I’m late to these comments which is too bad because reading this makes a few questions come up in my mind and would love to hear others’ thoughts: 1. As a foun

I’m late to these comments which is too bad because reading this makes a few questions come up in my mind and would love to hear others’ thoughts: 1. As a founder, how does one balance one’s evangelical passion about the product/mission with the responsibility one has to explain the risks of a job to new employees? Should one just be super passionate and expect the employee to have a “caveat emptor” approach, or is there a minimum threshold of kimono-opening one should do in order to advise potential hires of the riskiness of both the market generally and one’s startup specifically? 2. In the case of the people who were fired from 42Floors, being a good broker is a very fungible skill and is relatively agnostic of firm affiliation; either you’re good at selling real estate or you’re not (compared to, say, being a good designer, where a given individual might be excellent in one role and terrible in another, depending on team and mission). Anyway, question is: when hiring employees with fungible, broker-like skillsets, is it appropriate to be more — I don’t know what the term is, risk-tolerant, freewheeling, forward-leaning, etc — in deciding whether it’s appropriate to hire a new person? The logic here being that if things go bad (as they did at 42Floors), those people will be able to land on their feet relatively easily, compared to others who are going to need more time/effort to find a new job. 3. If you have raised a lot of money and have cash in the bank, and lay off an entire division of people, what is your obligation to give them severance / extended health care / etc? My inclination would be to be very generous in this regard (i.e., firing good people who had to be fired because I realized I made a mistake hiring a bunch of people with their skills, not them specifically), mainly on a moral basis rather than a reputation-saving one. However, does doing so make one look weak in the eyes of the Valley VC community? Say you gave everyone something generous, like 3-6 months of severance….would it be hard to raise money later because investors think you don’t have a hard enough heart to run a profitable business? I know this is a relatively stale thread and not a lot of people watching, but very interested to hear thoughts on this.