[llmblockchain]

This happened to me as well, but even worse because they killed my equity by getting rid of me on month 11 of year one.

I joined a company as employee #2 (though, I started the same day as #1). I started working with the founder and co-founder in a We Work office that barely fit the four of us.

Within 11 months the company was worth over a billion dollars and my wife was about to give birth. At this time the company had around ~15 employees (mostly in sales).

I find a job posted on our site for a job that sounds an awful lot like mine. The founder/CEO is suddenly vary combative with me every day over nothing (shouting at me). I felt like he was trying to get me to react negatively to him. I just dealt with it because my wife was about to give birth.

One day I come in and I just couldn't deal with it anymore when he was shouting at me. I basically told him to stick it up his ass and he went ballistic. I was "fired" at this point and had to leave and leave behind my company laptop.

I get a call to meet with the founder the next day to discuss the exit. We meet at a cafe. He presents a folder with a bunch of "evidence" for why I was being let go. None of it was really damning in any way (he had private emails between me and an employee, Slack private messages, etc). He tried to spin some narrative as to why I was being fired and not given my stock even though the cliff was around the corner. I also had to return my signing bonus ($XX,XXX).

I told him good luck and showed him the job posting that was dated after he found out my wife was giving birth. I also had printed email exchanges proving the company was doing some less-than-legal operations.

Needless to say I got to keep my signing bonus, but not the stock. I also got glowing recommendations for every job I applied to after that.

[indoordin0saur]

Wait, your 11 month old company with a handful of employees was valued at a billion?

[llmblockchain]

Yes-- and worth more today.

I don't think it's an ordinary path. The founder had success before, and the company I was a part of skipped seed and started with a series A before raising more pretty quickly.

edit:

From the looks of it, they have 500+ employees now.

[indoordin0saur]

Seems like you would have had a good case to a lawsuit, at least enough to give them a headache settle in court. Strange that they dumped you if you were valuable to the effort. Did they just squeeze you for what you were worth and decided they could get by with other engineers or did they not see your work as valuable?

[llmblockchain]

> Strange that they dumped you if you were valuable to the effort. Did they just squeeze you for what you were worth and decided they could get by with other engineers or did they not see your work as valuable?

Yes and no? I was certainly brought on as a valuable asset to the company.

I was introduced to the founder via a mutual acquaintance. I had other job offers at the time and had no intentions of joining, but the acquaintance asked me to speak with the founder and hear him out. I was basically tossed an offer that was silly to refuse.

I provided a lot of value and was responsible for building the most successful product the company offered.

I think things went a bit south when they wanted to raise even more money and bring in more investors. I think I was a bit of a black sheep in the company (I didn't have the phd+company pedigree as the other founding members). I felt like maybe I didn't look so good when they presented to investors. They certainly pitched the company as being built by the elites of AI and machine learning... and yet there I was ;p