I was hired to build a website for someone, as a contractor, and somehow it turned into building --all-- the systems for a enterprise B2B company handling sched

I was hired to build a website for someone, as a contractor, and somehow it turned into building --all-- the systems for a enterprise B2B company handling schedule processing for the shipping industry. It was my fault for getting caught up in the work, but I finally left when the realities hit me in the face: - the CEO negotiated in bad faith with a customer, lying about the nature of the product they were sold. The customer finally got around to suing. - I was constantly told there were cash flow problems, and thus my invoices were always being paid late, why more contractors couldn't be hired, etc. Like I said, I was caught up in the work and trying to keep things running. I finally demanded some of my invoices be paid, and the client breached my contract, point blank telling me to ^&$($ off It turns out the founders were paying off the loans their other companies had "made" to the startup before paying any of the salesguys, IT staff, etc which is why all the contractors hired to help me kept disappearing and not answering my emails. All the while, the CEO's wife was whining how he hadn't been making any salary... Startups are not part time hobbies. That's the moral of the story, I guess, along with "don't work with sociopaths". People who play "chicken" with their entire IT staff are idiots. I didn't have a problem with having no equity, as that hardly ever pans out, but being manipulated like that was intolerable. So any engineer with a startup should be familiar with the sales process, the basic cash flow, the contracts being signed, etc. Keeping the blinders on like I did is a fatal mistake - there is too much money involved in IT nowadays and all the less than honest people are being drawn to it like flies. As that famous idiot once said "trust, but verify".