Ask HN: How would you convince highly paid engineers to join your startup

Engineers are wise to the “magic beans” aspect of startups now. If you can make the case that your startup isn’t trying to exploit engineers' financial ignorance you could really differentiate yourself.

I’d start by coming up with a good answer to these questions:

Why would joining your startup be better than starting their own?

Will my (engineers) equity have the same preferences as those of the other investors? (2X liquidation, etc.) When you take a pay cut in exchange for equity, you're an investor.

1. Raise money so you can pay them higher than they currently make, and throw in a signing bonus.

2. Set up a secondary market for your stock options.

3. Set up a 10 year exercise period for departing employees.

(sorry about length)TL;DR: Play to your strengths as a startup. You're exciting and offering something with potential.

I would firstly look at what you have to offer that might be interesting to someone in their position. Since you've said "highly paid", I'm assuming that you're not able to offer them the same pay they might be on at the moment. Remember what's great about your company and play to your strengths. As a startup you should be more flexible than wherever they are now and therefore able to tailor things to that. Here are some ideas for things that could convince:

1)The opportunity to work on something meaningful, fun or cool. If your company has an interesting social mission or something cool, that can be convincing. I imagine Elon Musk finds it easier to hire people for SpaceX than someone working on tax accounting software might do (important thought that is)

2)The chance to make a really huge impact vs at a big company being a cog in a big machine. Lots of experienced engineers yearn for the chance to build something new because they've spent so much of their lives refactoring, tinkering with and otherwise improving parts of huge systems built by lots of other people.

3)Explosive upside in the case of success - having an equity or other incentive structure where people give up some comp today for the opportunity to really share in success can be a great incentive. (I know there are pros and cons to this and lots of strong views on HN on the whole equity comp thing).

4)The opportunity to work with really interesting people and learn new things can be a big incentive for really top engineers. If you or other members your founding team are genuinely exceptional, this will serve as a magnet for others. Likewise if you're using a cool new language, some interesting tech stack or whatever that could also be a draw.

5)Lots of people in big companies want to work in a more interesting environment. Cool offices, some work from home, not having to wear a suit, flexible working hours etc all could potentially convince people to give up a 9-5 grind somewhere else

6)Perks - ok so the money isn't as much but you get free food, beer, laundry, gym membership etc. This is usually more of an incentive for people coming straight out of university as more experienced team members might have families they want to eat with etc but that could work for some people

7)Personal growth - this ties in to some of the points above, but the chance to learn, grow and develop their career can be a really big incentive. Engineer #1 at a startup could end up being the lead engineer/cto/whatever for a big company one day and for the right person that potential trajectory could appeal.

Finally two really important warnings:

- Bear in mind fairness to your existing staff. If you go the extra mile for the new hire, consider the motivational impact if they are getting conditions that are materially better than your current crew have. It could be far better to offer everyone a new condition or whatever at the same time than to offer it just to the new person. So say the person has asked to work from home some chunk of the time etc, offer that to your existing staff or prepare for them to be salty.

- Behave with integrity and be prepared to give up on "convincing" them rather than compromise on this. eg Don't say anything to convince someone you aren't 100% committed to following through on. Likewise, if someone feels you're sketchy in hiring you won't just lose them, you'll lose all their network of contacts also. A friend told me about being headhunted to run engineering at Theranos. He said Elizabeth Holmes said to him _in the interview_ that if he wanted, she would fire her entire engineering team so he could hire the team he wanted from scratch. That sounded so unethical to my friend he passed on the role.