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1. If you cannot offer something better, you don't deserve to retain valuable employees. You need to be a better founder and boss.

2. Yes they will. You'll spend time arguing about a bad decision because it has an effect upon your life.

3. Salary is an incentive too. I like mine to keep coming. Those of us who aren't terminally naive regard equity as nice to have, but generally worthless unless we get extremely lucky.

4. If you are a good founder and boss who has a good company that's a nice place to work, they absolutely will. A company, not a church.

You can't scale a company entirely with believers. You can do just fine with mercenaries. You just have to treat them as rational actors, which isn't so hard at all if you're a good leader.

agree, there's a difference between "believer" and "gullible". And regarding 2), I suspect a sane dose of skepticism will do more to avoid bad decisions than drinking the company cool-aid

Agree. And a business that's a "nice place to work" for awesome people is hard to find I think. If you've made one of those it'd be hard for employees to find one elsewhere.

Particularly regarding #4, a friend observed that, "people join startups for the vision. They stay for the culture (#4)"

... probably not the least because "the vision" tends to get lost in pivots and priority shifts

"They won't push back when bad decisions are made."

You have to define 'bad'. If you've drunk the kool-aid, you won't see decisions XYZ as 'bad', so there wouldn't be anything to push back on, even if they are objectively (or reasonably apparently) not good decisions.

"They will negotiate for more salary than equity/options, giving them less incentive to help make the company succeed."

Unless the 'equity' gives me the ability to actually change direction on patently stupid decisions and make course corrections, it's a lottery ticket. If a company is willing to pay me above market rate, I have far more immediate incentive to do what's necessary to keep that gravy train going, vs "hey, if we get sold for $100m, I might get $700k 3 years from now and be handcuffed for the next 2 years to some company who acquires us!!!" level of 'equity'.

If you do things well, it won't be a matter of 'believing' someplace is a good place to work, or they're doing good, or killing it, or whatever the metric is - it will just be factual, and won't require 'belief'.

#3 is silly.

First, this is an expensive place to live. A really expensive place to live. Oddly, my landlord doesn't take options.

Second, options are binary. There are very few outcomes for a company where the amount of options you have matters. Either you make a couple million dollars or you make very little/nothing. Cash now and $2mm instead of $3mm in an extremely unlikely future is a good trade.

You could replace "not believing" with "being a gullible idiot" and all of what you just wrote would still be true.

Your developer will leave if they are offered a better paid position at another company. It's because that company values them more. "believing" is just more nonsense thrown at inexperienced developers who don't know they are being hoodwinked.

Each of these points pertain to the startup gaining leverage over the employee.

Ergo, the reason startups like their employees to believe is so that they can retain and control them more easily.

On the flip side, if a startup that "believes" is more effective (or more likely to survive) than a company that doesn't, this could benefit the employees. Whether this is the case or just ideology, I think it's difficult to know.

1 and 3 would seem to be upsides for employees, though.

> If they are offered an identical position at a company they believe in, they will leave.

The way I see a position is a combination of money, culture and people. It is possible to surpass money. Sometimes people leave for that. Sometimes, your best friend leaves and you move with her. I have never found a company where all three things are replicated elsewhere.

No. Number 3 is flat out wrong. Most people will negotiate for more salary because they understand that options will just fuck them over. Money won't.