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What are you doing to ensure that employees receive that broad an experience? In the startups I've worked for, the founders were loathe to involve employees in business development, let alone financing.


Depends on the person and their interests, really. A lot of the day-to-day stuff (product prioritization, feature design, user testing, operations, development process) is easy to get people involved in if they want. We definitely involve everybody with recruiting and hiring, which I think is vital for startups.

Direct involvement in financing is, as you expected, hard. But we try to be very open. Everybody knows the burn rate and the terms we took money under. Everybody regularly gets updated on dealings with our investors. We also have a regular brown bag series. A couple months back, my co-founder did one on venture financing, covering both the basics and our specific fundraising effort. He did another one recently on the competitive landscape. And he's an awfully good presenter; you can see a 5-minute talk he did recently on our approach to testing product ideas:

http://vimeo.com/24749599


Thanks for responding! Sounds like an interesting company. I wish more founders took this attitude.




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