I had a really bad experience with a startup and attribute it to not getting along with one of the founders and trying to stick it out despite that. When it com

I had a really bad experience with a startup and attribute it to not getting along with one of the founders and trying to stick it out despite that. When it comes down to it, people just naturally treat their friends very well and look out for them, but people they don't like tend to get taken advantage of or simply forgotten unless they have leverage or clout to prevent it. The success chance was similar: they had a top ranking spot in an app store, which is tough to lose no matter what you or competitors do, and generates enormous traffic. You can use the traffic to promote other apps your company makes and give them a terrific advantage too. That said, they were moving away from the employees' personal interests just to get more users in the future. We weren't solving our own problem any more which makes things less fun. The founders would often agree to compromises on features in public meetings and then cancel them privately after. If you and the founder aren't getting along, it may be better for you, the founder, the company, and your relationship with it and its network to just leave early while there are still some good feelings all around. Leaving early you can leave as a good coworker who just moved on to another opportunity. Leaving later you might be the stereotypical disgruntled coworker. This reasoning inverts some of your pluses. Looking back on it, the things I stuck through were ridiculous: they often forgot to pay me or got the amount wrong (always too low, never too high of course), didn't come through on agreed benefits like a paid gym membership (I took over paying for months when they randomly stopped, then it took a dozen emails and a meeting where they tried to get out of it when I asked them to pay any amount at all), kept scheduling construction on the weekend without putting it on the team calendar after agreeing not to, and one final nail in the coffin re equity. They asked me to take more equity instead of cash for pay, I agreed if they'd do some paperwork things I needed, like changing my address to a house in a nearby state I moved to with my wife - I needed that for our immigration case. They were happy to pay me less cash and did so, but they never updated the address (probably didn't want to pay the accountant for the change and different state taxes) and claimed I was accusing them of negligence when I brought it up instead of fixing it. As a developer, is was easy to find work once I left where no one pulled any bullshit and I could just concentrate on getting my job done. Should have just done that when they first started playing fast and lose with the pay checks instead of getting involved in some sort of adversarial relationship.