I mean, you could house, feed or educate people and you chose to...not do that ? To have more ? Is there a endgame you are not sharing with us, a special number that would make it OK to sell ?

The author talks about himself and his co-founder Jacob and they went back and forth on whether to sell or not.

I am very interested in what the other 118 employees thought. Did they want the co-founders to sell? What was their equity in the company? What kind of deal would they get? Accelerated vesting? Much larger than normal RSU stock grant at the acquiring company compared to a normal new hire there? Nothing?

I post this link in many threads about startups about how the normal employees often get nothing. The author says "So we decided to raise another round" and I wonder if the co-founders share the liquidation preferences and captables with the other 118 employees.

https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/a8f6xz/why_didnt_...

I posted this comment in a different startup related thread last month but I really wish the CEOs of both startups would have accepted these lower offers.

I don't know what the captable was at the first startup but at the second I would have got around $300K. This would have been a large amount of money for me but the founders wanted more so they rejected the offer.

Almost every "normal" level employee thought we should have taken the deal and then we would have also gotten jobs with normal RSU grants and bonuses at the acquiring company which was a well established company.

It made me decide to never work at a startup again. I don't want a single person to be able to control my financial situation that much. I'd rather have the relatively guaranteed yearly raise, bonus, and RSU grant, and not have to drink the Kool-Aid of the founders.

> I worked at 2 startups. Both failed.

> The first had been around for about 4 years when I joined and had products that made money. They were trying to get acquired. They had partnered with 2 companies making products specifically for them. One of them offered to buy the company for $30 million but the founders thought their company was worth $300 million. They said no and then money started to run out and people started leaving. In the end the assets were sold for $2 million.

> The second startup was created by former coworkers and I joined after it had existed for 4 months. We worked like crazy for the first year and got our prototype out. We had a lot of interest but it took me a while to realize that the 3 founders already had net worths from $5 million to billionaire level. When I heard about offers in the $30 million range they just weren't interested in selling for so little. I left after 3 years and the company floundered another 2 years until they shut it down as people left.

tl;dr - delusional founder writes AI slop reflection narrative recast as “vision” and “conviction.”

Makes more sense given a. prototypical cto ego (and insecurity) amplified by b. he’s Spanish (ifyyk)

Thousands of words to justify the rejection of a nine-figure exit and he never seriously addresses what the exit would mean for employees or investors. “I’m a builder,” “I need to work with inspiring people,” “I’d be bored after two weeks.”

Hard to ignore the glaring contradictions amidst the AI slop. He sets “networking with executives” as a top annual goal, then says “networking is mostly bullshit.” He calls out two separate “biggest fires” for the year: first, reliability/support issues; later, hiring velocity. On one hand he’s bragging about “not having to do anything,” but takes credit for every success (“my foundation-building,” “org design I set up,” etc).

Median senior engineering salaries in Spain are a fraction of those in the U.S. - you can take the founder out of spain…but you can’t…

And yet, the “nine-figure” rejection is repeated over and over. If it was such an easy, confident choice, why does it need so much explanation? Can’t wait to read more about CTO insecurity and a need for public validation. What’s Lemkin got to say?

It is like these people are hell bound to the work culture, diehard workaholics. They don't know anything else outside of a computer screen.

Honestly disgracefully.

VCs aren’t interested in a lifestyle business throwing them maybe a small dividend and a miniscule number of companies go public. Look at YC, they have invested in thousands of companies and only around 20 have gone public and only 3 have had positive returns since going public

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...