I feel you. The first company I worked at was like this, except I got out before I got completely exploited. It's a charming story. I was interviewed by the

I feel you. The first company I worked at was like this, except I got out before I got completely exploited. It's a charming story. I was interviewed by the lead developer and the head of Human Factors. Fresh out of college, I didn't have much experience other than a campus job, so I was turned down for a developer role. Two weeks later I get a call saying they'd like me to join their Human Factors team. I accepted. Three weeks in I was tuning their speech recognition applications and committing code to their main application repo. Six weeks after that I wrote an algorithm to optimize grammars on sentence fragments for searching databases by speech recognition. They moved to have it patented. However, they ended up firing my boss and they put me on more mundane tasks. I ended up leaving because the CTO was more impotent than my grandfather after a bottle of Jack and the president thought he was Steve Jobs. It became a terrible place to work. They never patented my algorithm because I was the only one who knew how it worked. The other developers weren't computer scientists and were just wasting time trying to dissect an implementation of expectation maximization. I'm kind of glad they spent a boatload on lawyers and came up empty-handed. I will never again work for equity or shares unless I really trust the organization or people involved. Money (cash) talks, and paper is used for wiping your ass.