Description
What Should Scare The Hell Out Of You, Going In-House
[00:00:00] I'm being considered for an in-house position with a startup,1.5 years out. I'm getting a position that I'm not getting in my current company, but we're not in salary negotiation, yet. Okay, great. Your thoughts on going in house with relatively new ventures scared the s*** out of him. Wanting to know if there are any questions I can ask the hiring team to get more insight on now healthy and how long the company would be around? Is there anything I need to invest on my own?
Okay. So the problem with new companies and I would say if, 20 years ago, going to work at this company, if I was a young attorney, it would have been career suicide because young companies do not have the management skills. Unless they're well-funded, do not always have management skills.
Does the founder have experience? Do they have advisors and all sorts of stuff?
What should scare the hell out of you? This is actually a really good point. This is what should scare you about going in-house, especially a new company. The people that are there at the beginning,
I had a company at the beginning, we'll be taken out when the company grows most likely and more experienced people will be brought [00:01:00] in.
So, just think about it this way. If I have a young company that's disorganized and I'm a young founder and stuff, I'm going to bring in people like me, as the company grows and I start wanting to talk to banks about, raising public funds or whatever, I'm going to want a more experienced, different type of attorney working in my company.
There's no way that I'm going to want to keep the person that was the kind of people that I had there initially, in the long run. And, management will change as the company grows. As the company takes money, new counsels will be demanded by venture capitalists and private equity and all sorts of things.
So that's what should scare the hell out of me here? Hey, no one in a new company can guarantee anything about what's going to happen in the future. You're almost better off if it's, well-funded, that's fine, but they're probably going to, as the company gets better funded, they're going to bring in a different caliber of people as they get different.
I'm not saying that in a bad way, but what that means is they're going to bring in people that have the experience and have done the things that [00:02:00] you may be doing before and have a different type of judgment about situations. Think about how you analyze legal problems. I don't know how long you've been practicing law, but think about the way you analyze at the beginning of your career and the way you think about things now.
This is the same way with in-house counsels. You should be asking those questions. Understand what the company's business model is, whether it works and how it works is also very important. They're not really looking at you to understand that they're more looking just to hire and put people in positions, but they don't know. And then, look at how does the executive team treat you and how important do you seem to them? What level of control do the founders have. The founder may be just someone that's very enthusiastic, but founders get taken out too. So, typically, like a founder will start the company, but then as the company is taking money they may become clear that they don't have management skills and managing something and growing totally different things.
