ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT Internal transfers may not be as simple as swapping personnel. In many cases, they also require additional training or education. But still, the investment is well worth it. Startups need to retain their star employees, and doing so might mean empowering them to pursue new interests. And that’s better within company walls than out the front door and someplace else. Grosse recalls an infrastructure engineer at SoundCloud who grew particularly interested in machine learning and information retrieval. “So we gave him time every month to do Coursera courses. Then he switched to the discovery team, and brought all his infrastructure knowledge with him,” he says. “Last time I checked, he’d been with the team for four years and is very content.” Alexander Grosse 89