This echos some of my feelings planning to move on after 14 years at the same(non-startup) place. Thank you for writing it.
How I feel quitting my own startup
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#32I left the startup I co-founded 4+ years ago. The entire process was an emotional roller-coaster. My co-founders (and business partners), who are the majority shareholder, made it abundantly clear that the company was 'theirs'. They made decisions behind my back although I am the only founder working full time on the company. I felt alienated, undervalued, and frankly quite miserable for a while. At some point, when…
That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear it.
I tried twice to start software companies with people I knew. Both times the other party didn't invest nearly as much time as I was putting in. And in both cases I figured this out fairly early and started to match their drive and investment into what we were building. As you'd expect, the companies folded within a few months.
What's interesting to me is that one of the guys I'm still friends with and the story he tells for why it folded is very different from my view. To him, it was me backing away and causing it fail and from my experience, it was I switched from working on it 7 days a week to working on it two weekends a month. I don't think he's being mean spirited here - I think he is just that clueless about what was going on.
My current start-up was founded differently. My partner and I did multiple smaller projects together to see if we could work together. We also went through a deep dive on "past traumas" (key life defining moments for us) along with exercises on what sorts of values we want to inject into the company (ranging from how we handle feedback, to how we respond to failure, to what our employees would say about us and the company 2 years in the future, etc.). This allowed us to understand where we are coming from, figure out if our values aligned, and help lean on each other when things got hard/stressful. It really does make navigating building something together. Basically "wtf?!" reactions can easily be replaced with "uh oh, is everything okay?"
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is not the culture human beings should support or tolerate at their workplace
my comment is descriptive, not prescriptive. i doubt anyone even knows the difference anymore because of all the smarmy posturing these days. "this rock is hard, and has sharp edges. it will cut you." "no! that is terrible! rocks should be soft, with round edges! how dare you! nobody should accept rocks that are hard and sharp! that's dangerous! why do you support dangerous things?!"
No it's not, it's a false equivalence. What the original commenter described has way more pathologies than "startups are hard", and it does not smell like success to me. To pick up on your analogy, it's more like a rock that has been drenched in poop by someone, and you're supposed to use it to cut your food. There are other sharp rocks around, and most of them are not covered by poop, so you might be able to cut your food with it without getting a terrible disease and puke all food out again in the process.
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
my comment is descriptive, not prescriptive. i doubt anyone even knows the difference anymore because of all the smarmy posturing these days. "this rock is hard, and has sharp edges. it will cut you." "no! that is terrible! rocks should be soft, with round edges! how dare you! nobody should accept rocks that are hard and sharp! that's dangerous! why do you support dangerous things?!"
No it's not, it's a false equivalence. What the original commenter described has way more pathologies than "startups are hard", and it does not smell like success to me. To pick up on your analogy, it's more like a rock that has been drenched in poop by someone, and you're supposed to use it to cut your food. There are other sharp rocks around, and most of them are not covered by poop, so you might be able to cut you…
okay, so your position is that he should leave because everyone is too mean. that's valid.
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's not, it's a false equivalence. What the original commenter described has way more pathologies than "startups are hard", and it does not smell like success to me. To pick up on your analogy, it's more like a rock that has been drenched in poop by someone, and you're supposed to use it to cut your food. There are other sharp rocks around, and most of them are not covered by poop, so you might be able to cut you…
okay, so your position is that he should leave because everyone is too mean. that's valid.
Don't put words in my mouth. OP mentioned significant equity and the possibility to be acquired, without any details. This could both provide them with something to show after enduring all the suck, as well as with a real chance of changing management. If the question was to join the company, or no equity was at play (including if there's either no realistic chance of that equity being worth something, or if the equity does not lose its value for OP after quitting anyway), then yes, likely best to leave immediately.
Simplistic phrases are not going to help in complex situations with lots of details.
> because everyone is too mean.
No, because it sounds like a business bordering on dysfunction. You should know the difference.
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#36Although it wasn’t as a founder, but I can relate, in one of a small startup I got hired as the first engineer, rest were a founder and sales guy and a part time HR girl, so as expected, I solely built the architecture, few fully fledged platforms, dozens of PoC, successfully delivered projects, then after 1.5y the second engineer got hired, now I’m guilty as probably you mentioned being emotionally attached to my wo…
As long as you have significant stock it probably doesn't matter much. Like for that engineer with 10% of Yahoo, or chief cook at Google. If you are ambitious, then you need an assistant to do what you are doing now. Better a small team under your leadership ;) The difficult part is to make them believe it.
> As long as you have significant stock
Minority shareholding is actually pretty shitty, as I am sure a few people on this thread would agree.
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like something that should have involved lawyers right from the "put in writing" stage.
We had well-known lawyers from the beginning who deferred payment until we raised. The problem was that we delegated all legal to my business partner. When we traded the written equity split, he didn't disclose that he held (estimated) >80x more shares than what was listed next to his name.
Amazing people think that’ll work. Might be OK if the person doing that is the majority of the drive behind the business. But if not of course it will collapse.
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there's one product, one MVP, and a team of 8 full-timers... My biggest concern was the people, trying to find a situation that somewhat guarantees their short-term future and they can then go from there..
If the full time people don't identify a founder leaving as an existential threat and look for their way out that's on them.
Also it is a job. People can get fired (impacted I mean) at any company. They weight it all up like any other job. Company is family never really existed.
Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
the sense of frantic feature building is normal for a high growth startup. feeling constantly behind is also normal. a high growth startup is not a loving, nurturing, comfortable place. it's a mad dash for money and everyone is going to be pushing as hard as they humanly can, both in terms of work but also in terms of pushing others. you're on the right track with the detaching yourself, but that can only get you so…
this is not the culture human beings should support or tolerate at their workplace
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Re: How I feel quitting my own startup
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like something that should have involved lawyers right from the "put in writing" stage.
We had well-known lawyers from the beginning who deferred payment until we raised. The problem was that we delegated all legal to my business partner. When we traded the written equity split, he didn't disclose that he held (estimated) >80x more shares than what was listed next to his name.
How can people be so sketchy and still sleep at night is out of my mind