How to make your startup a "cool to be working in" company?

I thought what could make people wanting to join and stay in a company even if a next door neighbor offers 20% more. I don't have a magic answer rather few candidate-like suggestions but before I go there let me tell you why I think it's important to retain your colleagues with you. The key factor is consistency and trust. People you can trust (not only in professional but more important in personal or even private  perspective) is the real edge in team building and the more such people work with you the more stronger this relationships and the team became. Your resource needs tomorrow may change but trusted people tha want to work with you will remain. Of course it means you have to "retain" only good people and ones you wouldn't take in your next start-up you should fire already today.

I think for a start-up it's better to have only real hackers in the team. I call a hacker one who would still continue playing with computers even if he wins a million dollars tomorrow. People who program not for living (or not only for living), people who don't leave their notebooks on evening and weekends in the office:-) A potential advantage of start-ups is due to a small number of needed people they can (theoretically) build the whole team from hackers. Joel promotes a similar idea providing numbers and reasons from his vast experience. So how to attract hackers to work for you? Here are few ideas without any preference order.

1. Office layout. Avoid cubicles! Just don't do it. So many friends of mine resisted to apply for big well known companies with one phrase - "donn' wanna work in cubicles!" Why, for God's sake, would you put  your best brain power into a 2x2 cell making them feeling like a factory cog? Layout your office with separate rooms for 2-3 people that like to have more privacy. Make spacious rooms for group work for people preferring collective environment - I mean seriously spacious rooms not meeting rooms remaining smoking lockups  in airports. Buy there a divan or comfort chairs, make people willing to stay there:-)
2. Office equipment. Buy comfortable working chairs. A chair is a working tool of a programmer, show them your respect their work (and over-work). Invest in cool boards (like this) or install cameras in meeting rooms to grasp and send board's drawing, buy phones with high quality speaker phones (for group discussions) and personal ear-phones. Buy a cool coffee machine!
3. Tools. Give only notebooks to the developers. Not a 17' screen 'game station but a good notebook for development. Undoubtedly it costs more than a desktop and hardly upgradable but for sure it will attract hackers (and retain too). Most important thing is if you hope they will think about your product evenings, nights, and weekends let them really do it. Give them home Internet for free.
4. Job duties. Let people deal with exciting things. I know it sounds strange but here is what I mean. People hate doing the same things (and those who like probably shouldn't be in your dream-team). Even if it was interesting in the beginning.  Give boring jobs to ones for whom it's still new. Write an installation? How exciting is it to create a new version for such a 'project'? Hire students for it and give somebody to lead them to try him in a position of a team or a project lead. To be a technical lead of the installation project is much more interesting/challenging/exciting than to customize it 15th time.
5. Horizontal promotions. People expect promotions and often leave the company seeking promotions. You can't promote everybody vertically - it's a bad idea to make all the programmers team leaders without a team. But you can give distinguished people new opportunities. An installation project lead is just one of the options. For people having strong technical experience offer to try the customer site - get involved into business aspects, interact with consumers, try to be on the front end. Give people opportunities to try themselves in the areas they probably never would apply for next job. An excellent QA engineer may try to take a small operation project and challenge a task the operations team lead has been dreaming of taking but didn't have resources. Such 'castles' may happen on a  temporary basis with part-time involvement. Isn't it a good bonus to let people a privilege to try something they may want for free?
6. Professional bonuses. Instead of paying money bonuses (or if you financial situation allows - besides that) let people think out a two week long project not related to your business directly and undertake it. If the team writes in Java let them write something in Ruby. Let them play with Linux if all running workstations are Windows. Let a HTML team create a prototype in Flesh. Let them study and then teach new technology. Let them be creative and offer projects that a) - interesting for them, b) - have more than zero probability be used in the future. Such professional bonuses may vary in conditions. For example prize #1 may be a project lead for full time, prize #2 - a team member with 50% involvement, #3 - 25%. At the end the project has to be presented to the entire team and the experience shared.

There are many ways to attract people and to make them willing working in your cop many even if the salary is not the highest. I put here my preliminary ideas came to me when I tried to answer to myself what would catch me in a company for a long period. What do you think should such a company has in its philosophy?

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