Always surprised when a founder asks “should I tell my team X?”
Being transparent is one of the most important things for a founder.
First, your team will surprise you in how they’ll use the information.
2nd, how can you expect them to act like owners if you don’t treat them so?
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More surprising is the inevitable follow up question: “even the financials?”
Especially the financials! That’s the point of being an owner.
Plus, I never understood that concern. Public companies release their financials to the whole world every 3 months and they’re fine.
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This email transparency policy (adapted from Stripe) was great in the earlier days of KA (once we got above 100 people it got rough):
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For me, similar to what implied in his followup (stripe.com/blog/scaling-e). Say each teammate (well-intentioned & curious) has prob ε of creating drag by wading into low-context situations. Rare when N is small, increasingly common as N grows. (Curious what would say)
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This drag manifests in practice subtly, e.g. people spending an extra 4 hours adding lots of context and caveats to a document before sending it; people being more hesitant to share early and often because they don’t want to deal with onlookers; etc.
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Also FWIW I was very frequently the culprit here!! Drag instigation often looked like someone on the sidelines (*cough* me) asking: “hm, but why are we even doing this in the first place? why not this other thing?” Which, like, OK, you want some of that—but not every thread.
I’ve only led/ worked on smaller teams, but the principle is the same that the well-meaning and thoughtful folk often create at least 50% of the drag (and makes up for it with occasional great value). They also seem to work well with drag placed upon them by others
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Agreed w/ all here. I simultaneously feel fondness for our old email transparency practices and deliberately did not bring it into .
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Ah, that’s a very interesting data point!