Mistake #1 - leaving a secure job at a pre-IPO company before I vested in order to join a company where I had greater authority.
Mistake #2 - using my authority to hire several friends from school who hadn't previously held responsible full-time positions.
Mistake #3 - trusting them to manage themselves.
My friends were all smart but none of them really cared about the business or each other. They just preferred getting paid to not getting paid and slowly left after the novelty wore off. One of them even wrote a draft of a crappy novel when we thought he was coding, which we found when cleaning out his desk.
We've all since moved on. Some of them are now quite successful. But I was burned pretty badly by that experience and am no longer friends with any of them.
Mistake #2 - using my authority to hire several friends from school who hadn't previously held responsible full-time positions.
Mistake #3 - trusting them to manage themselves.
My friends were all smart but none of them really cared about the business or each other. They just preferred getting paid to not getting paid and slowly left after the novelty wore off. One of them even wrote a draft of a crappy novel when we thought he was coding, which we found when cleaning out his desk.
We've all since moved on. Some of them are now quite successful. But I was burned pretty badly by that experience and am no longer friends with any of them.