According to First Round Capital’s “2018 State of Startups”, the #1 thing keeping startup founders up at night is attracting and hiring great people. This outranked fundraising, growing revenue, and competition. But if you work in the tech industry, this won’t surprise you. Talent has been more scarce than capital for a long time.
On one end of the spectrum, Big Tech gobbles up much of the market with eye-popping compensation packages. On the other end, people are more interested in being employee number 20 than employee number 120 – and move to the next startup after hitting their vesting cliff.
If you’re a founder or investor, the inability to attract human capital poses the biggest existential risk to technology startups after product market fit.