Ask HN: How long did your startup's first engineers stay?

2 pointsraglof3 comments

As a founding engineer, I'm curious to get a sense of how long other founding engineers (there from nearly day one) stay at startups.

I've often heard they stay at least four years (bc equity vesting) but Im curious to hear from others about this.

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We hired four people shortly after raising our seed round (in addition to the two cofounders). Two of those early employees are still at the company 4.5 years later. One is the CTO and one is the Head of Product.

The other two left within 2 years of joining. One early employee quit before the one year vest cliff. The other left after about 18 months to start his own company (which ended up not working out).

Curious. How dos you find those early hires ?

I think the answer will depend a lot on how the startup was funded. If you get some great seed funding where you can afford to pay the engineers market wages during that startup phase, you might get a completely different answer than if you are trying to bootstrap and either couldn't afford to pay anyone (other than equity) or just a fraction of what they could make elsewhere.

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