[brabel]

> author appears to be a co-founder of the company despite writing much of the article from the perspective of an IC engineer who was taken advantage of.

With all respect to the author, I think, from reading this, they gave him the title of co-founder to try to try to stop him from leaving earlier, given 85% of the engineering team had left (it's implied this happend before he became a co-founder). He jokes about it himself, asking "have you ever seen a co-founder on a free-lancer contract?".

[PragmaticPulp]

He writes further down that he was handling founder-level responsibilities. That’s actually part of his complaint about his workload.

If he has the title of co-founder within the company, describes himself as co-founder in his blog, and was responsible for founder-level activities then I think it’s clear that he was, indeed, a cofounder.

I sympathize with his experience, but I also think we need to be careful about letting someone claim the prestige of a cofounder title while disclaiming the responsibilities that come with that title.

[sam0x17]

I can definitely sympathize with this. I've been in a situation before where I was employee #1, hired an entire team of developers and built a complete product all the while being baited along with promises of "we'll discuss equity later", "we'll incorporate later" etc. Originally our understanding was I'd be a co-founder with double-digit equity (this was the main motivation for being OK with taking a salary 30% below my typical market value, even though we supposedly had "millions in the bank"). All the while this was intermixed with the most toxic micromanagement, gaslighting, and unrealistic expectations disguised as performance shaming that I've ever seen at any company ever (though strictly speaking this was not a company -- we were all self-employed because the guy was too lazy to incorporate or provide benefits). Eventually I left when none of these promises panned out and morale was at an all-time low because of the constant negativity and direction changes from the CEO.

[brabel]

Not saying that he wasn't... as much as a "late" co-founder is a thing... just that the motivation for making hime that might have been a little bit sinister.