I'm Nick Francis, Co-founder and CEO of Help Scout. AMA!

Hey Dare,

  1. The trick isn’t tooling – it’s outstanding managers. Outstanding managers know how to measure productivity holistically, and software doesn’t. In my experience, people management is way harder on a remote team. Being an individual contributor is easy, but management is very difficult. We’ve found that a full-time manager can partner with 6-8 people, but not more than that. My wild guess is that you have too many individual contributors and not enough people focused on your people.

  2. No. Equity is one of many many variables. To pull from another comment:

What I’ve tried to do is build a company people are proud to be part of, and a culture within which they feel like they are doing their best work. Retention is the byproduct if you get those things right.

  1. 4-year vesting period, 1-year cliff. Evergreen grants should be given starting at 2 years, so there’s always something vesting even after the first 4 years.
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