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by fybe 2834 days ago
I was part of a start-up that still exists but it seems to be stagnating. i left due to the founders having almost nothing in common except for making money.

The site is like squarespace but for local shops and businesses. The founders met on an airplane and thought they can make a business. So you had the business CEO with no technical background living in X country and the ruthless CTO with his team in Y country.

I left ship when the CTO cleaned out the bank account and disappeared. The Y country never extradite their citizens or charges them for any international crimes so he got off scott free while the CEO had to "use" his car insurance to get money to keep the business afloat and pay the out-sourced developers. (He set his car on fire to get a payout)

Edit: I guess the lesson is that the founders need a vision and co-operation to make it work. These two basically had a common goal of making money of a fad. Back then the latest craze was to become a market place for other businesses ie. JustEat, SquareSpace etc.

Another would be that the core team better stick together. The founders were separated by hundreds of miles. The business side was in EU while the CTO and the devs where not. This caused communication issues, planning problems and of course money.

I left because of money too I guess. After working 6 months on a "paid" internship which was 50 eu a week I was offered a contract that would give me 0.5% equity, no raise and force me to work full time AND when doing my final year college thesis to be based for something the company can use.

3 comments

Thats's nice... the CTO commited a crime by stealling the money and the CEO commited a insurance fraud to keep the company. I'm glad you left, I hope you ended up in a place that's not being run by criminals :)
Wow! Torching a car takes serious dedication. Maybe I shouldn't, but I think I respect that.
I think the OP aimed his question at founders of failed startups. There are fewer of them than of us poor shmucks that got burned by a failed startup as a collateral damage. So their accounts of failures are far more interesting.
That's fair, perspective from actual founders definitely is a more interesting point of view.

Didn't want to give an off-topic anecdote but thought from my experience seeing what can go wrong for founders of a start-up I would share my experience.

I have to say this story was still pretty interesting.