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The first 10 employees hired (most of whom should be engineers at a tech startup) have a huge effect on the trajectory of a startup. One bad hire there will sin

The first 10 employees hired (most of whom should be engineers at a tech startup) have a huge effect on the trajectory of a startup. One bad hire there will sink the company. If that's true, then why aren't they given more equity and more respect? At least in New York, it's a lot more common to hire unproven 22-year-olds at ~60-70k and 0.25% for the first 10 employees. Of course, a couple of those will turn out to be really good, but that's not a hiring strategy you'd take if one bad hire could sink the firm, because you're also going to take in a couple of bozos. A single bad executive, yes; a single bad engineer, maybe, but founders don't act as if that were the case.

nostrademons 13y ago
And most of those startups fail, right? And their stock options are worthless. So it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: most companies fail, and so stock options are worthless, and so those companies attract mediocre talent, and so the company fails. I've found that the best employees look for two major things when evaluating startups: that there's a market for what they're building, and that the founders aren't idiots. And the reason for this is that startups are full of necessary but not sufficient conditions: if any of market|team|design|engineering|investors are not present, the company doesn't take off. So a good engineer will look for companies where engineering is the missing ingredient, and he will take an equity hit if necessary to ensure that the other elements are present. That maximizes his expected payoff, because suddenly his 1% is of a potentially huge number that is under his control.