>Everyone's being pointedly vague and I guess that's necessary to an extent to preserve internet anonymity (or maintain a reputation, if your professional work is tied to your HN account) but it is frustrating as someone trying to figure out how to "read the room."
Allpw me to possibly explain a bit about why there is a degree of cagey-ness/intentional vagueness. A lot of the startup world focuses around exploiting opportunities where there are profits to be realized in areas of mercantile endeavor that can ne in a bit of a grey zone, as it were. Areas the big boys won't touch because it's too risky, but that can have a large payoff with just a relatively small infusion of capital. So when you're talking a lot of these places, there is certainly room for a bait-n-switch to occur. Circumstances may be wildly different from instance to instance; but in general the same threads and warning signs are there. Going into specific details, as you point out, is a great way to out yourself. Sometimes it's just enough to tell someone to look hard, and generally with the prompting they'll figure it out.
Now as far as reading the room goes... The sapd truth is this. If you didn't fund raise, you ultimately don't get to call the shots. Just how it works. Now it's best to listen to the folks you hire; don't get me wrong, but in most cases, an org does everything it can to make sure it is only steered from the top down by edict. It's not perfectly so, and there are ways to manage up (techniques no one who knows em is going to discuss in public), but at the end of the day, with power concentrated in the guy at the top, it comes down to how much trust you confer unto that person as a human being. If you're bringing up an ethics concern, and you're pretty sure it's not going to be taken well, or you've seen it ignored... Well... Adjust your trust levels accordingly.