Startup Advisor Equity? - Pebble Watch Founder Eric Migicovsky

Bringing on advisors or creating a network of people who can help you is critical for an early stage founder, especially a first-time founder. I did it myself; I had ups and downs in the process, but that's just like every other part of building a startup. You just have to kind of embrace that.

I had really good success finding advisors that were about three to five years ahead of me in the same domain that I was working on. I started a hardware consumer electronics company. What I did was I reached out to several other CEOs that had created moderately successful consumer electronics companies but were about three years ahead of me in the kind of life cycle of doing this startup.

The advisors that I started working with were amazing because the experiences that they had were still really fresh. They could share anecdotally, like, "I had this problem; I tried doing this, it didn't work, so I tried that and it worked." The experiences that they had were still relevant because the timeframe was relatively close. They could actually remember and look back at emails and things to see what they actually did.

I had other advisers and mentors who were kind of later in the stage; they were better for strategic thinking. These were people that I would go to and say, "Hey, could I just sit down and throw some ideas around and get your feedback on these things?" They were less useful for like, "I need to hire someone in this domain; could you recommend people that I could talk to?"

It's important to have a broad set of advisers. This is kind of one of the tough things about being a CEO and really is the one job that a CEO has, which is at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. You can't outsource all your decision-making to someone else. This happens to be something that you'll need to attack with your advisers as well; you can't go to one person. You need to go to multiple people.

You need to incorporate their advice or their experiences into your own mind and make decisions that draw from them. Everyone loves giving advice; everyone has tons of different experiences that they've gone through. Some people think that they will be able to apply their experiences directly into your company; that probably won't happen all the time, and it's your job to incorporate these pieces of advice and figure out how they apply to your situation.

It's pretty common to offer advisors, especially ones that are going to be helping you over a longer period of time, some sort of compensation. The pretty common setup is to do a startup advisor option grant of around a quarter of a percent to maybe three-quarters of a percent, vesting monthly over two years. Sometimes you can have a cliff, but more often than not, it's just a two-year path to that equity.

I also like to have, for some advisors that I'm granting equity to, I like to actually make them work for it. For example, I set up a weekly call with my marketing mentor at 8:30 every Monday. We pick up the phone and chat with each other for about 15-20 minutes. I thought that was a pretty good cadence for someone who was really there to help me out.

In conclusion, I think it is really important for startup CEOs to get advisors and mentors who can help them in their journey. It's a tough road, and you want to talk to someone who's done it before you.