Early Employees

“A lot of the times you'll have founders who say, oh, like my original team can't scale with me, which, you know, sometimes that's correct, but a lot of times it's just a misdiagnosis. Like when growth starts to break things on the human side, founders tend to …”

“And so in some ways, the risk that an early employee is taking on is somewhat similar to the risk that a founder takes on.”

“It is getting harder and harder for that to actually happen, you know, and the only way, like you said, to join a fang company as an employee, you just make way more money, you don't have to worry about any of this, or you're like startup hopping and increasin…”

“You may hire someone at the very start when five people, they're the chief marketing officer, but now you're 200 people. Are they really still ready to be the chief marketing officer for that next stage? And it's hard sometimes as founders, it's hard as early,…”

“If an early employee, for example, feels disgruntled, which is easy to do, and it's easy to do through a comms mistake. If you sell them on one thing and here's a vision, and now either that's changed or you miscommunicated it, they feel like there's a bait an…”

“The early employees might only have half a percent of the company, one percent of the company, two percent of the company. And so they also are looking for it. I mean, they're turning down offers for, you know, from Facebook and Google and Uber at like, you kn…”

“One thing I would think about if I were structuring profit sharing is to make it a pool, not a committed percentage to an individual. I think that's a mistake you can make with an early employee is to say, oh, you get one percent of profits or two or three.”

“The other thing that the early employees typically have available to them is what's called 83 B, which allows them to essentially early exercise their options when the strike price is still very low and therefore the cash out of pocket required to do so is rel…”

“Certainly when you get to the stage where people that were used to knowing everything don't know everything, ah, that, I think more early employees leave over that than anything else, and it's really tough to say what to do about that. it's people that have…”

“The YC companies that have done this well, the YC companies that have been super generous with equity to early employees in general are the most successful ones that we funded.”