What’s your startup story?

Circa: 2007-2009 I’ll go first. I joined a startup as 33% of the development team to build a EMR system. We worked against a government deadline for ICD-10 and built a (very) beautiful system. Mine was an all equity deal (deferring comp until after revenues could support it). 2 years in, it was apparent that the sales team had no fucking clue as we recalibrated the product direction twice and they made zero sales. I had a side gig that covered my living expenses so I stayed longer than most and was eventually 100% of the dev team. At some point the founders ran out of cash and shut everything down hastily. For my efforts, I got 100% of the codebase. Thought about hanging a sign on my neck at street corners reading “Will Trade Functional EMR System Code for food” but opted against it. #neverAgain

Worked at a startup whose product was a clone of another company's product that became a smash hit. They expected to hit it big the same way, but couldn't focus on a product direction for more than a few weeks. The founder was hard to get along with. Look up "histrionic personality disorder" and this person hits every point. When they interviewed candidates, they'd say anything the candidate wanted to hear. Every time they ran into someone at a party, they'd come back with new ideas that bumped our old priorities. They also flashed their family wealth at the office, fancy cars and vacations. Three things made me leave. The founder lost trust in the engineers and started getting "second opinions" on our designs from people outside the company. I tagged along on an interview and saw them flat-out lie to a candidate, and I realized the same thing happened in my interview. And I got an offer from another company for twice as much pay.

I joined a ‘startup’ who was 5 years in and had gone through a recent product pivot which put it into cash flow positive. The founder showed me numbers that illustrated the company was in growth mode, albeit slowly. Was told that all growth was organic and that they hadn’t done any marketing at all till this point so the market potential was huge. Joined, found they had no idea about their own business performance. I re-ran the numbers for them and identified that they in fact were not growing, they were declining at an alarming rate. They had also previously done shit loads of marketing (under previous business model) so the 70% of the market had actually already been users of the SaaS product when they offered it free. The product hasn’t changed, the founders don’t have appetite to fix it, but expect to double growth YOY. Delusional and misrepresentative to incoming candidates. The founders are more excited to be ‘startupy’ and ‘scrappy’ than to focus on the product and the realities of the business. But the founder is a great salesperson so who knows what narrative they are spinning to the board and investors