A few key take aways…

• Its not the espresso machine or free food that attracts smart people.  It’s that chance to work with other smart people.  Sometimes startups spend a lot of time talking about the little perks that they have. Sure they are nice but they really aren’t what attracts or keep good staff.
• Pay people what they are worth.  While this makes sense a lot of places I worked had competitive salaries when they hired but then just used a simple single digit increment for the yearly increase, no matter how much the staff member had grown their skills.  This forces staff to leave the company to make big moves up the salary curve.
• They have a very simple test to decide if a staff member should be kept on or not: “which people, if they told me they were leaving in two months, for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep”.  Everyone else should get a generous severance package.
• As a company grows, there is a tendency to add more procedures and rules.  Unfortunately, this destroys the environment that your star employees joined for.

There are more nuggets in the presentation.  I suggest you give it a read yourself.