I'm sure you mean well, but this is exactly the the non-founder response I'm talking about. And maybe things were different 20 years ago, I don't know.
There's always something better I could have done as the person in charge, obviously. I've done a lot of reflection and self-critique, please believe me, and I realized I've made a lot of mistakes, from which the situations could have been recovered though.
Putting my faith in employees, expecting them to do maybe 80-90% of what I was doing as an employee 10 years earlier created an almost unrecoverable situation, that burned the entire runway to unscramble. Yet if I say that my biggest lesson was never to put trust in employees, as it's most likely impossible to create a good incentive system for them, most people won't believe me, as I'm sure you won't either.
I've come to think that the burden is no longer on anyone to create incentive systems, it's on society to reintroduce some morality. Only a limited amount of businesses have the luxury of aligned incentives.
I can be incentivized by money, but it has to be in the 7 figure range. The reality is that tech workers with a little bit of work can clear 400k/yr at BigCo with much higher job security and much lower variance than any startup.
Why would I grind at a startup where the best case scenario I am getting a payout I could get at FAANG without any of the risk?
I have been through a successful exit as a SWE and you can be sure that the founders did everything in their power to maximize their own payout and minimize my payout. In a company of 40 the founders got a payout of 100x any other individual at the company, even those who were there early on and stayed until the exit. I got a (taxable) payout of ~300k and the founders got 40mil. The money was life changing for the founders, but for everyone else it was just a nice bonus.
Now I just work at BigCo and make 400k/yr, every year.
There's always something better I could have done as the person in charge, obviously. I've done a lot of reflection and self-critique, please believe me, and I realized I've made a lot of mistakes, from which the situations could have been recovered though.
Putting my faith in employees, expecting them to do maybe 80-90% of what I was doing as an employee 10 years earlier created an almost unrecoverable situation, that burned the entire runway to unscramble. Yet if I say that my biggest lesson was never to put trust in employees, as it's most likely impossible to create a good incentive system for them, most people won't believe me, as I'm sure you won't either.
I've come to think that the burden is no longer on anyone to create incentive systems, it's on society to reintroduce some morality. Only a limited amount of businesses have the luxury of aligned incentives.