How much info should founders share with early stage employees?

Share it all. Complete transparency. Show them the cash flow.

At your small size you will benefit from the additional trust and alignment this will bring. You may find yourself delighted in finding that many of your team can see and solve problems that you may have missed.

You can be super secretive to combat the BigCo mentality like Apple when you have the first class problem of being a BigCo.

Here are things that I would consider significantly more important than wanting to pump up employees by giving them information on partnerships:

- making sure your business model is viable

- involving employees in the software development process so they understand the user's perspective when developing the product

- paying people fairly

- helping employees structure work/life balance

- having clear and scoped value streams to prevent undue burden on the organization

- rigorously test business assumptions on an ongoing basis

- leading by example through being a decent human and treating others humanely

While information is power, secrets are not what makes a company valuable. Corporate espionage is trivial these days -- you can't stop people from talking. Nowadays, the best competitive advantage is execution. If you can execute well on the basics, you'll blow 95% of the competition out of the water because it takes a certain kind of person to cultivate talent. Your competition is only human, and they naturally want to cut corners, which is why they rely on mind games, or what some might call _sales_.

Still, it seems polite to answer your question about the effects of pumping up your team with info on upcoming partnerships, so I will despite the fact that I think you're coming at it from the wrong angle. Ask yourself why would they care about this information you're providing? If they do seem like they care, either:

- they stand to gain directly from this partnership or

- they're putting on a performance for social and political reasons or

- you hired employees who fail to reason properly, in which case you have bigger problems than their enthusiasm

If you want to provide more context without giving away too much info, please feel free to. Otherwise, I hope this answers your question.

My experience kicks in quite a bit north of where you are, but for what it’s worth, I joined a company as employee ~150 that practiced near total transparency on everything.

We went public, are now north of 8,000 employees, and it’s still nearly as transparent as when I joined - financials, product metrics, anonymized employee trends/HR data, major decisions… the list goes on but pretty much everything is done in the open with only a handful of exceptions.

I can’t think of a situation where that level of transparency was a hindrance to the company or regretted by our founders as far as I know… in fact the opposite, I think it creates a culture of ownership and makes people feel valued and respected.

As an employee, now that I’ve experienced having that level of access, I’ll never join a place that doesn’t offer a similar level of transparency.

Edit: Adding a couple thoughts based on some comments I’m seeing. I really believe that restricting information to specific people or keeping it from people who “might not understand it” is wrongheaded.

If people are interested and curious, help them learn. If they aren’t, who cares? When there was feedback about wanting to better understand financials, our CFO did an hour long walkthrough of SaaS economics. When new legislation forced operational changes, our general counsel walked us through not only what we needed to do differently but how he approached his job and situations like this. People come to work (especially at startups) to stretch and to learn, regardless of their role or level.

Sharing the current state of things is good. It will be stressful (for everyone) at times but at 7 people, they're invested personally and professionally.

Sharing things that are in-progress is harder. I'd recommend attaching timelines and probabilities. Basically saying "this should happen in the next X days" and "we're trying this idea, it may not work but we'll know in roughly Y days."

There are two huge upsides to a small, tight team:

a) there are LOTS of decisions made every day in every area. If people know what else is going on, they should be able to make better decisions. aka "This doesn't make sense to do for one customer.. but if there are 4 others in the pipeline, it's way more compelling."

b) people with varying strengths and areas of focus will not have your blindspots and perspectives and will see/understand things that you don't. Lean into that and you'll get a better solution.

Background: I was employee ~25 at Twilio, launched Okta's API security product, and am currently employee ~20 at ngrok.

"What if we train our people and they leave?" "What if we don't and they stay?"

Forward-looking entrepreneurs are building in public. In my opinion, sharing news and information with core team is overall a positive investment.

If there's a lack of trust, maybe, there are bigger problems in the startup to fix?

The best way to ensure your employees wont be honest or transparent with you is to not be honest or transparent with them.

Or maybe to put it a bit more harshly: You're not important enough to be hiding details

Be open, honest, and realistic. Say what you hope will come to be as a result of your actions. Be clear when things aren't set in stone.

Be transparent so that they can all work towards the same goals. If you keep them in the dark, they wont have any intuition on how to take initiative. Let positive results pump them up.

You should definitely share information relevant to the employee’s decision to join and continue working at your company. It’s imperative to build trust with employees so that they know they can take your word.

The challenge for many is that it’s easy to be transparent during the good times, but much harder to be honest when things aren’t going well. You need to choose a level of transparency that you can stick with through good times and bad.

I will caution against taking HN advice unilaterally on these topics. HN comments are heavily skewed toward employees rather than founders and the advice you get will not necessarily consider the needs of founders and a company at all. Anecdotally, I have worked at a startup that tried to share everything with employees in a fully transparent manner and it backfired spectacularly. A couple of the employees used their information as leverage to work their way into high ranking roles at a competing company, taking some key customer relation knowledge with them. The roles didn’t actually work out for them at the new company. They were unqualified, the company just used them to extract their knowledge and let them go after a year. However, the damage was done. The information they took wasn’t at all necessary to be open to the employees and didn’t really benefit them behind a sense of full transparency for everyone. Don’t assume that your employees are always going to be in your court, especially as you scale past the intimate team size. It only takes one person acting in a selfish manner to try to leverage your transparency for their personal gain. Be at least somewhat careful about sharing information that doesn’t directly relate to employees making decisions about their own jobs at your company.

Don’t worry about leaks. At this stage, nobody else cares about you.

But what you should really worry about is risk appetite. Your employees will have different appetite for risk to you. That’s why you’re a founder and they are not.

That’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

Be conscious if this when you share things. Even if you can control the message, different people will respond to events differently.

For example:

- You have 6 months of expenses worth of of cash in the bank, and you are spending 110% of MRR each month. Is that plenty of runway, or not much at all? The answer depends on risk appetite.

- You decide to bid on a contract that’s way beyond your current product’s feature set. If you win the pilot you’ll need to build a stack of features fast and might neglect other customers while you do. Is that exciting or awful? Depends who you ask.

- You turn down an acquisition offer. If you accepted, the other 6 folks could have each put a deposit on a nice house. But you believe you could be 10x bigger than the offer. Will everyone else share this belief or would they rather cash out? Depends on their… you guessed it.

I would share things that are true now, but be careful about sharing things that may happen in the future.

For future partnerships, the real risk isn't that your competitors find out. The real risk is that the partnership falls through and your employees feel demoralized.

So I think it's fine and good to share information about the discussions your currently having with bigger companies, but less of a good idea to preview the possible future relationship.

I've been in both camp, founder and employee in a startup.

From my experience, sharing is mostly bad.

Very often, you'll be tempted to share good news too early, and very often it won't materialize (startup life is a roller coaster)

This alone will erode the morale of your team.

But there is an other factor, many humans, when presented with data and problems, tend to at least think about solutions, and they dislike being ignored.

Their solutions and ideas might be good, but they are very often half-baked and everyone has different ideas and priorities.

In practice, when people are asking for information, they implicitly are asking for power.

Different perspective, more about individual enablement vs company risk:

- Share info that enables independent decision making and actions so your team can help recruit new teammates, sell to customers, choose designs, and at a personal level, make personal financial decisions. If not, you're hobbling your team, who are your main shot at success. Just be clear that info is internal.

- Level anything forward looking, good or bad. Relatively few people understand that good sales requires significant loss rates, what a slog fundraising typically is, etc, so when some big lead doesn't convert or a process takes awhile, bigger issue is avoiding unnecessary heartache & whiplash. So share progress good & bad, but always level it. Partnerships, key hires, leads, VCs, talks, releases: celebrate real wins and analyze losses, but it's a marathon, so don't pump people up too much on the barrage of things outside of your control. The sharing is mostly dependent on the experience of the individual receiver.

At that size, share everything. But also share all realistic outcomes, including what failure cases might look like. It's more about earning trust than "pumping" anyone up.

At Stream with our team of 140 I like to share runway, burn, cash balance, revenue, burn multiple and CAC payback.

Historically Stream has grown rapidly and the equity grants have been very significant compared to the base salaries. (who knows what the future brings, but hopefully that trend continues).

So a significant part of our team's compensation is equity, I think it's only fair to be transparent about those topics. Also important to share the last round valuation and the revenue, since many startups that raised at too high prices are currently deeply underwater on their employee's equity.

We do lunch and learns on equity, evaluating startups etc. That is important since most people don't have prior experience with evaluating startups.

A friend of mine didn't exercise his stock options when he was early stage at a company that had an exit above 1B. I think that shows how hard it is to evaluate how startups are doing. But sharing the data is a good starting point.

We have a company scorecard that shows sales funnels, bookings, production numbers, cash and collections info, etc, all completely open to any employee at the company.

A soldering technician on our team can literally see how we’re doing on cash and collections at any time.

We have company-wide updates 2-4 times a month where we brief all employees on important ongoings for 30 minutes.

I would never join a startup that didn't have complete transparency. I've been fucked by startups before where YC founders held all the information and then sold the company, enriching themselves but leaving the scraps for the employees. The next startup I made sure that the founders were very transparent and honest and trusted us with maximum information. Even though it didn't take off, I still enjoyed being a part of their team so much more.

Even unicorns that I worked for, the CEO shared very detailed and transparent information with employees even as the company got extremely large, which I appreciated.

I can give you the opposite perspective: our CEO shares very little, and often far too late for us to be effective. It’s led to several resignations over the last year, increases stress, and encourages burnout as we all see a heavy emotional investment with little payoff. Frankly, it sucks being in a professional position with the potential (and job description) to direct operations, but to be in reality one of many assistants to a single bottleneck.

I realize that this may be a common arrangement, but I would suggest that it is not the best model for anyone involved, and would encourage you to avoid it.

Give them as much as they want to know.

Some folks don't want distractions. They don't care about the state of things that don't directly pertain to their job. They just want to build stuff.

Other people, like myself, want to know everything.

If you want honesty and transparency from your employees, you have to create a culture of it. Which means it starts with you.

There's two categories of responses on this page: 1. people who have never ran a business and been fully transparent 2. people who've done it and recommend selective transparency because of the consequences

haha

While transparency is no doubt a good thing, you may have to consider following points

- The overall structure of your team and who will benefit from which information. - Should you share everything at one go or defer the announcement (Important so that target audience is not overwhelmed but should be able to grasp what you are sharing) - Create a bi-weekly or monthly update program and then identify what and how much should be shared - Majority of the people are interested in how the information will benefit them (most of the time whats the direct impact on the money they will get), so don't be disappointed in case you share a good SI partnership news and no one is excited. - Staggered approach is always better. It indicates that company is on growth path. - Be sure to check legal clauses before you disclose something well before it materializes. - In addition to above points, there are also situations wherein deals/partnerships have been revoked after everything was signed, disclosing such announcement too early also creates bad impact when things don't work out.

There is no silver rule about what you should do, but don't spill everything as most of it will be either ignored or people will still find ways to criticize. There are very few who will be excited about the future of a company than their personal gains.

I don't think I'd worry about the risk of them leaving (unless you have some highly lucrative IP, and as a fintech you probably don't). The thing with sharing potential deals is mostly just they will usually fall through / not happen, so do you want them to ride the ups and downs with you? I'd probably share while keeping their expectations realistic, cause otherwise it can feel like working in a vacuum.

I’d default to transparency and share things that can be useful for people to know, consider not sharing things that can be distracting.

Customer or partnership deals can be useful to share because the team can help with those but talking about future fundraising might be just distracting and the team might not be able to do anything.

We do monthly business review with the whole company (25ppl now), going through growth, revenue, cash flow, customers etc.

I'm also in the full transparency boat with two exceptions:

1) if the partnership requires NDA or another type of secret/security then keep that limited.

2) many deals fall through, so I choose to delay worthless detail on those till the deals are more mature.

I'm the CEO of an early stage startup, about ~10 in size. I share everything.

Cash in bank, runway, burn. How our products are doing. What's coming next.

Maybe things change as you grow, I'm not sure. But for now, my teammates are early believers in what we're trying to do and the least I can owe them for taking that risk is transparency.

Transparency is great, and I think the main balance that might be missing in this context is how much frequency/latency there is between events that are taking place. I see it more like a stock ticker. There are ups and downs, some big swings that happen at a micro scale, and then overall trends.

It’s good to identify how much frequency your team can handle and where to dial that in.

E.g. Monday: really hot lead, Monday afternoon: just got off call, lead upset about missing feature - not sure if deal will happen, Tuesday: contract sent. Wednesday: Lots of red lines, not sure if we can do this. Thursday: Deal signed. — This is very high frequency reporting with lots of ups and downs. It can be hard for a team to even focus with this amount of thrashing.

Another example: Monday: Prospective client, Next Monday: Contract won/lost, and these are the reasons.

With 7 people in the company, I would assume that you are close-knit in terms of trust. If that is not the case, then either you need to verify if there is trust or you have verified and there is some missing trust: I think this is underlying reason that you asked the question in the first place. I think this might present an opportunity for you to build trust.

Why I think you should share strategic information with your early employees? In my opinion, not sharing strategic partnerships to early employees misses the point of building trust with your early employees. Your early employees are in it for the experience of ups and down, and they will be benefit from both. Critical feedback from them is especially important at this time.

You will have situations where an employee or even a co-founder leaves, I think you have to be ready for that.

Be as open as possible.

The places I've worked that were basically "open books" and super transparent tended to be more successful than the more opaque places.

Largely because people felt they had more of a stake in it, felt more involved and engaged, and would bring more ideas/contacts/knowledge to the table, etc.

The more opaque places that practiced unnecessary levels of "need to know" tended to not work as well, as the company couldn't leverage its peoples experience, networks, etc as efficiently, and people generally work less well if they are kept in the dark.

Being open tends to create opportunities, and your employees can warn you about risks you might be missing.

Being closed? You lose that advantage.

A decent NDA and properly written contract will cover you if someone leaves.

Everything except for their own deepest fears and doubts. You really need to save those for co-founders who are as invested as you are.

There's no correct answer. I have tried both strategies. When push comes to shove employees and founders are not co-aligned. You can treat people really well and they will leave. You can treat people badly and they will stay. You can explain things until the cows come home but employees are not founders, they can't always be expected to see things in the same light, timeframes, or think at multiple levels of the business simultaneously. High-touch management doesn't scale. Eventually you will part ways. Protect the business, be transparent enough to engender trust, admit your mistakes, and always be fair to others.

There are very few cases in which outsiders with power will act on “intelligence” from a 7 person startup. You are like the government of Palau — nobody cares what you’re doing — your problems are much bigger than getting your stuff cloned.

I was the first hire at a company that grew to 5 people in total. I got told pretttty much everything, though usually after the fact. Business decisions I was sometimes asked for my input but with the knowledge that I was just providing my opinion rather than it being "a vote".

There are no secrets in a small company.

When we went under, I wondered how it was that we had run out of money. The boss was always transparent about cash - I was always able to look at the books, and I was aware things were getting grimmer by the week. In the last week or so he took me through everything. Lawyers are expensive :(

I don't work for an early-stage startup, however, the company I work for is early mid stage. They share everything except (annoyingly enough) individual employee compensation. They also share risks/opportunities in a very transparent way. Note that they share most of the data with the general public as well, which is quite unique for a company of any size, and likely the big reason we basically own our niche.

When you write "employee", what role is the employee in? Do they need to know so they can make good business and life choices? If not, it is just burdening them.

I definitely think that CxOs need to be aware of most of the things. I recently was asked to join a start-up in the C-suite, but had to turn it down. Too coy with details for my taste. If you trust me enough to invite me to take care of mission critical elements, do not hide things from me.

But, there is such a thing as over-sharing. Not every role is mission critical. If the role does not need the information to make business decisions there is no reason the share, in my opinion.

>Should I share info on upcoming behind-the-scenes partnerships, etc with employees to pump them up?

Will it directly impact their work? If so, share it with them. If not, what is "pump them up" mean? Are you looking for a Steven Ballmer presentation reaction?

I will presume you have an NDA and non-compete with all of your employees.

All of it. (the financials are what matter most) Check out “The Great Game of Business” which does a great job of explaining why.

I've seen everything shared really well.

Typically cash flow at a high level is shared, the KPIs are shared (revenue per employee, annual run rate, deals being worked on, etc).

As it scales then I've seen things being held closer to the chest... companies tend to learn that the people they've hired between the 500-1,500 headcount range are less family, more likely to leak things publicly... so then cards get held closer to the chest, more consideration is put into what is shared.

What I've never seen shared: cap table, who has what options, salaries. The latter two things are usually solved by whisper networks between staff, the former is the big one... without aspects of it one cannot really know whether their options are worth anything at all and how much they're getting, and for early employees (within the first couple of hundred) that's typically how they get screwed on negotiations or simply through inexperience/greed by founders.

You should share enough context that your employees have a good grasp of business goals and can shape and prioritize their own work to build value. You won't think of everything and you don't want to spend your time tracking all their work - they need to be able to make independent decisions that further your business.

It is helpful to think of all communication with employees using a lifecycle model. As the company grows in headcount and functions, the composition of a core team that has the ball keeps changing depending on the nature of the deals. It would be helpful to form some guidelines on what gets communicated when you form a core deal team. Obviously, when the deal reaches different milestones, you may want to communicate it to all employees. This includes both positive outcomes and negative outcomes (they both provide opportunities for organizational learning on what went right and what went wrong/could have been done differently).

It is important that employees feel they will get communication at the right time if the communication is relevant to them and not feel like they are being left out of the loop.

Also, be ready to give honest answers when there are followup questions.

At 200+ full time, I found being 100% transparent extremely difficult when lacking context (especially around cash in bank) because some took it as company was in bad shape, start looking for another job.

However due to the recent downturn, I found being transparent about the company's cash position, why/how we were making cuts, and my (founder) decision to take on debt instead of attempt to fundraise (equity) in this environment a rallying force because most of my staff have significant stock options and being effectively bootstrapped while surviving (almost thriving) right now is really exciting.

It also tamped down the seemingly endless requests for comp increases from earlier in the year as everyone shifted their priority to job preservation while realizing they have solid wfh careers.

I'd default to transparency - but that means also being up front about risks.

It's very nice to be able to say you have a partnership that is being discussed - it's less nice to "pump them up" on a partnership that's not a sure thing.

So if you disclose (and I think most times founders should) - disclose responsibly.

That means - don't bullshit them about how real the partnership is. If it's "Just in the discussion phase" (or frankly, anything other than a signed deal) make sure they know it's not a sure thing.

"We're working on a partnership with ____. We think it can provide some great opportunities, but it's not a done deal. We're still trying to figure out the details, and there's a chance it may not happen - but right now it's being discussed".

When I was joining my current team, founder shared with me what is their runaway and then added some details to back this up - how much money did they have in their bank account at the time, how much money do they burn each month, how much money do they earn each month. This was not the first startup I was working with so from business perspective I was not that much interested with other info he provided (like, that they have deep relationship with AWS, which they indeed have and it indeed helps a lot, not only from cloud services perspective but also from marketplace perspective).

I'd say it's good to keep balance, show people what risk are they taking by joining you and share whatever information you have to back this up.

What role do you want these early stage employees to have?

If you hide everything, that is consistent with having an unprivileged role at a risky enterprise where the employee should justly assume the worst - e.g. that the only compensation that is real is one that is cash-in-pocket, and that the job can end at any moment, as the company might be dead in the water, out of the runway already. That's not necessarily an obstacle, but that requires paying some premium (in cash, not equity) to justify these risks.

If you're open and trust the employees with realistic financial information, then the employees can trust the future of the company, to the extent that the information actually supports the notion that the future is there and not faked for pure PR.

As an employee of a post-seed, immediately-pre-series-a company, I've wondered if the cap table should always be public. It seems like hiding ownership is potentially highly deceptive, but I'm looking at this from the employee perspective....

As much as they'd like? For me personally after having been ice burnt by the kookaid I'd be very worried if there was hand waiving and cloudiness for things I actually want to understand and get details about. In that regards show me cap tables, show me who gets what kind of preferred vesting, what impact is future funding rounds going to have on my outcomes, what stories, I mean assumptions, are your valuations predicated on? Unlike founders afaik most employees don't have the ability to sell early stock and have to wait years and years for an exit. So full transparency is the least one can do to earn trust.

For this sort of situation, I'd always avoid any generic advice that isn't a "how to". "It depends on the team" really is the only generic info I'd share, since you still have to consider your situation.

The more professional and emotionally mature your team members are, the more I'd share. If a huge deal fails, juniors can be badly affected and will pull down morale, without much upside. On the other hand, experienced colleagues can catch early mistakes that could cost a lot more later.

Try to mentally simulate people in multiple situations and it'll be a lot clearer for you.

I walked away from a start-up and potentially a lot of money, largely due to lack of transparency.

I think the worst thing that can happen is that your employees stop trusting you. They're still on the payroll but they're there only until something better comes along.

Be careful with your answers to them when they ask for information you don't want to give out.

If it's confidential, say that straight out and explain why. If the employee doesn't understand it or feels you're being deceptive or not totally honest, accept that there now has been a breach of trust between you.

> Or is giving too much information ... risky if an employee leaves

What is your actual risk exposure here?

For most startups the existential threat isn't competitors, it's lack of traction. There's basically nothing that a competitor could find out that would substantial hurt the startup, especially nothing that they won't find out anyways.

There are obvious exceptions (e.g. you're a hedgefund and have a trading strategy which could be wiped out if someone bigger started exploiting the same opportunity), but they're called exceptions for a reason.

I run a media company. We are very transparent about our KPIs with employees. We only share things that have materialized. For example, we don't want to mislead about something that might happen especially in an early stage company where it's hard to estimate the accuracy of something happening.

I would never want to work at a company that is secretive about everything and thus we chose to be transparent.

Information hoarding leads to internal empire building. In a startup this is absolutely deadly. I've experienced this personally twice before learning my lesson to be careful surrounding this point.

Obviously there's some stuff which simply must be confidential, like HR stuff, as well as early stage negotiations. But otherwise the default should be transparency.

I think it probably depends a lot on your employees. Some might be really interested in what is going on and enjoy being in the loop. Some might have been burnt before so actively want to see signs of decay or lack of growth. Some are there for the tech, really dont care. If your staff is like the last group you're wasting your time doing presentations.

A small SaaS company I worked for in my early career used to have business notifications plugged in to our chat app (flowchat) and even provided read-only access their Stripe account so we could see how much impact we are creating on the business. I appreciated that kind of trust very much and always felt included in the company's vision.

Most up-voted comments seem to be of the opinion that companies should be fully open with their employees. Most companies I have seen do the opposite, they control information to a need to know basis. May be it's a result of where I am coming from.

Would be really grateful if anyone would share a list of companies that are fully open with their employees?

I was employee #1 at a startup, the founder was actually a friend (not a close friend but a friend nonetheless) and was pretty transparent. That said over time I uncovered a few half-truths and one thing that was somewhat hidden from me. I started looking immediately and left within 6 months of joining.

Fellow cofounder here. Be totally open. With a team that small, you need everyone to be on the same page. Regardless of your roles on paper, the success of your venture depends on each and every person putting in everything they have and holding nothing back. Communication is key and definitely will help motivate everyone.

I have worked for small companies that shared virtually everything. It did not go well when senior people found out their bosses where making n times their salary, among other stuff. The lesson is that you should only share what you can afford to share. If you do share stuff, share it async instead of spamming meetings.

Anything less than all of it is a red flag.

Depends on what you mean by info - founders (me included) sometimes mistake dreams and wishes for sure facts. This can backfire spectacularly if the hype doesn’t pan out.

So like everyone else I say you should most definitely over-share but only once it passes facts check. Whatever that means for you & your company.

We did this for years at TMC and to good effect, the format was a monthly newsletter sent to all hands with sections for each part of the company (sales pipeline, past jobs, future jobs, lessons learned, finances). It was the glue that held us together across many years.

Why hide anything? Early employees should know they are taking a risk too. If they don’t know that going in, they aren’t a good fit. Share financials, risks, concerns, thoughts from the board (within reason), what has worked, what hasn’t, runway, customer feedback, etc.

If you trust them enough to work on your product at such a crucial time, then you should trust them enough to give them full transparency.

Siloing info rarely benefits anyone. At best it builds incompetence and distrust (lack of full picture), and at worst it dooms best laid plans.

Confidentiality should be agreed on in a sane manner.

That said - full strategic insight into the vision and what‘s done to achieve it and welcoming input will engage employees in a very productive way, but requires free flow of information.

Usually, the benefits outweight the problems _by far_.

Being one of 7 employees, I would expect a high level of transparency. That doesn't mean you should force it down their throats, but I would want access to as much info as possible given the risks of working for a company that early-stage.

If a large enough chunk of the information, that happens to be what you'd give to your employees to be frank about the direction your start-up is going, is stuff that your competitors can use, then why aren't you making these employees sign an NDA?

You're a fintech startup. Your employees have already formed their own financial models of your company, and if you do not share info, they will plug in their own worst-case estimates, and leave if their models show bad numbers.

Err on the side of transparency, but also just ask how much they want to know (maybe during 1-on-1s). Information can create extra individual stress, and some people would rather just be shielded until bad news hits.

Share all the hard facts: who's who, capital raised, cash flow, competitive landscape, committed roadmap, etc.

You can withhold future plannings to yourself unless you need inputs.

A good leader is like a strict but loving parent. If you model yourself around that, you’ll know the answer.

Everything.

The missed opportunities of not sharing is way greater than any misuse of the information.

Reliance.

Mutual dependency in a small business, or depending on a critical component, is a kind of risk that's mitigated with sharing, both first-order (knowing) and second order (knowing you'll know when you need to know).

It's the same for technology development as for partnerships or funding. If a partnership or technology is not really key to the mutual reliance, there's no big driver for sharing. If sharing would create more uncertainty than silence, that's a blocker.

I find it comes down to scheduling when to address an issue. When trouble is brewing, I try to ensure people have the skills and background they need before I bring things to a boil (or it boils over on its own).

My goal is to have people face an issue, manage it properly, and move on. After lots of battles like this, even if we lose, we still know we're in it together, we'll be ready to face things as they come, and it's be ok, even if we lose one or two.

The solution to the uncertainties of mutual reliance is experience in the trenches together -- particularly scaling focus, effort, and alignment (only) as needed.

need to know. if you tell them, make sure they know 1) it could easily not happen 2) if they tell anyone it wont happen 3) drop some fake ones to see if they spill beans

Yes be completely open with all employees.

Radical transparency is the best policy

You should ask other founders about this. I wouldn’t leave important decisions up to HN’s crowdsourced truth-seeking.

maybe you can ask them if they are really interested

Your first 10 employees are make or break. Tell them everything.

Startups are largely a financial vehicle to shift value created by employees to founders and investors

> I'm the founder of a small 7 person startup in the fintech space.

If you can afford $1m/y in payroll, you're not small :)

> Should I share info on upcoming behind-the-scenes partnerships, etc with employees to pump them up? Or is giving too much information counterproductive/risky if an employee leaves?

The kind of person who needs "full transparency" that these Internet randos are advocating isn't going to be working very hard. You can't afford to blow $1m/y on people who use Twitter. That said, don't conflate "full transparency" with having meaningful direction and vision, and rising above the fray of agile development.