| The VC-funded startup scene is full of frauds: fake startups, fake technology (manual work being sold as high-power machine learning), and promises made with no intention of keeping them. It's a shark's world, not for the faint of heart, and not a good place if you're a bad judge of character (unless you're prepared to learn, painfully, in that arena). I've worked in finance and in the startup world. Ethics in the startup world are a lot worse. Finance has more reach (see 2008) but the people who will completely fuck someone over just to make a nickel are just not as common. Even if you get politically unlucky in finance or otherwise end up being laid off, you'll still get a severance and a decent reference. They'll send you off in a decent way. On the other hand, I've seen startup CEOs ruin peoples' reputations just to do it. OP's complaints have nothing to do with the company being YC, and certainly nothing to do with it being pre-A. The most unethical people I met in the startup scene were the management team of a well-established post-D startup in New York. (The CEO is from an extremely wealthy family and pulls connections to raise money in spite of his own incompetence and the mediocrity of the leadership; otherwise, the company wouldn't exist, but you knew that.) These people have used extortion to settle severance disputes, hired multiple people into the same exact leadership role as an explicitly intentional recruiting tactic, and were so dishonest with investors that they're known for it in New York, which might be why the Series E seems to be a struggle for them. That is in a company that has passed VC vetting four times. YC doesn’t necessarily mean sure shot success. Paul Graham is a human and bound to make mistakes. Well, fucking duh. No one is a perfect judge of character. No one. You have to make decisions on people based on extremely minimal information that has more to do with someone's charm and social skill than anything deeper. You only know if someone's a good person when they're really tested; you don't see that in a few hours of superficial interaction. On the other hand, if you're not willing to bet on people based on almost no real information, you can't make any deals at all and that's generally considered worse. Go for post Series-A. VCs have already done the vetting for you. They're not going to be any better than YC was. Judging character is just fundamentally a hard problem. Look at the Stanford Prison Experiment. A change of context turned normal people into monsters. Most of these startups do not match the ideal we have of Google's early days: technical to the core, well-managed, etc. The bad news is that about 75% of these VC-funded startups still fail (but you knew that). The ugly news is that at least that percentage deserve to fail. Sorry, man. So, OP drew a dud. It happens. I've drawn two and I'm still alive. |