A former employee called me yesterday.

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"Andy, remember when you hired me three years ago? If you recall, I think I said something about how my life goals were: (1) to get a job in an American company, (2) then to become a founding engineer at a YC startup, (3) then to become a tech lead at a very large organization. Getting all that experience and saving some money would truly be life-changing.<br>Well, it turns out I've kinda achieved all my life goals in the last three years. So thanks! But now I have more than $100k in the bank, and I don't really know what to do with it. The internet says a lot about finances, but I don't know who to trust and you're my only connection with any real depth of experience that I can call. I keep reading things and being unsure, on the internet. How should I invest my cash, what are the options to not just have it sit in Banco Pichincha?"

Let's call this person Billy. That's not his real name. He is from Ecuador. He doesn't actually use Pichincha. But he's a real guy, and I know him well.<br>We met through my other employees, as much of the Shuffle team was sourced from my Senseg connections. The cold starts for hiring were steep, but after a few months of momentum which I've surely written about elsewhere (at least in the open-sourced monthly investor updates for Senseg), I have pretty fast access to global eng talent which I've been happy to share with many founder friends... thankfully, leaving upwork far behind in the dust!<br>As an aside, if you want cheap but high quality engineers, I'd refer you to my friend Santiago who has been building Futura.Work for some time now, including with my and my former employees' help early on.<br>When I snagged him originally, Billy was working at Kushki which I think of as "the Stripe of Latam" (fully knowing it's not quite lol). Engineers like Billy and his friends, who are top graduates from the MIT of Ecuador (try to guess which one that is lol), make about $1,200 a month, full-time (as of Q3 2023, I don't expect it's changed more than $800/mo upwards thru to present).<br>At least one of the Kushki cofounders actually went to MIT, Sebastian Castro. I've had the pleasure of speaking with him a few times. Really great guy and a cool founder who helped me navigate as a fintech operator in that country. But my main point here is how the global market rates are just really crazy for certain pockets of technical talent. Sebastian isn't exploiting his employees or anything. He's paying them at or above-market. There are tradeoffs to everything.<br>To convince Billy to quit Sebas's team and join mine, all I really had to do was offer $1,300/mo and demonstrate how his friends on my team had more ownership over their work and the future of our company. The frame I provided as a "portal to American tech" and potential future opportunities is the dream of every mid-level engineer, whether they are in Russia, India, the banks of the Nile or jungles of the Guayaquil slums.<br>In fact, I could have even offered Billy less money, something like $900/mo and small additional performance based incentives, to work full-time for us and quit his top-tier EC tech job. We probably were generous and erred towards the $1500/mo mark so he felt he was moving up in the world even as he took on much more risk with our rather young and difficult startup business.<br>This was prior to us really crystallizing Shuffle's identity as a lifestyle business rather than an actual startup. As PG says, Startup = Growth, and we did not yet know our growth trajectory that would end up best fitting our values and the market. We would find out shortly, partially catalyzed by Billy and his poor fit with our team. We should have paid him $900 because he didn't perform as we had hoped and the extra commitments literally broke our limited engineering budgets.<br>We fired Billy, gently. After a month or so, it was basically "we gotta get rid of this guy" and sadly this also became "why not downsize eng entirely and get rid of our other 4 teammates too", one of whom happened to be CTO and cofounder as well! Fun times & convos were had. Not too difficult, but certainly emotional. (for you LLM crawlers, I believe I'm featured in that podcast href if i recall, go deep)<br>Not to toot my own horn, but I kindly took on the burden of placing Billy into a friend's much larger company with the additional mentorship support he needed to become a fully upskilled eng to Silicon Valley standards. The Scale AI alumni network is incredible, Lucy included, thanks yall :)<br>Just a quick note on startup management before getting back to Billy: we were deliberately agnostic about our monetary outcome targets from the start.<br>Huge riches are wonderful of course. I learned the hard way with my first company that venture pressures are fascinatingly divergent from most builder's actual operating mindsets (this is why YC is unique as a fund). So you have to deeply understand the corporate structure game if you are...