<cough>customers<cough>
Depending on your business you may have stable customers who just keep going. You can’t neglect these forever, but compared to employees it may be of lesser priority short-term.
If you neglect employees on the other hand, even short-term, bad things will happen short-term or long term. Employees remember when they were neglected and loyalties are hard to build.
There are many reasons people stay in a particular job, good and bad, but those same reasons allow for a lot of "employees neglect".
You have to neglect a lot of employees to an extreme level, for a long time, for it to actually make a significant difference. Mostly, you'll loose a few staff, who'll be replaced by new, keen, eager to please/succeed staff who's enthusiasm effectively mitigates poor management, and who's "tolerance for sh.tty management" counters have been reset to 0.
We've all been to those places where the employees don't give a fuck about customers, and basically tell you with their body language and tone of voice to fuck off.
Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7lGqmZprx0
Of the two places I've worked, the one who was hiding the metrics ended up having great financials and selling.
The other said they had to do layoffs but would be fine until X years later. A few months later they laid off another round of employees.
Similarly to me is the "democratizing X" startup. Those were never not about the same thing as every other startup: VC money and getting a return. But it was trendy to was "we're democratizing <thing>".
And Robinhood still keeps saying this as a tagline!
OpenAI is a capped profit company. https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/. If they become as big as everyone today thinks they will become, they can be democratizing AI.
Also note that, lot of progress in AI has happened because big companies are willing to share their research publicly, which helps them in attracting talent.
The hard thing about Indie businesses is proving product-market fit. Rest of what they do can easily be copied even if they don't share info. Not sharing revenue numbers will just help them with others not going for similar ideas.
But sharing info leads to social media following, which is key to marketing for many of these companies.
OpenAI are a traditional for profit company, milking PR like “open source”, and “non-profit”, without being either.
So if those metrics arent painting a great picture, does the company assume that such trust and respect turn into loyalty?
In other words, the ultimate goal is to buy loyalty?
What matters much more is that you’re open with your own employees.
The “open startup” idea always seemed superficial to me, founders seeking external validation.
Over the long-term, what really matters is keeping your people (employees) happy, and one very easy way to do that is to show that you appreciate and respect them by sharing your company’s key metrics with them.
Not every month will be great, but that’s ok. If you’re running your business responsibly, you’ll be able to say “we didn’t have a great month, but we have 5 years of runway”.
If you hide metrics because your business is unsustainable, then yea, don’t show your metrics to anyone… and if you work for a private tech company with very guarded metrics, it’s safe to assume they are not doing well financially.