Engineering compensation
- 1% equity max for first 2 engineers.
1% equity and low salary
- 0.5% equity and medium salary
- 0.25% equity and full salary
- 0.5% equity max for second round of engineers
0.5% equity and low salary
- 0.25% equity and medium salary
- 0.1% equity and full salary
Advisers compensation
- Typically 0.5% to 0.25%
On managing the sales team
- important to clearly defined guiding principles and policies up front
- This will prevent sales representative from selling out of line and clashing with the Ops team leading to all round frustration.
Fund raising
- can raise money from angels before there is even a product and distribution
- Jason Calacanis invest in people who he feels are winners
- Frame the opportunity and let investors fill in the details with their own models
Investors
- Really open doors to help with follow on funding rounds
- Brad slowly stepping away from USV to pursue his investment thesis in the crypto-currency space
- SiliconValley Banks has established fund for investment purposes
Building
- figure out what your super power is and quadruple down on it
- always focus your time on the highest leverage activity
- hire people to fill the positions and eventually replace yourself
- practice discipline do not step across boundaries and get in the way of specialist. Focus on framing the problem and let the specialist define the solution
- Use Slack - setup process to ensure information about sales process is disseminated to engineering team as well
On exiting
- important to grow your personal network so that you can tap on it for key resources
- seek out other operators within the space seeking to bolt on to their business model
- company making 20K to pay their staff sufficient wage to continue working on the project
- eventually find a new home of the team by selling off the company
- figure out the key strengths of the CEO you hired and structure operations around them.
Related references
- https://medium.com/@SiliconValleyGC/how-much-is-my-startup-advisor-worth-d97d825a6742
- JoinMassive.com
- Begin.com