Reading that story, I feel like you were sabotaged at every step by a CTO that was so insecure that they were afraid to succeed, and would rather fail on their

Reading that story, I feel like you were sabotaged at every step by a CTO that was so insecure that they were afraid to succeed, and would rather fail on their own terms. You might have been able to improve some small aspect of the mobile demo that would have prevented the crash (ie: error handling on that field), but your C-team was obviously playing Russian roulette, and if the demo hadn't blown up, then attempting to productize it almost certainly would have. In a way, you should feel better about the outcome you got; your CTO was obviously trying to bluff the investors that there was more product maturity than actually existed. If he had succeeded, he would have burned through a bunch of other peoples' money, and the outcome would have still been failure.