Thinking About Startup Hours
You are the founder and owner of your organization, and you've grown
to ~20 people. It's a startup, so everyone understands that there are
long hours and hard work. Contrast this with the defense industry,
where people frequently do their 8 hours (and much of those 8 hours
are spent unproductively) and leave. When your team already feels this
responsibility to the company - i.e. feeling the need to accomplish
something every day, and staying as long as it takes to do just that -
DO NOT guilt trip them about hours. Likely, this is the group who has
equity, and know the stakes they work under. If they need some time to
rest, let them have it. Let's put it this way - take your equity,
divide it by the equity of the highest equity earner in your company.
Take this multiplier, multiply it to the hours this high equity earner
works, exceed this time. Now you've earned the privilege to ask more
hours from this highly dedicated core set of employees.
