We'll be your first investor – Benefits – Posthog | Hacker News Reader

We'll be your first investor – Benefits – Posthog

posthog.com

28 pointsvinnyglennon8 comments

So PostHog is a platform with a lot of tools for SaaS products (feature flags, analytics, events, etc.). Never heard of them but sounds interesting.

One of their employee benefits is: "We'll be your first investor and biggest cheerleader, if you spend two years at PostHog and leave to start a new company. We're looking for entrepreneurs and a strong bias for action!"

I wonder if someone who has done this can testify how that process went. I assume these were all cases with very strong personal connections, if any, because the company is just two years old so any such person must have been a very early employee and (hopefully) a friend of the founders.

EDIT: LinkedIn shows zero employees who are "Past company: PostHog" and are also current founders. That doesn't mean the gesture isn't neat, but it doesn't seem to be a deep component of their culture (yet!).

(I’m a cofounder there)

You are correct - haven’t actually done this yet since we’ve had no chance to so don’t take too much from this policy until we’ve done it a few times!

We set up hedgehog.vc which is what we’d use to fund ex employees if you’re curious.

Why don’t you do it a few times first before advertising it? It’s be quite sad if someone gave you two years of their life and then have you fall through on your end of the deal.

It's because we wanted our team to be aware that we'd have this intention so we don't miss out! If someone leaves PostHog voluntarily to start a new company (i) that's sad for us but is a pretty cool reason to leave and (ii) if we were willing to employ them, we'd be willing to invest in them more.

There are some pieces of missing context I guess. Primarily that we're small still (30 people) so we tend to hire a lot of ex founder / generalist type people (and most are technical) who'd be quite well suited as founders.

One thing I will do is add a more detailed handbook entry to create more clarity around this benefit so we don't mislead/confuse. Issue made (https://github.com/PostHog/posthog.com/issues/4013)!

Was it inspired by graphcdn?

They have the same benefit.

Good to see nonetheless.

Neat! https://github.com/PostHog/hedgehog.vc/issues/1

This is an interesting take, and im slightly intrigued aa to how it works long term. What becomes of the culture? Does it create long lived partnerships?

I review Posthog PRs occasionally. In addition to this, they’re also open source. Seems like a cool place.

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