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My friend worked for startup, here in India, that was doing work with drones and water level measurements or something like that. It was and still is a pre-VC s

My friend worked for startup, here in India, that was doing work with drones and water level measurements or something like that. It was and still is a pre-VC startup. He had left a huge European MNC where did cutting edge research but was bored and needed the bleeding edge rush and excitement as he put it. He's awesome in his field and then excellent at coding too (not a CSE grad) he was paid really grand in that MNC. So he was getting less than half of his MNC salary at this drone startup. He was totally immersed in making and breaking things with weekends stopping to exist for him and evenings and nights blurring. For pretty much 10 months. He was asked to resign a day after demo day where potential investors raved about the product his team (3 people) had finished. Another team mate was also asked to leave within a week. Both of them were given a reason on the lines "excellent engineer but won't be a good fit in the culture and your product was not well appreciated". Only remaining team mate was a confounder who used to pass on requirements. Of course both ex employed didn't get anything. He said he needed at least 2 more months to get some stocks as he would get instalments after every completed year. He took a break of around two months. Relaxing, slowly getting back to rhythm. Him being good and being from IITB meant he had literally hundreds of recruiter mails every week. But he calmly deleted any mail which had startup mentioned anywhere in it. Sometimes back his previous manager recruited him back at the same European MNC with a substantial pay raise. My point of writing isn't sharing a generic burnt by a startup anecdote with you. He tries to remain calm but I, and many other friends, can see that he has been deeply scarred by the deception and (I would call it) betrayal.

laughingman2 10y ago
This is direct result of capitalism. Employees who put their heart and soul to build something don't own it in capitalistic model. Only the owner by virtue of being owner of private property/company has right to it. Treating people as means to an end, which capitalism encourages leads to this model. I think economy dependent on human creativity will hit a ceiling, if they continue to remove ownership of content from the creators. The creators can be anything from a humble web developer or someone like your friend.
jacquesm 10y ago
I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all. Even so, I do realize I had a part in that, if I had been a little bit smarter I could have educated myself on this stuff before accepting. And that's where the world today is different than in the past: we now have world-wide networks of people in tech that can warn each other. So every story like the one you told here should help to keep other technical people safe from predatory behavior. I wrote about my experience here: https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell Apologies for the pictures not working, I still need to fix that after the latest domain shuffle.
- TimJYoung 10y ago
  Great story, and very well-written. #6 resonated with me quite a bit: "(6) beware of people that use your love of your work to take advantage of you" I run into this problem again and again, although I am getting a little better as I get older.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    This is two decades ago and I still occasionally dream about it. Hard to forget.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  > I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it. I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative. I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways. The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".
cpeterso 10y ago
> Only remaining team mate was a confounder who used to pass on requirements. Is "confounder" a typo for "cofounder"? Too perfect. :) I've known some confounders responsible for product requirements!

laughingman2 10y ago

This is direct result of capitalism. Employees who put their heart and soul to build something don't own it in capitalistic model. Only the owner by virtue of being owner of private property/company has right to it. Treating people as means to an end, which capitalism encourages leads to this model. I think economy dependent on human creativity will hit a ceiling, if they continue to remove ownership of content from the creators. The creators can be anything from a humble web developer or someone like your friend.

jacquesm 10y ago

I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all. Even so, I do realize I had a part in that, if I had been a little bit smarter I could have educated myself on this stuff before accepting. And that's where the world today is different than in the past: we now have world-wide networks of people in tech that can warn each other. So every story like the one you told here should help to keep other technical people safe from predatory behavior. I wrote about my experience here: https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell Apologies for the pictures not working, I still need to fix that after the latest domain shuffle.

TimJYoung 10y ago
Great story, and very well-written. #6 resonated with me quite a bit: "(6) beware of people that use your love of your work to take advantage of you" I run into this problem again and again, although I am getting a little better as I get older.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  This is two decades ago and I still occasionally dream about it. Hard to forget.
noir_lord 10y ago
> I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it. I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative. I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways. The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".

cpeterso 10y ago

> Only remaining team mate was a confounder who used to pass on requirements. Is "confounder" a typo for "cofounder"? Too perfect. :) I've known some confounders responsible for product requirements!