[guiambros]

If you are an early employee at a startup, you were hired to make the company successful, not just to write code.

If in order to succeed you need to clean the bathroom (figuratively speaking), just go do it. Go beyond the job description; it's a startup, after all. Job descriptions are worthless, until you have a decent size and need some bureaucracy to survive.

If the founder is not seriously expecting you to do go beyond your comfort zone, you should seriously question his ability to lead the company to the next level.

[klibertp]

No, he was hired to do the job his employer want's him to do. If the founder says "stop thinking about stupid/unnecessary/other's things/jobs/responsibilities" then he HAS to do just that. It's not his role to tell the founder how bad a management this is. And yes, I saw such founders in action, it does happen... Quite often in my experience, though obviously YMMV.

[jeffasinger]

I wouldn't ever want to work in a company, or run a company where it's unacceptable for an employee to say:

"Hey, the company would be a lot better off if I spent some time on X, instead of my usual responsibility Y."

[bennyg]

Exactly. A discussion between manager/employee needs to happen there. Either it's actually a good idea to do X and the employee can rationalize why or it's a better idea to do Y, and the manager can rationalize why.

[guiambros]

I have no doubt it does happen. I saw it myself several times. Heck, maybe I have done it, when I was a first time entrepreneur.

But as I said, if I were ever in this position, I'd just pack and go. It's hard to build a successful startup; even harder if the CEO thinks he/she has all the answers and is not open to collaboration and sharing the burden of the key early decisions.

This is particularly true when the company is small; not so much when you get to triple-digit headcounts.