I'm writing a longer post on how I think about hiring for my company, but the gist is that I want 100% equity players with the thesis that work will get done without the excess headcount.
The incidence of "owners" is higher in tech, in part because its an easy way to start a business. Low capital needs, cheap equipment, no formal qualification required, and lots of examples of success to emulate. In other words equity in computer startup is highly attractive to those who have that bent in the first place.
>> I'm writing a longer post on how I think about hiring for my company, but the gist is that I want 100% equity players with the thesis that work will get done without the excess headcount.
In my experience this hasn't always worked well for me. Those that favour equity often end up going off to start their own business, where they get more equity, and don't have to deal with pesky folk like me. It's certainly worth a try, but I think you'll discover that most people just want a salary.
Equally, my advice to workers is to get a good salary first, and consider options et al to be likely worth nothing. For equity to be meaningful it has to be substantial, and you just don't get infinite substantial slices out of 100%.
Of course if your company is google successful, then great, even tiny slices make millionaires. But its vanishingly unlikely that your company turns out like that.
I'll end with this - you have a thesis and it's certainly worth a punt. If nothing else it's valuable data for your next business. It'd be great if your thesis works out (for your sake I hope it does) but be prepared for unexpected outcomes, and try and recognize those outcomes early. Perhaps, just perhaps, there's a reason most companies don't work like this.
Now, if what you're trying to describe is a co-op, that's interesting and you should look into that literature, but it is no longer "your" company alone.
I just want to check first that my mortgage provider, landlord, utilities company and supermarket all accept equity...
The first step is to save and discover freedom.
At core, I want an open company building open source where people can get an effective royalty on contributions. I'm writing my thoughts on this, and I may revert if it turns out to be a bad idea.
And make sure you don't have kids, health issues, etc etc.
You are shrinking your pool of talent quite a bit, don't you think?
Sadly I’ve been forced to accept that many employees will happily enter into workplace codependency relationships that allow them to offload risk from themselves (e.g doer-decider duopolies).
This sounds interesting but would be helpful to have some more explanation of what you mean by this.
As an example, I'd post a task "write a language tool to automate generating the code and tests for the type system" and offer 100 shares. Is it the end of the world if the task doesn't get done, no. Is it marginal? probably. However, is it a neat problem, yeah!
Exactly, I want people more interested in the art rather than the finances. However, once I get some profit generated, the model I want to pursue is that every month the profit from the company is distributed.
It's a mess, but if you solved a problem that I thought was worth a number of shares, and then left... great!
I'm not a fan of clauses and believe, especially as an old man, to give back via open source.