part of our team's compensation is equity, I think it's only fair to be transparent about those to…
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…
You didn’t finish your post - if information is power, how much should be shared?
So, this is an important choice.
Only share what is needed for the task. But of course you can talk about your vision for the company, your ethics, long term goals etc.
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I disagree. Startup employees care about making a good product, too. That's the rule when you join a startup: you won't have the highest salary, and maybe your startup bankrupts in 6 months, but you get to have more impact. If you don't want the risk and don't want to care, go in an established company. But that all means that you should be transparent with startup employees, because many decisions depend on that at…
Sure, employees should care about making a good product, and should be provided all relevant info they need for that. They however do not need to know everything about how the business is run. Their focus should be on making the product.
As you said, not everyone can be into business. Which also means that not everyone can be technical. Who says that the business people are good at translating requirements from potential clients to technical employees? Isn't it likely that the technical people know more about what is technically possible?
If you share too much with your employees, what's the worse case? They leave with that data? So what? If the whole value of the startup is that the founder knows a bunch of business numbers, anyway it doesn't sound very promising.
However, if you don't share enough, maybe you miss very good solutions that they would come up with if they had access to all the data. Worse: if your interpretation of what the customers want and what is technically possible is slightly wrong, maybe you will send your whole startup in the wrong direction. All that just because you thought you knew what your technical people needed to make a good product.
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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…
If you work for a company so small that it's possible to have that transparency, the assumption that your job is safe should never have entered your mind. Startups that small are always a risk. Anyone joining a company like that must know that going in. Making sure people are aware of that risk is part of full transparency.
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.
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If you work for a company so small that it's possible to have that transparency, the assumption that your job is safe should never have entered your mind. Startups that small are always a risk. Anyone joining a company like that must know that going in. Making sure people are aware of that risk is part of full transparency.
This is some very SV-centric view. That kind of transparency is possible with up to ~50 employees and plenty of businesses in the 10-50 person range are stable enough you can assume your job is safe. Not everywhere is searching for PMF-to-hyperscale.
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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.