Q&A with Alex - on getting your team wrong:
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Hi Alexander
Greetings!
I have a question for you - how do you approach salaries?
I am running my startup and it is lean but still burning cash and obviously, the funds are not infinite. That said some members of the leadership team still expect commercial salaries with bells and whistles.
We are burning cash and if I am to increase leadership salaries something has to give be it we cannot hire the additional headcount or cannot do this or that etc.
So what is your recommendation in addressing salaries?
Thanks in advance
FOUNDER
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Hey FOUNDER-
What‘s up.
I can say stuff, but I don’t really like to without a lot more data points. That’s called paid consulting.
Short answer: Lean and mean. Only fancy shit I do is manipulating people with prizes on Friday (publicly). Cash means runway.
If you are in a rowboat, you need to all row in the right direction. You’ve retards rowing the wrong way otherwise. I would fire people with the wrong mentality and learn from your mistake. Hire young, smart and hungry.
Leadership and startup are a little abstract. Leadership are minions and need to act like it. If they want bells and whistles they should fuck off and get a real job.
Having said that, if they don’t have equity alignment then 1/ you oversold them, 2/ they are losers and can’t get the fancy job they want and so something is better than nothing, or 3/ you did a shit job of explaining that the equity is how they get rich...
Startup is about mind fucking people to do what you want, but making them think it’s what they want.
I have no idea, so I’m just saying you need to be acutely aware you have the right person for the phase. There is a reason most startups are staffed with cheap kids who want to learn, and they get ‘grey’ the more money there is, and the more complicated things get.
My guess is there are a number of things going wrong, and it starts with your communication and how you are managing expectations.
You need to be able to communicate that ‘additional headcount’ makes the size of the pie bigger long term, and they need to have bought into that. A lot of startup is mentality and culture.
Everything I wrote may be total BS. I need like an hour to really not say something that is not total BS.
What I said is not comfortable, but 80% will probably hit a nerve.
Alexander