| I was the tech lead / main engineer at a startup with a huge investor investing 1mln in a seed round.
I refused a salary with a little bit of equity (single digit percentage) and kept contracting because I didn't trust the business side and apparently I wasn't cool enough to become an exec. Everything was fine at the beginning, we built very fast a CRUD app in node.js hosted on K8s on Google Cloud, doing something useful for our target market. We demoed with the client and everything was fine. Then they hired a tech lead from another failed startup as a CTO. He started bringing in all his friends (all from the same country, so the company started having a french crowd and everyone else) from his previous employer as minor exec titles.
Stock compensation for the exec was pretty good and they even had a 50k bonus or so I heard. Slowly but surely they started pushing for our backend to be rewritten in Go for no reason - which I resisted - and then we decided to move to AWS + nomad. This was 2015 and tooling was even more minimal than what Hashicorp offers nowadays - so they basically started building a K8S on top of nomad to replicate the capabilities we had before. I complained saying that we didn't have time for this with the impending demos and I said it was a stupid decision. I was promptly fired for that - and without me on the way they threw away our node.js application and started rewriting everything in Go. They never made another demo in time and the investor eventually pulled the plug from investing in the startup and acqui-hired the company for little money. The founders were pissed and called me later on to update me on how it went and to apologise. Fin. |