3 ms·

You're not making much sense. There's no secret. Nobody's hiding anything. So I would tell them the truth. What could I possibly achieve by lying in the scenari

• raganwald 18y ago
  I'm saying that people would rather work for someone who has experience building and selling a successful venture where the employees felt they also gained, vs. working for someone with experience building and selling a venture where the employees were laid off and received little for their trouble. Case in point: Some time ago up here in Toronto there was a venture founded by someone who had built a company with much talk of going public but one thing led to another and he sold it to a large US conglomerate. Due to the way the terms worked, most of the people with stock options ended up with a few hundred dollars. As you might expect, the operations were slowly wound down and everything moved to the buyer's head offices state side. People found other work. One tech manager put it this way: "I got big screen TV money out of the deal, but I wanted house money or at least car money." He told me this while explaining why he was avoiding calls from head hunters staffing up the founder's new company. The net-net of what I'm trying to say is that if you are running a smaller start-up, and you might want to do it again, consider making sure that the employees perceive they benefit from the deal and not just the major shareholders. You make the call.