I screwed up at last startup I joined and failed to vet the founders properly. (They ended up being low IQ scumbags.) Assume you have connections to founders of a startup you’re considering joining - what questions would you ask about the founders to vet them? Also if joining as an early employee (eg. Maybe 1st, 2nd, or 3rd employee) what % equity would you expect?
Following
What were some of the red flags in your prior startup? Hindsight is a wonderful teacher
Couple major red flags I missed in previous one was understanding how long they had been in business (too long) and turnover rate of former employees. (Too high - insanely high.)
Pedigree can help, track record of previous successful startups, use your own innate business sense, do they have money, can this make money, how long till it can, how good are sales etc
Those are all good external signs but not the kind of “real talk” vetting process I have in mind. You can have all those things in the plus column but if the founders are scum (or just majorly flawed in a non scummy way) you still end up screwed.
That’s true. At Stanford there was this course on startups and the first lecture was like “take all the factors that make a startup successful and multiply it by another factor between 1 and 1000000 and call it luck” There you go. Of course If you find something better I’m all ears.