I think a lot of this advice is valid for applying for research grants as well. Like it would be nice if someone showered me with money to explore my ideas without limit. But actually forcing yourself to describe which parts grant money will solve and which parts are limitations introduced by you and the team you are assembling to explore the problem is sage advice.
You can hire as many people as you want, but you can't hire talent with money, just people who claim to have talent. No amount of money makes you able to tell the difference. If you don't believe me you really should never try to start a business.
Enough payroll lets you hire and fire fast until you have the right people. More money means you have to worry less about sunk costs from bad hires that make it through the recruiting process.
By the time you realize someone is a fraud you've disrupted your progress for months compared to where you should have been, and firing people is not free in terms of culture and the psychological health of your other employees and their families. If you have to fire someone because they don't fit the profile you actually want you have severely fucked up. That's IF you can tell. Most people can't tell who is talented and who is not even after hiring them.
For every highly skilled / talented person there are 500 that think they are and have a resume that is consistent with that, but they are still trash.
If you are hiring/firing this much of the time your company culture will become a stalinist purge mentality where people have no trust or loyalty in each other and act primarily out of survival. That means they will withhold help from each other and even sabotage things to ensure they aren't the one the bear catches that month. Maybe you have only ever worked at terrible giant tech companies or come from a culture where this is normal, but it's literally death.
The culture you really really want to have is a group of genius misfits on a mission from god, very hard to join but steadfastly loyal to each other, and willing to pour their entire life into achieving their mission.
I think this is a theoretical exercise for you, you should revisit this after you have some experience.
No references ATM, but I believe studies show that the correlation between money and motivation is very large up until you reach the point an employee considers it a fair wage. After that point, the correlation is small.
Of course, what the employee considers a fair wage and what the employer considers a fair wage can diverge significantly.
Fun. I can imagine motivation-money curves would look a lot like stress-strain curves [1]. A "fair wage" might be akin to the yield strength. Work hardening under cyclic loading probably is similar.
At a startup you are paid primarily via stock options, so if you can't get motivated for the potential millions and millions of dollars they will be worth no amount of cash is going to do it.
I think a lot of this advice is valid for applying for research grants as well. Like it would be nice if someone showered me with money to explore my ideas without limit. But actually forcing yourself to describe which parts grant money will solve and which parts are limitations introduced by you and the team you are assembling to explore the problem is sage advice.
Product intuition, engineering talent, really talent of any kind, motivation, alignment, like nothing important can be solved with money.
All the things you listed can be solved with sufficient payroll and recruiting budget.
You can hire as many people as you want, but you can't hire talent with money, just people who claim to have talent. No amount of money makes you able to tell the difference. If you don't believe me you really should never try to start a business.
Enough payroll lets you hire and fire fast until you have the right people. More money means you have to worry less about sunk costs from bad hires that make it through the recruiting process.
By the time you realize someone is a fraud you've disrupted your progress for months compared to where you should have been, and firing people is not free in terms of culture and the psychological health of your other employees and their families. If you have to fire someone because they don't fit the profile you actually want you have severely fucked up. That's IF you can tell. Most people can't tell who is talented and who is not even after hiring them.
For every highly skilled / talented person there are 500 that think they are and have a resume that is consistent with that, but they are still trash.
If you are hiring/firing this much of the time your company culture will become a stalinist purge mentality where people have no trust or loyalty in each other and act primarily out of survival. That means they will withhold help from each other and even sabotage things to ensure they aren't the one the bear catches that month. Maybe you have only ever worked at terrible giant tech companies or come from a culture where this is normal, but it's literally death.
The culture you really really want to have is a group of genius misfits on a mission from god, very hard to join but steadfastly loyal to each other, and willing to pour their entire life into achieving their mission.
I think this is a theoretical exercise for you, you should revisit this after you have some experience.
No references ATM, but I believe studies show that the correlation between money and motivation is very large up until you reach the point an employee considers it a fair wage. After that point, the correlation is small.
Of course, what the employee considers a fair wage and what the employer considers a fair wage can diverge significantly.
Fun. I can imagine motivation-money curves would look a lot like stress-strain curves [1]. A "fair wage" might be akin to the yield strength. Work hardening under cyclic loading probably is similar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93strain_curve
At a startup you are paid primarily via stock options, so if you can't get motivated for the potential millions and millions of dollars they will be worth no amount of cash is going to do it.
I mean, engineers and other talent need to eat, right? So some level of money is important to be able to recruit people.
But other than that, agree that motivation is not something you can buy.
You can pay charlatans just as much as you can talented engineers, and telling the difference requires a lot of ability.