Loyalty is probably the last quality you should be looking for as a hiring manager at a startup. Granted, you want people to be loyal, but it also has a loose correlation to incompetence, mainly because incompetent people tend to (rightly) fear losing their job more than people at the top of their game.

Better to hire the best you can by other criteria and let the chips fall where they may.

Interesting, I think it would be one of the first.

The reason why is that people that you hire early and that put together the core of the company will have a bunch of extremely important knowledge that will be very hard to transfer to another new hire. If a start-up spends a great deal of time replacing people that were hired and that left just as fast that would seriously affect continuity.

It is for that very reason that in later funding rounds it is not unusual to ask these people to sign on for an X number of years in return for some stock with a vesting period.

You should hire the most skilled people you can, period. If you can get a brilliant developer or designer for 6 months, that's better than hiring some schlub just because he'll stick with you.

Perhaps more apropos, skill is more of an unwavering quality than loyalty. The way to make a great developer loyal is to give them interesting stuff to work on and have the right culture. If loyalty is your metric, it's more effective to worry about your office conditions than to try to pick the right candidates.

I'm a prime example. At 33 I've only had 5 jobs since I was 20, so I look incredibly loyal as an employee. But there's a reason I stayed at each of those jobs for so long. I would not suffer a pointy-haired boss for a single day.

Agreed. Loyalty is a useless metric when you hire talent. For sure you want someone smart with a positive attitude but you will have to get used to smart people wanting to move on.