Most of this didn't make sense to me, what resources could I use to get a better idea of the topics discussed in the post? Book recommendations?
How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
211–220 of 222 posts
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
The relevance of health care in this negotiation is contextual. For young, healthy, child-less people, their usage of health care is going to be minimal at best - and really amounts of catastrophic insurance against accidents or major illnesses. This changes dramatically if the individual has children, chronic illnesses, or other persistent conditions that will require regular use of the medical system. And also, ouc…
Yeah, they're fronting the other $1400 of the premium. We're a very small company and getting completely dicked by Blue Cross / Blue Shield. Doesn't help that most of the principals are senior people with families. I also chose the PPO over the HMO and FSA plans. I've btdt with those two and will never go back. Which brings me back to your first point. Yes, the healthcare aspect (especially in the US) is contextual.…
This is actually lower that what it cost me as a one-person company. Fortunately, my C-corp enables me to deduct health care costs (so long as the benefit is given to all employees). It is rather outrageous.
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough, as long as you're going into this with open eyes. It's not like most risks that startups take; inherently, most people wildly underestimate the risk that a personal relationship will go sour down the road. (If we didn't, a lot fewer people would get married.) I'm pretty sure if you ask most folks getting married what they estimate their chance of staying together is, they'll pick a number higher than ~50…
It's true that being romantically involved with a direct report is fraught, because the whole team will assume favoritism. But it's also obvious, and it does not take a management genius to come up with mechanisms both to avoid the problem and soothe the concerns of the team.
If that was easy, it wouldn't be standard practice at corporations to disallow it. In most large companies, if you are in a relationship with someone in your reporting line, one of you has to transfer or leave.
Even if the reality is that there's no favoritism, it opens you up to lawsuits both from the people who are involved, and from their coworkers. If they break up, and then he demotes her or lets her go, lawsuit city.
I've seen this firsthand at a major venture startup (but wasn't involved in it myself) - a fiancee/employee decides to leave an officer for one of the other officers of the company. Disastrous for the company.
Anyway, it's their company, and I respect that they can do whatever they want - I only raised this issue because it happens fairly often in the startup world that a very tiny company wants to hire someone in a relationship with an existing employee, and there's a lot of issues you bring on board when you do that.
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm biased, as I work with my spouse, but this is I think an overblown concern. People leave companies for all sorts of reasons, many of them dumb. They do not need to have made a lifelong personal commitment to their manager to find those reasons. Also, people do not need to have made that commitment in order to access their unprofessional self; normal team members find ways to be deeply unprofessional without entan…
Well as long as the reporting structure at work is the same as the reporting structure at home I'm sure it can work. When they are reversed its a recipe for disaster.
I'm not sure what you mean here. The working relationship I have with Erin is nothing like my home relationship with Erin.
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too find it incredibly strange and most importantly dangerous . 1) You are intertwining your MARRIAGE with work. Rule #1 is don't shit where you eat. 2) You make matters worse because your husband is your boss. This will screw up the relationship dynamic, and that's not necessarily a guess, Im 99% certain it will be hard to separate, especially with longer start-up hours. Good luck, you'll need it. 3) You are putti…
I'm sad to hear that you have enough bad experiences to constitute a statistically significant sample size. Or are you extrapolating from just one?
I'm basing it off every work relationship I've ever witnessed. not a huge set, but varied enough to form an educated opinion
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally strange. I did most of the negotiation with Dan, our CTO, though Kyle (my fiance) is the person who gave everyone the first verbal offers. I just updated the blog post to make that more clear. I think in the end being friends made the negotiation much easier. I am confident we all wanted what was fair for the business and each individual, and were able to talk at length about that until everyone felt comforta…
I too find it incredibly strange and most importantly dangerous . 1) You are intertwining your MARRIAGE with work. Rule #1 is don't shit where you eat. 2) You make matters worse because your husband is your boss. This will screw up the relationship dynamic, and that's not necessarily a guess, Im 99% certain it will be hard to separate, especially with longer start-up hours. Good luck, you'll need it. 3) You are putti…
I find your response to be a bit dramatic and troll-y, but you do raise some valid, common concerns which I will address now for the sake of others who might be curious:
[don't shit where you eat] If things start to get uncomfortable, for whatever reason, I can get another job. I'm smart enough not to be 100% confident things will work perfectly. However, I have lived with Kyle and the other founders for 8 years. We have a long and stable history.
[your husband is your boss] Kyle is a leader, but he's not my boss. We are a six person company and no one here has a boss. We treat each other as peers. So far it is working great. If we need to establish a hierarchy at some point, I trust we are capable of architecting it wisely. We are kind of obsessed with the organizational design of the company.
[two eggs, one basket] I'm not too worried about either of us being able to find a job. We have valuable skill sets which are in high demand. Plus, I have savings from my previous job.
[why did you blog this??] I put this on the blog because I thought it would be helpful to other people. It has received overwhelming appreciation.
Keen allowed it on the blog because we support a culture of transparency and because we think maintaining a blog that is useful to the tech community is helpful for our business. So far, it has worked very well.
[your finances will be joint, so why does it even matter what you get?] I'm offended by this question. I have always been the high earner in this relationship, and I still am. My salary matters a lot to me. The only way your question makes sense to me is if you think Kyle is rich (he's not), if you think he makes all the salary decisions in the company (he doesn't), or if you are speaking in the context of antiquated gender roles.
[you're weird] Thank you.
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#217I think Michelle's methodology here is great, except for the fact that she applied it without a goal number; in other words, she took the offer number and tried to "reconcile" it to the model. The mechanic of running your offer through a model to justify a counteroffer is a great one that more nerds should adopt, but she's missing an input: what does she want the model to say? Your goal as a prospective employee is t…
re: CEO just told you it's $2MM, yes, but perhaps he'll instead tell you it's actually $5MM but he wants to incent you to take a larger equity stake (the other options trading off expected reward for additional financial security).
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well as long as the reporting structure at work is the same as the reporting structure at home I'm sure it can work. When they are reversed its a recipe for disaster.
I'm not sure what you mean here. The working relationship I have with Erin is nothing like my home relationship with Erin.
I worked at a company where the husband was the CEO and the wife reported to him. But at home it was pretty clear the wife made the decisions and the husband reported to her. As a result we got to experience the CEO making some decision which the wife disagreed with, only to have the decision changed the next day after they had spent some time out of the office. It was uncomfortable for everyone, and ultimately fatal to their marriage.
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#219Another thing that made this situation complicated was that Kyle and I are recently engaged. This is a cute article but for obvious reasons completely inapplicable to anyone else seeking a job at a startup.
I wrote this article because I wished it existed when I was going through this. Even something as simple as an example of a early employee's salary at a seed-funded startup is helpful. I also think the links I shared are pretty good. I'm shocked that my post got over 150 tweets today -- many of them saying "read this if you're considering joining a startup" or "great read". I thought some people might take interest i…
I think that regardless of how much influence your friendships and relationship had on the process, your analysis was thorough and very interesting, so I personally got value out of reading it. Thanks!
Re: How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
#220A tip for people writing on corporate blogs: let us know who you are up front. Whether there's a byline under the title or a short intro sentence/paragraph preceding the article, knowing who you are gives the reader a way to frame what your story. Because the tech industry is so heterosexual male-dominated, when I read that the author was engaged to the CEO, I first assumed I had misunderstood, then I thought the aut…
That makes little sense. If the domain is dominated by heterosexual males, it's quite obvious his spouse must be a woman.
I assume, I missed something obvious here. Just curious - What?