It takes courage to quit. Your manager was laying on a guilt trip. I too have worked for two small technology companies. The first one was great. Smart boss,

It takes courage to quit. Your manager was laying on a guilt trip. I too have worked for two small technology companies. The first one was great. Smart boss, heavy but realistic workload. Got bought out by a much larger competitor. Sales people making unrealistic commitments to clients, then project managers driving the tech team to breaking point with unattainable deadlines and budgets. It became toxic. Got bought out by an even bigger competitor, a multinational company. I refused to sign on to the third company. They had a reputation. If the second company hadn't been bought out I would have probably quit anyway.