There's no rule one way or the other. So far there hasn't had to be, because none of them have that many employees. I doubt it will ever be enough of an issue that we have to think about it.
The dinners mostly. I'm mainly asking about equality.. My current employment's management has a bad habit of looking down on the implementors. It seems like if employees are segregated in YC companies (These guys are eligible to attend, but they are not) then it would naturally lead to some problems.
Any startup I work with will get my deepest trust and hardest work. My life will revolve around the company succeeding. So - sorry if I sound a bit.. um.. arrogant - I expect nothing less than complete trust and equality in return.
I'm totally bored with life in the midwest. Where I work there are about ten programmers. We all work on this long row of tables stacked end-to-end, in one room - no walls between us. Everyone's talking and yelling all the time. It's so noisy that I can hardly focus at any given time. One of them has this great habit of yelling "FUCK!" at least once a day when something he's doing doesn't work out. And he yells really loudly.
So I need a change and I'm ready to devote myself to something brilliant, not to churn out mediocre crap day after day, working on a product that crashes every other day. But I couldn't totally devote myself if I wasn't trusted and equal.. could you?
Sorry that this turned into a personal account.. I just needed to vent and hope that maybe somewhere, finally, a company can treat its employees as equals to the management.
If you join while the startup is in the YC Founders Program [1], you're pretty much a cofounder, even if you have less equity than other employees. In that case, yes, you get to go to the dinners.
1. The Founders Program is the 3 month program that YC runs.
There are no dinners after the Founders Program. There are some other invitation-only events like the reception on the night before Startup School, but I assume that employees of YC companies will most of the time be allowed to attend these events. As Paul said in another post, "There's no rule one way or the other. So far there hasn't had to be, because none of them have that many employees. I doubt it will ever be enough of an issue that we have to think about it."
First, everyone in a startup is an implementor. We can't afford anything else.
The only place the "employee" designation means anything at Xobni is on our worker's comp policy. Our whole team helps evaluate new hires, attends investor parties, and has input on business decisions. We happen to be looking for the best to join us: http://www.xobni.com/jobs.php
