You should definitely share information relevant to the employee’s decision to join and continue working at your company. It’s imperative to build trust with em

You should definitely share information relevant to the employee’s decision to join and continue working at your company. It’s imperative to build trust with employees so that they know they can take your word. The challenge for many is that it’s easy to be transparent during the good times, but much harder to be honest when things aren’t going well. You need to choose a level of transparency that you can stick with through good times and bad. I will caution against taking HN advice unilaterally on these topics. HN comments are heavily skewed toward employees rather than founders and the advice you get will not necessarily consider the needs of founders and a company at all. Anecdotally, I have worked at a startup that tried to share everything with employees in a fully transparent manner and it backfired spectacularly. A couple of the employees used their information as leverage to work their way into high ranking roles at a competing company, taking some key customer relation knowledge with them. The roles didn’t actually work out for them at the new company. They were unqualified, the company just used them to extract their knowledge and let them go after a year. However, the damage was done. The information they took wasn’t at all necessary to be open to the employees and didn’t really benefit them behind a sense of full transparency for everyone. Don’t assume that your employees are always going to be in your court, especially as you scale past the intimate team size. It only takes one person acting in a selfish manner to try to leverage your transparency for their personal gain. Be at least somewhat careful about sharing information that doesn’t directly relate to employees making decisions about their own jobs at your company.