[sockgrant]

I'm strongly in your camp. However, to play devils advocate, a founder has to make the company the focus of their life. They're gonna be working long hours, 6-7 days a week, with little to no vacation. There's diminishing returns on that time, but the pressure is on and the clock is ticking.

Naturally, founders want to hire people who also make the startup their life. If you're working all day, don't you want to build your company with people who do the same?

But besides founders fervor to work round the clock, some people are just addicted to work. They can't stop thinking about it and no matter what they're doing, if it's not work, they're not satisfied. These people want to work with other people with the same mentality.

[ulfw]

Totally understandable for founders who have skin in the game. An engineer hired as employee 10+ with less than half a percent equity, which will get diluted to 0.05% or less before an eventual exit (if ever!) shouldn't feel like he HAS to work 100 hours/week - especially if he's getting maybe 2/3s of his market value in salary.

[sockgrant]

Yeah. I agree with you. Just saying each side has a valid point. As employee 10+ with 0.5% equity, there's no chance I'm going to work as much as a founder.

But as a founder or a very early employee, I'm going to try to hire people that work as hard/efficiently as I do.