I have put emails out to 2 proven programmers (Marc Andreessen and Max Levchin) to show up in my NYC office next week to interview for positions as programmers in my startup. To get hired, they must promise to lay everything on the line so I can fulfill my dreams, this of course includes their respective ferarris as well as Marc's 'windfall' from the recent acquisition of Opsware.
John Chambers will leave Cisco to be my VP of sales even though we have neither revenue nor funding yet.
What does "proven" mean? Even if you've worked with someone before, and things worked out well, there's no guaranteeing it will be 100% the same the next go around.
Miscommunication is probably the biggest problem here. Were both of you expecting to work 80 hours a week on the startup for the next 3 years of your life? Or was one person really thinkg "I'll see how this thing plays out... might have to bail after a few months if it doesn't."
Precisely. The "proven" ones are already rich; thus you are always going into the trenches with "unproven" people. I don't know why anyone is worried about this -- it doesn't take months to discover that someone isn't dedicated. Setting up ownership agreements with someone you haven't worked with yet is the only mistake here.
Not trusting "unproven" people in a startup can be a far bigger mistake, however. If you don't trust your employees, they'll quickly fall back into the "Okay, it's a bureacracy, I'll do the minimum amount of work and collect a paycheck" mode. Or they'll leave. Because there's little else they can do if you don't trust them.
Instead, you should trust them, but always have contingency plans (which you don't tell them!) for what to do if they don't perform. You probably need those contingency plans even if you're doing the work yourself or have hired the best developers on earth. After all, nearly every software project takes 3 times as long as you expect (even when you account for Hofstadter's Law ;-)), and some things just plain aren't feasible.
