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“You should stay at your job until we get funded,” I said to Jeroen. It was September 2008 and Jeroen had just agreed to be our VP Engineering.
The economy was sinking like a stone and VC funding appeared to be drying up. The last thing in the world I wanted was blood on my hands if we failed to get funded.
The only asks I had of Jeroen were to help out as much as he could and come to every investment meeting that he could. Jeroen agreed.
You have to be flexible if you’re going to recruit top talent to be your cofounders.
Now I’m not suggesting that you pay people crazy salaries that you can’t afford to pay them. I am saying that you need to be flexible based on the situation that you and your cofounder(s) face.
In the case of Jeroen, I knew that asking him to quit his job in the face of a very uncertain future would not only have prevented him from joining us, but it was wrong. I knew that it might take more than a few months for us to get funded (it ended up taking fifteen more months for funding to close) if we got funded at all.
