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1. If you cannot offer something better, you don't deserve to retain valuable employees. You need to be a better founder and boss.

2. Yes they will. You'll spend time arguing about a bad decision because it has an effect upon your life.

3. Salary is an incentive too. I like mine to keep coming. Those of us who aren't terminally naive regard equity as nice to have, but generally worthless unless we get extremely lucky.

4. If you are a good founder and boss who has a good company that's a nice place to work, they absolutely will. A company, not a church.

You can't scale a company entirely with believers. You can do just fine with mercenaries. You just have to treat them as rational actors, which isn't so hard at all if you're a good leader.



Particularly regarding #4, a friend observed that, "people join startups for the vision. They stay for the culture (#4)"


... probably not the least because "the vision" tends to get lost in pivots and priority shifts


Agree. And a business that's a "nice place to work" for awesome people is hard to find I think. If you've made one of those it'd be hard for employees to find one elsewhere.


agree, there's a difference between "believer" and "gullible". And regarding 2), I suspect a sane dose of skepticism will do more to avoid bad decisions than drinking the company cool-aid




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