You agreed to this when you signed up, maybe you should have negotiated more equity instead or went to some other company or started your own company which is the risk (and reward) those founders took. Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.
> You agreed to this when you signed up
Have you ever actually worked in a start up?
That's not how it works. You can negotiate whatever you want. The deal can still change out form under you as new investors come on.
Not to mention, you're negotiating from a point of information asymmetry. They know way more about their plans for the company than you do and will often tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth. You can make some attempts at discerning if they're being honest or not, but ultimately you're left to just make a guess.
They also enter the negotiation from a strong position economically. They aren't going to miss a rent payment without a Job. The company itself may be fucked if they can't hire, but not the investors/founders.
So the negotiation is inherently unfair from the start.
> Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.
This is not relevant to whether their actions were moral, ethical or fair.
> Have you ever actually worked in a start up?
Yes, many in fact. We negotiated the terms up front and if I didn't like them then I went with another offering company. I never had deals change from under me, maybe you're some Eduardo Saverin but I'm not. That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does. I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company or even startups, or even in the tech industry. There are lots of jobs you can do.
> I never had deals change from under me
I sincerely doubt this. If your start up went through a funding round, the deal changed.
> That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does.
“Due diligence” is impossible because the negotiation is asymmetrical. You can’t know what their actual exit plan is. You can’t know what their financials look like. You can ask. They can lie.
> I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company
No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Just because you aren’t forced to invest your time/money somewhere doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of you
You can "sincerely doubt" it all you want, doesn't make my experience false. Again just because you got screwed doesn't mean others are, how many millionaires has SpaceX minted last week? In a startup it is the exception to have experiences like yours, the norm is that they make some, but probably not much, from a startup because most startups don't go anywhere.
> No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Yes, there was nothing unethical about being an investor in these, sometimes you cannot predict what a company will do but that doesn't make you an unethical investor unlike investing in say weapons manufacturers.
You can ask about all of these things during negotiations, and an increasingly large share of people do. I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators.
Ultimately it's possible to get screwed, but you can also choose not to work at startups and get a traditional job with less risk.
And the existence of some bad actors and screwy deals in the startup community is not really valid commentary on the greater picture of "the way wealth is shared." That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.
> That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.
Except it's not. It's the norm not the exception. It's pervasive through the industry, and YC and pg have done it themselves to multiple companies.
Hence why it was literally turned into a meme plot on a TV show.
You also ignored the bit about the negotiation being inherently unfair from the get go. And again, the deal can (and almost assuredly will) change out from under you because of the structure of the company which isn't really up for negotiation.
I disagree, and I've never seen any stats to support your belief that people getting screwed is the norm. But I've seen many, many stats of new startups minting millionaires.
> I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators.
Just to be clear, we're talking about the same LLMs that were recently silently tuned to kneecap competitors? https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
Not sure what that has to do with LLMs helping individuals. Even if you don't trust American ones, there are other open weight ones.