[mjolk]

> It risks creating the typical monoculture of guys (yes unfortunately) between 25 and 35.

Oh yeah, totally. My motivation for asking was to make sure we don't end up in a monoculture of people that stick around after being surprised by the startup grind. That won't work for our business as we _need_ a mix of people, backgrounds, interests to really make it work (opposed to say, a hft/fintech platform, where diversity of thought/life experience isn't crucial).

> A ton of people are in this situation, much too many to ignore even for a startup. They might not seem like a good fit for your phase of startup but I think that mode of thought is counterproductive.

Yeah, it's definitely hard. Funding is limited and early stage is about maximizing the value of capital and speed of validating assumptions, and unfortunately, that often means preclusive criteria for people that need to leave "on time" regularly. Not saying it's right, but that's the reality of most startups.

I want to actively combat the bias of just short circuiting to people that are 22-30 and probably without kids, which means being able to have the conversation of "hey, please don't say this expectation is fine if it's not" and knowing how to tell if someone says it's fine for the sake of getting an offer, but it's actually not.

> Needing people to occasionally work more is normal. Even having an emergency meeting on a Sunday is normal. Just be clear with what the situation is, what is expected, and make sure that the plan is to never have 50h weeks or weekend meetings. The problem is having the "constant crunch time" culture.

The first 5 you hire are basically hopping into constant crunch with you, which is why their equity should be the carrot to make the stick worthwhile.

I think I rubbed people the wrong way or reminded them of a negative employer, but a weekend meeting for us is a few lines on Slack that essentially serves the purpose of "hey, so I decompressed and reflected, and here's where I'm thinking for this week. is this reasonable?"

I don't call meetings without a purpose and I _definitely_ don't want this to be the norm after we grow.

> Not sure I understood the problem here, was it that you would have preferred that to surface in the interview, but it didn't, which caused friction down the line when someone turned out to not want to work more than 40h weeks?

This is exactly it. If a candidate expressed this, I would say "okay, thank you for your time, I hope you're available when we know we can respect this."