One dynamic that is not discussed explicitly here concerns junior/mid-level engineers who perhaps didn't get the offer at Google/fb the first go-around and are

One dynamic that is not discussed explicitly here concerns junior/mid-level engineers who perhaps didn't get the offer at Google/fb the first go-around and are working at your startup as a fallback. They probably don't care about executing strongly on your startup's mission in year one as much as they care about their own careers/CVs. As they should. Things they might talk about implementing that probably won't help your new business: -distributed systems -hand-rolled ML -react -hiring dedicated QA professionals so that they can focus on coding algorithms If you say no to all of this and tell them to go write another rails view for the admin dashboard, they will simply quit. The challenge is to find the right balance between "product engineer" tasks and tasks that will show the engineer that you genuinely care about their career outside of the next BD stunt. Having some sort of secondary bottom line helps enormously with this tension, in my experience.