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.

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lkjdsklf an hour ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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csallen 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	lkjdsklf 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.