As a potential employee, tell me how your contributions will ensure that we make payroll for your colleagues.

I bet question #11 is “what’s your mission statement?” or some BS question like the others above. It’s freakin’ 2010. Be a contributor and not a misinformed pre-Madonna.

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Michael Murdock

Ask how they went about finding out what customers will pay for and how much they’ll pay, and how that translated into product requirements for engineering. If you hear “everyone we’ve shown this to loves and wants it”, head for the door. You need inbound marketing to be based on more than hearsay and rose-colored glasses. I call this lack of rigor “brother-in-law marketing” — if my cool savvy brother-in-law loves the idea then everyone else will want to buy the product.

Nepotistic retention is my $200 term for the act of refusing to fire a consistent non-performer because that person is your college roommate, your best friend, or someone you’ve worked with at 3 previous companies. As one example of many, the last place I worked produced consistently excellent product with precisely the features that our VP of Sales said would make us a shoo-in with customers, and every time no sales resulted. He would publish a $5 million 6-month sales forecast and actually close $87,000. The CEO was his best friend, so refused to fire him, and the company died from lack of revenue. And I could recount dozens of stories of non-performing friend-of-the-founders engineers who poisoned entire engineering organizations by missing schedules, sloppy coding, spending time on already-rejected design ideas, and causing everyone else to spend extra time and effort to clean up their messes.

Here’s my question…”Why should I go to work for a startup, because 90% of them fail?”

Rodrigo Caetano has suggested an 11th question in his blog Invisible Balance, where he writes: 11. How would you explain your business to my 80 year old aunt Ruth?.

I agree with him also. When I worked as a journalist in a radio station, I was told to think of how I would’ve explained a story to my old grandmother. Or: “How would you explain it to mrs. Olga who lives in the valley”, we used to say.

However, it’s hard to explain the concept of a service on the internet to someone who has never used a computer, like my grandmother. But she is interested, and asks me questions about my new startup on the web. This forces me to rethink and explain it to her in plain Norwegian (English in your case).

This is a very good excercise, and will make it much easier for me to explain the idea to potential investors at a later stage.