Exactly, also asymmetrical decision power and non-aligned incentives.
If you are a founder and you get a proposal for a 10M$ acquisition, you know you will make something around 2-3M$, which is not too bad.
The employee however will make a small 100k if he owns 1% after dilution, which is usually not the case. This is after many years of hardwork, probably taking a paycut of at least 100k$ per year compared to a big company.
Honestly, as an employee, I don’t care. I won’t be persuaded to take a lower than market salary for the promise of equity. If the company does well and I make some money off of my equity, it’s s bonus. If not, I call my list of recruiters and have another job in 2 weeks to a month. I’m no special snowflake, good developers who keep their skill set current can easily get a job. I’m nowhere near the west coast but it’s been the case for me for 20 years.
My criteria for a job is the technology stack, the environment, and the money.
I have to 100% disagree about your assessment of ethics. If you're hiding things from your employees so you can get your bailout and shaft everyone else, how is that ethical?
You're statement has an underlying assumption that founders are hiding things from employees.
As stated above, I think its that employees aren't asking the right questions.
It's like when purchasing a vehicle; it's up to the buyer to educate themselves. Savvy buyers get better deals. We'd like to think of our industry as a meritocracy; but it's still largely based on humans with monkey brains,and greed is a powerful incentive.
Who are we talking about here--founding employees who are presumably taking lower than market salaries for more equity, or someone else?
I asked our CEO to give us an update on our runway, and he told me. I guess he could be lying, but I don't see what purpose that would serve.
At my previous company, the CFO was invited to our semi annual engineering meetings, and he'd give us the last quarterly numbers, along with a lengthy Q&A.
At the startup I co-founded before that, the CEO/co-founder was very transparent about our financials and gave me all the time I required to understand the impacts of the business decisions he was making.
Before that, at INRIX, at least once a month during our weekly all-hands, we'd get our financials detailed to us.
Being a founder requires optics, progressive disclosure, and getting creative with the representation of data, but in my experience, I've yet to be in a situation where I felt I was lied to, or purposefully misled.
I actually worked for a startup and during its last days, they had weekly meetings telling us the status. We all knew the end was coming. After we all got laid off, we took our severance, and everyone had a job in two or three weeks.
1. What is your monetization strategy?
2. What is your plan for profitability?