At your small size you will benefit from the additional trust and alignment this will bring. You may find yourself delighted in finding that many of your team can see and solve problems that you may have missed.
You can be super secretive to combat the BigCo mentality like Apple when you have the first class problem of being a BigCo.
- Avoid generating too much expectation, which can lead to frustration if things don't materialize, and impact team morale.
- Always provide context so the team can better understand how/why events took place and decisions were made.
- Think preemptively, put yourself into your team shoes, and try to address doubts that may arise from your communication upfront.
- Always give space for clearing doubts, and follow up to your staff to assess the impact of your communication. You'd be surprised in how many ways people can react to the same information.
With time, you get to better know your team, build trust, and become more effective communicating with them.
I'd be very hesitant to share partnerships until they're done. Either because people will inappropriately mention them (a junior salesperson running his mouth on a phone call cost a former employer $5m++. no joke. a partnership deal that wasn't inked got rescinded after he told the wrong company and it got back), or more likely, get misset expectations about deals that can still fall through.
That's different than sharing rev numbers, about which I think founders should be very open. I'd share deals when they're inked, along with a lot of repetition about what can and can't be shared externally.
This is something a lot of founders seem to overlook.
Also, along with spotting problems - people who are engaged in a transparent org can more easily spot unexploited opportunities and bring them to the table.
Also somehow it’s not even close to 43 minutes, not sure where I got that from! Sorry to the poster :-)
In my experience, software, business processes, and hardware are best kept close to the vest until sufficient momentum and maybe market saturation is reached.
It does not matter if the item holds a copyright/patent/trade mark; they are post even re-active solutions. It's like an ambulance after a car crash. Excellent if there are good doctors in the ambulance, but better the avoid the car crash all together.
Putting together a team of competent engineers, developers, etc and having them create something meaningful is hard enough as it is. Trying to copy someone else’s tech doesn’t lower the bar all that much.
There are myriad of other examples, or different scenarios where an NDA or non-compete failed, and another company just puts out a product faster and cheaper. Happens with software, hardware, and of course business processes.
[0] https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/amusing-knockoffs-popular-tech...
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/30-knockoff-products-tha...
[2] https://www.liveabout.com/hilarious-knock-off-brands-4767601
I don’t see any out there that indicates they beat the original idea to the market by way of breached NDA or non-compete.
I think anyone who credits stealth mode with their success probably doesn’t realize they would very likely have also been successful without it.
I advocate balancing full transparency (I certainly don't mean to hide any info!) with a culture that can create a time and place for conversations that might go beyond today's work.
Hiring, mostly. If you hire people that don't want, care, or are able to understand the full picture, the transparency won't pay off. But at small sizes, you generally want to hire people that both can and are eager to understand the whole picture.
I would say this is frequently even the case for big picture employees.
I'm saying this also as the lowest compensated person at my company for ~5 years.
To me it's more of an ideal world vs real world. Ideally you can share everything, in reality the outcome is likely to have a negative impact on both employee satisfaction and profit. Ie most likely giving employees a raise and them still thinking they aren't getting enough due to them seeing the big $ in the bank.
My preferred approach is budget level (we can spend x on y, I am open to your ideas) and number light executive summary (we have x months runway, not we have y in the bank). You can also give someone a smaller piece of transparency and see how they react if you think the employee could be someone with the skill set to manage a budget in the future.
Different companies/team compositions might have different best paths.
It's more "why are you hiring someone, when you could give everyone a bigger bonus" vibes. Where my goal is to say, give 2x the bonus in the future via the hire instead, but an employee could justifiably, for their own reasons, want more money today.
I'm saying that^ in the context, of, in my opinion, big picture employees as well.
I agree there's sometimes misalignment, everyone has their own goals/aspirations/career, and they sometimes aren't the same as the company goal/timeline. At the end of the day, that doesn't mean that they aren't capable of making valuable contributions or that we don't want to support their goals. That is ok, it's impossible to be everyone's everything.
Or even "we just invoiced $5k for that project, I didn't get $5k, that seems unfair". Some people find it difficult to see all the different places that gross revenue has to go in order to keep the lights on and the wheels turning.
If you were telling everyone you were broke, asking them to believe in the mission and endure low pay for the cause, and then it leaks out that you have plenty of cash, then yeah, I can see this question coming up.
It's surprising to me that out of 100 people no one asked for a raise after seeing a pool of money, although there's a lot of industries and types of employees out there.
It's a smart thing to do from the employee perspective-- I would do the same in their shoes, I don't hold it against them, I'm actually a big fan of ambitious employees, and I've granted their requests (maybe not the full value of their ask, but at least part) every time.
Your mileage may vary.
Why aren’t employees at Apple asking for a piece of their massive cash horde?
If the only thing keeping an employee from asking or demanding they be given some of the companies property is the knowledge that property exists then you probably don’t want them in your company.
It's a "coincidence" that occurs a short time period after seeing the information.
On the other hand, I'd never want a "what should I do?" person as an early startup hire.
This doesn't apply to tanks or healers, only dps. Playing tank as an infra person I would do my team a disservice if I didn't make myself available on a dime to unblock my team. Big picture is fine for the planning meetings but on small teams I'm usually the only one, I have a bunch of cooldowns to keep track of, and don't always have the context because I have a separate workstream that has to telegraph out ahead of the dev work.
I am always asking what I should do that has the most impact for my devs.
* Looking for people who caught aggro and getting out ahead of it is the bulk of my work. It's how I prioritize my workstream. The problem, and where the metaphor breaks down, is that I'm not omnipotent or have Grid2. If my devs don't tell me their pain points or I don't pull it out of them by asking what deliverables they would like to see out of me I would miss out lots of higher priority items than what I can see.
* The whole reason I'm on a team is because I have a specialized skillset and am but one stakeholder among many who want things from me. I will never run out of stuff to bring to planning but ultimately it's a group discussion about what I should do next. For larger companies s/me/the infra team.
I have never seen transparency hurt the productivity of these employees. They know they can look and see the big picture any time, they just don’t bother to look:
But for some people "transparency" also means a more active communication of this information, and this definitely confuses some (other) people because they will consistently interpret "we want to do X" or "we are going to do X" as "I should, right now, do (sub-part of) X".
It's the ultimate "let's hide this because we know people won't like it" phrase.
Excluding private HR data obviously.
EDIT: I think this is a good way of phrasing it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32630650
I say this as someone who leads a team that handles the promotion and enablement of engineers into a role where they have a lot more visibility into sales and strategy, and have learned that they really need to have someone reassure them until the point that they realize that things are working out just fine.
That being said, I'm not sure of the wisdom of inflicting that stress on employees that don't have a need to see the Backoffice negotiations. Is there anything productive they can do, other then getting stressed?
7 person startup, right? Presumably they hired people who can wear lots of hats and who can deal with uncertainty.
> they start wondering "are we failing?", "am I not doing a good enough job?", "is our product a failure?" etc etc.
Good. Questions lead to answers where there's transparency. I'd hope that the people making the product would understand the product, the business, and the customers.
7 person startup, right? Presumably they hired people who can wear
lots of hats and who can deal with uncertainty.
Good. Questions lead to answers where there's transparency.
Are those really the sort of people you want joining your <10 member startup?
They ask for clarification, you provide it, and they are that much more effective.
If they think their people will be confused, they don't trust their people.
That's not necessarily the same thing as hiring the wrong people.