Comment by aintmeit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aintmeit | Hacker News Reader

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Here are things that I would consider significantly more important than wanting to pump up employees by giving them information on partnerships:

- making sure your business model is viable

- involving employees in the software development process so they understand the user's perspective when developing the product

- paying people fairly

- helping employees structure work/life balance

- having clear and scoped value streams to prevent undue burden on the organization

- rigorously test business assumptions on an ongoing basis

- leading by example through being a decent human and treating others humanely

While information is power, secrets are not what makes a company valuable. Corporate espionage is trivial these days -- you can't stop people from talking. Nowadays, the best competitive advantage is execution. If you can execute well on the basics, you'll blow 95% of the competition out of the water because it takes a certain kind of person to cultivate talent. Your competition is only human, and they naturally want to cut corners, which is why they rely on mind games, or what some might call _sales_.

Still, it seems polite to answer your question about the effects of pumping up your team with info on upcoming partnerships, so I will despite the fact that I think you're coming at it from the wrong angle. Ask yourself why would they care about this information you're providing? If they do seem like they care, either:

- they stand to gain directly from this partnership or

- they're putting on a performance for social and political reasons or

- you hired employees who fail to reason properly, in which case you have bigger problems than their enthusiasm

If you want to provide more context without giving away too much info, please feel free to. Otherwise, I hope this answers your question.

Your explanations for why employees at an early stage startup might care about upcoming business deals seem to be missing the obvious one to me, that you’ve employed people who are thinking about the business as a whole rather than their tiny slice of the picture. The single most vital thing in an early stage startup is acquiring customers, and these deals are how that’s done, why wouldn’t one of seven employees at the company want to know about how the business is doing?

I’d go far as to say if early stage employees aren’t engaging with every part of the business you’ve employed the wrong people because at that stage of the game there isn’t space for people who just sit in their box and don’t venture out of it.

It's not beneficial to have every single person at the company thinking about the business as a whole. Now more than ever, we live in an age of specialization and it's counterproductive for all the people at the company to be thinking about the business as a whole. That is why there are departments, teams, and other groupings with discrete responsibilities: the separation of responsibilities and focus on small, manageable areas of responsibility helps people do a great job, efficiently.

This is true even with a company that's just starting, because there are way too many aspects of running a company for a single person to contemplate, let alone do efficiently or well.

thinking about =\= working on

I can learn about my company’s deal flow and benefit from that without needing to spend six hours in Quickbooks

It’s good for me to know the feature I’m building is important to a prospective customer who has an emphasis on security, even if I don’t sit on a call with them

I would argue that the specialization you’re referring to is what causes very many early stage startups to fail. Before you’ve found product market fit, you need everyone to be thinking about the whole product, even if they’re not working on the whole product.

Also, give “Range” a read. It’s a fantastic book and may help change your mind.

Thank you for the book recommendation.

Many early-stage startups fail because they fail to find a good product-market fit, or because they fail in marketing and sales, which are much harder to get right. I very much doubt that poor information sharing by the founders about the state of the business with rank and file (which is what is implied in the question here) causes disasters.

Later-stage startups often fail because managing growth is a supremely difficult skill, and if everyone is not rowing in the same direction or if there are strategic missteps, the growth engine sputters. Absence of growth is death in our industry. Sharing too much information at this stage may be counterproductive if the company is still trying to make unit economics work, improving sales efficiency, or burning cash to fight an external competitor while scrambling to secure more. Many of these will just drive away many employees, who show up for the paychecks.

I agree on the latter point. The advice of be transparent applies much more to earlier stage companies.

Often, engineers and other employees have great ideas that lead to a development that changes your product or your market and helps you find fit. That can only happen if they both: a) have the info, and, b) care enough about the mission / company to think about it. That varied set of experiences gives you (the founder) a greater surface area to draw from when coming up with solutions.

Those departments, teams, and other groupings - none of which probably exist in a 7 person company, by the way - have to interact with each other.

Yes, and trust plays a huge role in that more than anything else. Information sharing is unlikely to make a huge difference for a close-knit group that likely knows one another quite well to begin with.

Even in a 7-person company, there aren't many direct interactions between disparate functions that are called for, or even desirable, for that matter. Employees and founders/co-founders have massively different incentives and need for information. Some functions, such as HR, actually rely on keeping a lid on certain types of information to function properly!

> why wouldn’t one of seven employees at the company want to know about how the business is doing?

If the early-stage employees have significant equity in the company, then they'll be very interested in how the company is doing. If their upside is paycheck, bonus and equity proportional to their salary (as you'd find in an established company), then one employer is as good as another.

I think the question of how much information to share is heavily dependent on how loyal the employees are to the company, and loyalty is almost entirely a matter of how much equity they hold (and more specifically how much equity they hold relative to the founders.)

In my experience loyalty is almost entirely a matter of who feels trusted and valued... in which sharing information freely (or appearing to) is a major factor. Especially when that information is directly relevant to them and their own financial security - even if you're just making wages it's still nice to know that your employer is stable.

I doubt this is true. I can believe that it's a good idea to give people equity at the margin. But in my experience loyal people are loyal. People who put themselves first put themselves first. I think there's very little correlation between how good people are and how good they think they are.

Take a good, valuable or loyal employee and treat them badly and you can probably lose them. Take a bad, incompetent or disloyal employee and no matter how much you compensate them I suspect you can not change them.

I think the motivation of early employees can be quite different from what you propose. I can speak to my own motivation:

Knowing what partners are in the pipe lets me contribute to landing the customer in the first place. I can work with exec to team on how we can improve the product to appeal to the customer. I can provide costing estimates to see if the customer is worth acquiring.

A big part of startup compensation is tied up in equity. If there is no insight in to the business health, I am not able to accurately value my employment.

One of the opportunities in a startup is in learning how you might eventually run your own business. Learning about customer acquisition, about corporate structure and strategy, and about fundraising are all things I expect to be exposed to in exchange for much lower compensation.

Perhaps they care cause early stage startups are hard and it can feel like a Sisyphean task, so encouragement / interest from outside parties helps drive their motivation.

This is great advise - if everyone could be a businessman, all of us would be and nobody would be an employee.

Employees only care about their salary / stock options and professional growth and fulfilment. If an employee isn't confident in your ability to manage the business, they will jump ship (which is their right to do so, just as it is yours to fire them when the business falters). And so it is best to keep them focused and motivated on the job they have to do. There maybe some employees that you think have partnership or managerial potential. You should be confident you can groom them, and thus can share some business information with them and observe how they make the best use of that to help you grow your company and / or advance your goals.

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 all level. If you hire employees who believe that they have infinite time and money to get the product to work, then you probably did not hire well, IMO.

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.

I would argue that it is often relevant for the technical employees to have an idea about how business is going: who wants the product, how they (intend to) use it, and also who discussed a partnership and eventually did not go with 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.

Have you run a startup? Are you a senior dev? Have you managed a team?

I'm not asking to be rude, but if you are 45 having run a couple of startups (even if they both failed) I'd be really interested in this opinion and what experiences got you to it. If, however, you're still at college and this is "pure philosophy" it's of much less interest.

Yes. Two. One I quit (no technical challenges, and partners were happy with business as it was), and the other I was edged out of by the partners as we didn't share the same values and vision. The only caveat is they are in India which has a very risk-averse work culture.

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