Updates from the Talent War Frontline

Members of the technical staff. Founder's associate roles.

These titles are increasingly common in early stage startups because of the increasing need for generalization in all roles.

On the pendulum scale of technical to non technical roles, everybody is trending towards the middle.

Engineers become members of the technical staff because they are increasingly forward deployed and need to make product decisions. AE's/SDR's/Growth folks are becoming "Founder's associates" where recruiting and communication with technical team members are ever more important to be nimble.

The evident answer is AI-productivity gains in bimodal startups where people are AI-native means everybody needs to be more of a generalist because instead of just the founders needing to where multiple hats, everybody has to wear multiple hats because of lower headcount. Being able to stack shift seamlessly across functions, aided by technical understanding, just creates an insane premium there.

That's of course not going to help the fact that founding engineers are some of the hardest folks to hire right now. YC is taking dozens of exceptional founding engineers off the market and there are ever more programs nowadays that back people (pre-pre-seed investing). In some way, sexier role titles that are more full stack like member of technical staff or founder's associate is a natural reaction here. Equity comp, or a similarly motivating factor, hasn't caught on yet though.

At the time of writing this, the more outlandish people on LI/X are calling for just compensating founding engineers at 2-5% equity. That's an arms race nobody will win and still doesn't surmount exceptional engineer's costs nowadays.

In the past 3 months, just over half of my friends who've joined early stage startups as founding engineers have either quit or plan to quit as soon as possible. When your startup culture demands 996 and equity compensation packages for founder-esque work and hours still only amount to 1-2%, you correct for your risk-adjusted compensation.
If your risk appetite is high, you apply to YC/raise your pre-seed and quit. If its low, you probably have the pedigree to get hired at a hyper-earner like Meta anyways, since you were scouted to be a founding engineer at a (presumably) seed-stage startup flush with cash.

We need more creative compensation structures that give ownership incentives based on forward deployed work (I think Ethan Ding from TextQL does an amazing job explaining this, and Paraform is blowing up here). When you expect your founding engineer to be both a Palantir-esque forward deployed software engineer, a PM, and an account executive, the work that they do is virtually indistinguishable from that of a founder. Parker Conrad's compound startup model, combined with some sort of performance based incentive tied to both creative product deployment, account growth, and other AE metrics (to match the new "founder-esque" responsibilities early forward deployed employees are taking on) will probably emerge.

Already, in some unnamed hyper-growth startup founded by 21-year olds who attained unicorn status in 2 years from seed, contracts are being written where growth leads are promised outlandish metrics like 5% of the company if 10M users are onboarded this year. In another unnamed one, overperforming newly shipped product features and AE conversions are tied to equity vesting schedules and outlandish bonuses at the next equity raises.

Startups nowadays want to hire "ex-founders" and extreme generalists who match this new full stack need, correctly seeing how every role is becoming more forward deployed nowadays. What hasn't yet updated is widespread update of compensation structures to retain this talent.