[gautamdivgi]

Don't believe anyone says "just desserts"... but think about it this way. If you're learning a new technology and want to get it into production - won't you learn everything around it, even probably things like how to contribute to it, process around bugs, PRs and what not?

This shouldn't be different. If you're getting into a role - especially as a shareholder/founder make sure things are well known and documented (term sheets) and well understood by everyone.

In technology terms what he did sounds like - "a friend told me of this great software and I put it into production w/o any testing and it crashed and burned my entire customer base"...

[busterarm]

> If you're learning a new technology and want to get it into production - won't you learn everything around it, even probably things like how to contribute to it, process around bugs, PRs and what not?

There's only so much you can learn -- so far out you can go. This guy built their platform and an app pretty much himself. Give him some credit. I can count on one-hand the number of web developers out there I know that know all of the surrounding technologies related to what they work on.

Talk to most "full stack" developers about Unix sockets and routing protocols and watch their eyes roll back into their heads.

[gautamdivgi]

Oh definitely... the poor guy got screwed. No two things about it. He worked hard and they screwed him. Shame on them. However, I hired a lawyer when I bought my house. I'm definitely hiring a lawyer if someone asks me to be a "shareholder" on something like this. I sympathize with him. I'm business-null as well. But there's people you can hire to make sure your exposure is limited.