Employee

“Personally, I don't think it's ethical. I don't think it's ethical towards employees. You know, most of all, if you're not, I mean, maybe when you hire someone, you tell them for sure. Because it's like the dilution wasn't that number one. It's not where most …”

“There's still tremendous amount of distrust when it comes to tech platforms that a company is deploying and the anonymity, the confidentiality of the interactions that you're having with that which I think in, in some cases is unfounded and in others is well-f…”

“The one thing I would say to founders is look out for your employees because chances are, especially for a lot of young founders, they're going to work with these people again. And so treat them really well. Treat them better than you treat yourself. Advocate …”

“And I legitimately think they're all going to lose their jobs in the next few years.”

“So this is like an educational or like mental model shift in employees because they want, they see the highlight, you know, that they typed something sensitive. They, they're like, oh, okay, I shouldn't be, I shouldn't probably do that. And then on day 10, the…”

“There are people who would be bad employees in any company because they're just like difficult to work with. They don't listen to like instructions. So like they don't follow like roadmaps. Or not, they're not like easy to collaborate, but maybe the flip side …”

“I think it's 10 X easier for the CEO to break glass than an executive. And 10 X easier for an executive than an employee.”

“And agents, like the narrative between what agents can do and what people think they can do could not be wider. That's like one of my other narrative fascinations right now, Sam, which is that it's like anybody building this stuff knows that like they cannot d…”

“Second thing is, just statistically, 70% of employees never ask for a raise. This is probably foreign to me and you, because we're, A little aggressive. But, 70% never ask. And yet, of the 30% that do ask, 70% of them get something.”

“If you think about an agent as an employee, an agent can be hacked the same way that an employee can be hacked, or an agent can find itself with access to information that it shouldn't necessarily have and misuse that information or share that information With…”

“A hundred percent.”

“You know, if I was using employees they're unreliable. They don't see my vision. They don't understand every aspect of design.”

“The rational reaction from employees will say, you know what? I don't want your equity. Give me more money.”

“If you go out at a lower price, and this is what I, the advice I generally give is go out at a lower price so you can have that momentum carry your price up. Everybody's happy. Your new investors are happy. Your employees will be happy. It costs you a little b…”

“Part of the reason why all the employees in Trader Joe's work Every part of the store and everybody does the cash register and everybody does bagging is to maximize interaction with customers.”

“I mean, I've got, you know, 3000 plus employees.”

“It's hard to be top down and tell your employees you need to be using AI. You can't really control what they're doing, and so what they proposed is at the end of each month, everyone needs to either, like, build a new workflow or a product or something using S…”

“The only way I found is just 30 day trials for everyone. And just saying on day one, statistically speaking, this isn't going to work out. Nothing against you. You seem awesome or else we wouldn't even be doing this. I'm just looking at numbers, you know, 30%,…”

“One of our values is now if we have to choose its employee over client.”

“But we forget about the employees don't care about, they don't even know what dilution is. All they care about is what happens with their stock.”

“Unless you learn how to be A great employee, like some way, somehow, it's hard to be a great CEO.”

“Knowing that being the person in power, you know, by the time anyone's speaking up to challenge you or to Give you feedback. This has probably been bothering them for longer than you knew.”

“I think they're going to cut a large number of employees, get people to return back to office.”

“That employees hire companies more than companies hire employees. That's really the big thing.”

“Ultimately if we've got to align the company's progress with their progress, because if they don't make progress, they will leave.”

“Almost any company will give employees a percentage of the business if they're valuable enough.”

“Every single employee at my companies will have an ability to earn in or invest into one of our companies, but they don't get it for an entire year. So your entire first year here, we're not even talking about it.”

“In many cases we had to engage the employees, right? No, we don't have cash. So what we did is that we diluted all shareholders in order to give employees way more equity, right? So five times more equity than they had before.”

“The most fanatical customer is going to make your best employee.”

“So actually that employee is effectively giving an interest-free Loan to their employer in, in a really funny roundabout way.”

“Well, in reality, like how many employees actually use a self-service portal to look at their pay stub? It's about 10, 15%.”

“Extroverted leaders sometimes can actually turn off employees and lose them. If they push them out of their introvert boundaries.”

“Even if 49 love it and one hates it, my guess is 50 out of 50 will like it if you compliment their work. Right, of course. Right? And so I think we'll just get a better impact.”

“Two thirds of employees right now that are working at these companies are working for options that are actually worth zero, and they probably don't even realize it yet, meaning they got a pay package of stock options at a 24 dollar strike price. That stock is …”

“So whether we like it or not, bosses, supervisors are conditioned to think of everybody as selfish. Because every time you come to me, you want, all you want is something for yourself. That's the reality.”

“One small poker tell for if an employee is going to be great is if they're willing to spend money out of their own pocket to move faster.”

“We've always been the head of the pack in terms of how much money we put in our own deals, and every one of the partners does that, and every one of the employees does that, is they're investing their deals.”

“I guess my advice is don't, I would, I don't overthink the, oh my gosh, will people be demotivated? I think it's actually, it's a good, it's a positive thing.”

“And I know that no matter what, and I always tell the employees like, every two years, we need to be a new company. We almost have to assume that our products are no longer differentiated, no longer matter. There'll be people that will copy whatever we have ar…”

“Four or five years later, when I stepped back to a board-only role, I think the business was probably 175 mil in revenue, probably like 506 hundred employees, so grown a lot, learned a lot from that.”

“Part of Really respecting them is respecting that they can make the choices they want and they're grownups enough that they can deal with the consequences of those choices.”

“I think it makes great founders, where they're like, just so annoyed if something's broken, they have to fix it, and they have to tell people something's wrong, and it's a, you can make a shitty employee, but a really good founder.”

“The absolute best thing a founder can do is call it and like pivot hard or shut it down, figure out who wants to be on the boat and get off and be honest with employees because it is like, from my perspective, I don't care about the money. The money is the mon…”

“Your oldest and sickest employees. Because they're the ones that have the co-pays, and they're the ones that use, that have the most chronic illnesses, and they're the ones that are subsidizing all those rebates.”

“I always say you know, also think about your employees before your investors. This might be a little bit more controversial, but these are people that chose to work with you And spend more time with you than their families believed in your mission. And I think…”

“So at this point at WP engine, also we've had a few secondary rounds, which by the way, all employees got to participate in as well.”

“Automatic is a very closely held stock. It's basically our employees and a few dozen of the most sophisticated investors in the world.”

“Lots of managers have great intentions to help their employees, but they get busy with their own lives, their own work, all the things they're focused on, and also their own career. The manager is often busy thinking about Their own needs. And so they just, th…”

“We don't offer equity to employees.”

“Creating thoughtful incentive structures is really, really hard, which means if you haven't put a lot of thought into them, you can probably assume that you're improperly incentivizing employees in many parts of your business.”

“Sometimes the most extroverted outspoken people are also the worst employees because they're great interviews and But horrible workers, and they get through their career via bullshitting versus actual substance.”

“I think that like way too many founders apologize for how they want to run the company. I don't know why they do, but I think they apologize for how they want to run the company. They basically find some midpoint between how they want to run a company and how …”

“Not getting tired of the story that you're telling to consumers before they do, which it takes a long time for consumers to get tired. It's much quicker for employees to get tired.”

“I think sometimes I think people work less than they used to. I think they work the same. It's just, they're not present nearly as often.”

“Oftentimes I feel like as a startup executive or a founder, you can look at someone as a dot instead of a line. It's like I hired this person for this reason, and that's their job, and I'm paying them to do that job. Meanwhile, they're viewing their life as a …”

“We had been always sharing the part of profit back to all the employees in the company... Typically, 25%, but it also depends on our cash flow because we are a bootstrap. So we just started it from two years.”

“The truth of it is they're not going to be. Most of the time. But can they hit a bar that is 80% of what your expectation might be? And is that going to be enough? And I think for some people, they're just still going to carry that frustration, and for other p…”

“And, you know, I think people too often put limits on what they think their people are capable of out of fear of overstretching them in some way.”

“So a baron is essentially the, like, the person that held over a small section of a kingdom. They had, like, their little town, you know, within it, and they were the leader within that town, and they would kind of have people come in and work for them, and th…”

“When you have all of these things happening, you know, macroeconomic climate, when you have, you know, AI creating questions, I think folks are looking for stability more than they were necessarily thinking about. A year or two years ago.”