A cynical man would read your salary offer(for lead developer) - " As we haven't taken any outside funding, we can offer you meaningful equity with a competitive salary." as: not-so-good salary , with promises of getting rich on a startup that wasn't even able to convince investors.

Heh, interesting read. Maybe I should adjust. I meant to imply that our equity is sizable (because we're still early-stage) while our salary is still competitive with later-stage startups (our founder is self-funding off his last $545M exit).

If you add the last part about $545M, things would sure look different. :)

Is that because you're reading "competitive" as competitive with other companies that haven't taken outside funding?

Because i'm reading competitive as standard market rates.

And standard market rates aren't good?

No, I think "standard market rates" are what employers are paying their engineer who has been there for a few years (and whom they are currently paying below what he/she could get if they left for another job) or possibly what someone would pay for a "standard software engineer" who really needed a job.

If you want to attract exceptional engineers then by gosh, you might just have to pay exceptional salaries.

At the end of the day, it's a business relationship and an intelligent engineer is quite justified in capturing some of the value that he or she generates.

Yeah, those career listings are pretty bland. Not much sense of what you'd actually be doing, or even what the company is hoping to do in a bigger sense. If nothing else, more specificity in both those areas would help you stand out. Especially since, as you say, it's publishing and techies are kind of skeptical about their role in that.

And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Here's what I'm getting at- sell people on the vision and what their specific role in it would be. What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world? As a startup, you've got the vision thing, or at least you damn well better, and it's your advantage. :-)

Thanks for the feedback.

> And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.

What do you think would sound better? Above market compensation?

> Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?

Good catch. I'm on there (Director of Product & Technology) but we haven't done a good job of keeping it up to date with new hires.

> What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world?

Yes, I definitely need to work on this. I've done a pretty good job of refining the technical vision and how it fits with the overall company, but haven't yet distilled it down to a good description. How's this:

Cafe is building technology for discovering, publishing, and sharing great stories. We're building: web scrapers which analyze content across the web (with NLP and Amazon Mechanical Turk) to identify promising writers, a platform which makes it easy for non-technical writers to publish interactive stories, and analytics which model how ideas and stories flow across the web in real time. As a developer at Cafe, you'll be using technology to inform and entertain millions of people while driving clickbait off the web.

Yes, "Above market compensation" is better. It makes me curious to find out what it is, and that's what you want.

I like the reworked description too. Definitely implies some interesting work to be done.