As a founder, I definitely sympathize more with the employee. I want my engineers thinking about engineering, not bullshit paperwork, or how to prevent me from screwing them.
Miso gained $10k in cash, but they lost a ton more than that in employee trust. A foolish bargain, I'd say.
This is all sorts of wrong. Miso should have paid the referral fee (let's stop calling it a bonus as another commenter pointed out) as soon as the referred employee hit 6 months. Why are employees forced to beg for their money? For most of us, it's awkward to have to go to 'the man' and ask for our money. So we procrastinate and 'forget' about asking for the money, all while working hard anyway.
Switching jobs is an excellent time to have $10k handy.
And for them to say "no sorry, you screwed up at the end" shows just how much they valued that employee's contribution to the team for an entire year.
This reeks of Big Co. incompetent management mentality. Sad to see startup founders power tripping and not realize it.
Few employees may get a windfall in reality, but it doesn’t make it easier to see (nor does it justify the founder’s choices).
Those employees are just as responsible for the company’s success as the founder is; it sucks to see them get shafted while the founder walks away with “fuck you” money.
I don’t feel that bad for the investors, or really even the employees. A lot of startup equity is worthless anyway.
But screwing over your cofounder and COO—your partner who’s been on the frontlines with you effectively running the company for eight years—that’s incredibly scummy. That’s a real psychopath move. How can someone be so greedy?
So, he got FU money. In exchange, he lost the team culture of the business he founded. Not a bad exchange, in my mind - not something to complain about.
Compare that to his employees, who likely did not get FU money, and still lost the team culture of the startup.
You think that the startup employee, who's placed a bet on their own personal value, doesn't deserve sympathy, but the VC, who gets to hedge their bets, does?
Well in this case, it looks like the employee was in the right. Just a few minutes ago, the founder (Somrat) admitted his mistake and paid Joshua the full $10k.
Later on when future employers see this, they'll realize that the employee has proper morals, and is a "do-er". I think most employees would suck it up if they lost out on 10k, but this person stuck it out and rode the storm.
Would you hire a passive employee, or a passionate one? Sometimes passion will cause people to do things that may backfire, but at least they gave it a shot. Passive employees wouldn't even bother with the 10k loss.
Ugh. I feel sorry for the founder left out in the cold. Especially if he was actually pulling his weight and just isolated from the rest of the team due to personal or political conflicts, or if the acquirer was just being cheap and said "We're only willing to pay for n-1 of the n founders, the CEO has to pick somebody to leave behind." Even if the guy deserved to be left behind, it seems like he shouldn't walk away empty-handed when all the other founders got something.
This happens to startup employees who still work for their startup on a daily basis. Crazy to me that founders don't bat an eye at screwing employees, but everyone seems to be out for blood just because some FB founder who left the company only got a gazillion dollars instead of 3 gazillion.
I don't think blame is relevant, they haven't done anything wrong, just potentially not ideal for themselves. If you're coming from the point of thinking that you know better than the employees on how to achieve their goals, and that they shouldn't be gambling their time hoping for a hugely successful company, then your argument does make sense.
However if that's the case, it looks like you've just used a lot of words to effectively say "Accepting equity as payment for working at a startup is a poor decision so therefore employee interests were never aligned with those of the founders".
Interesting. I didn't know that. I understand that if expectations are not met there have to be consequences. But leaving the founders of a company with nothing while others earning money feels completely wrong.
And so many people out there wonder why engineers are hesitant to work for startups now, and demand high salaries.
I do also feel that the founders in that story should be named and shamed. There is absolutely no excuse for that kind of behavior. They should never be able to do that to anyone ever again.
From my own experience, it was naivety and manipulation.
I trusted the founder when he would make big promises for the future. He didn't bring up equity until the last moment once we already were ready to quit and join. In hindsight these are clearly common business tactics (get the person to accept before going into details), but as a young engineer I had more trust in older more experienced folks like the founder. Even when there were huge alarm bells ringing in my head, I said yes. It's hard to describe how a good salesman can have you saying yes to things you aren't comfortable with.
In the end the company crashed and burned after losing all it's founding team who all work at top companies now.
Fair enough. I missed the part where this is an employees perspective.
WRT being selfish. It's often the last thing a founder wants. Boards, family members, and even sometimes employees - often pressure a founder into an acquisition the founder themselves isn't as keen on.
I'm I missing something? It seems to me that everyone involved knew what they where getting into specially the investors. You hear about the cases where founders get screwed all the time. This is a case where a founder gets to keep his company. Good for him.
I for one think it's a bit greedy after all he did not build the company all by himself but silicon valley investment is all about greed. It's just another day.
I was part of a very well know incubator and a very early employee at a flagship company. Founder blew tons of cash and dilutions but that is part of it and I didn’t mind.
What was ethically shady was shortly after I left with 4yrs vested they decided to restructure the entire company so they could attract investment. They took all the debt from the original company and put that in a shell company that then owned a portion of the new company. Guess where early employees’ stock went? The debt vehicle.
I actually did make some money on the eventual exit, but probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude off of what it would have been if my stock was in NewCo. Consider the tech we built was a major driver of the acquisition, it was frustrating.
People are greedy, no matter how nice they are to your face.
I once worked at a startup that was acquired and the founders made a killing. A few years after the acquisition, they founded a new company in an adjacent domain and started raiding their original company for talent. At the time I was working with a guy who had product and marketing experience who happened to be close college friends with one of the cofounders. No one liked working with this guy. Yet rumor had it that he was offered a 5% stake in the new company while the engineers they were recruiting were being offered .25-.5%. I was very confident that they would be successful but I opted not to work for them because I was so offended by the inequity of the offers. The developers they were attempting to raid also had proven that they were productive and effective so it wasn't as though they were making a wildly speculative bet on them.
I also knew that in a major exit, I would be more resentful of the relative difference between my rewards and that of this other guy than I would have been pleased with my windfall. I had once had serious respect for the cofounders, but their greediness and willingness to perpetuate these systems of inequity permanently diminished my opinion of them.
Yet, I have to concede that the cofounders were correct in their assessment that they could lowball the engineers with little impact on their prospects for success. They were able to exploit their way to a second major windfall, far larger than the first.
Miso gained $10k in cash, but they lost a ton more than that in employee trust. A foolish bargain, I'd say.
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