"You're a founder. They're not. They are never, ever going to be as committed as you. They're going to do the 9-to-5 and then go home and think of other things.

"You're a founder. They're not. They are never, ever going to be as committed as you. They're going to do the 9-to-5 and then go home and think of other things. This is fine, because their compensation has a bounded upside and yours doesn't. Unless you're giving them a huge equity stake, which doesn't sound like the case. You have to reconcile yourself to this. Trying to make the whole company out of founder-level committed people is like the old joke about "you know the indestructable aircraft black boxes - why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?"" I could not have said this better myself. I worked - as an IT manager - in a relatively successful startup recently and experienced that same realization. The founders were very young, in their early 30's, and had a daily, constant serious, ornery, mistrustful attitude towards staff. The founders worked 6, 6.5 days a week, 10 hour days. However, some of the most junior staff also worked like that. They were mistrustful with regards to the amount of time people put in, and these founders paid almost everyone under market even though they themselves were standing to make millions off of the expected sale of the company. While the founders believed everyone in the company was swindling them by cheating their work time, as a manager I knew that people worked very hard, with enormous stress. As you can sense from the original poster of this sub thread, the two positions (founder v. salaried employee with a little bit of stock options) are irreconcilable EXCEPT if the founders start to realize the added value of the employees versus their cost. "An employee's cost" == short-term thinking. In my opinion, if you're churning through 10 people and you're only still 3, I'd wager (without knowing more facts it's just a wager) that the comment about not finding 'top talent' is a rationalization for something else that's wrong managerially in that startup. Mentorship, training, higher pay, patience, better interviewing are all possible avenues to pursue to AVOID the 'churning through 10 people' scenario.