Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
Welcome to the club. It&#x27;s pretty much a rite of passage here to spend some time with a psychopath VC, a completely self absorbed CTO with a rich investor dad that fuels his fantasies, or an idiotic CEO with an ego problem, and to pay the price for it (just time if you&#x27;re lucky, time+money if you&#x27;re not).<p>I&#x27;ve encountered this myself several times (down to the CEO using hire fast fire fast as a mantra), and judging from my friends&#x27; stories, most people have or will. When there are large amounts of money at stake, I guess it makes sense for charlatans and sharks to flock.<p>There are very few ways to tell accurately from the outset at first who&#x27;s going to screw you over - I&#x27;ve heard horror stories of the sort from friends at startups backed by high profile entities like YC, famous startups that are often in the media for being &quot;the best places to work at&quot;, companies with celebrity founders who have reputations for being &quot;the nicest guys in the world&quot;, etc.<p>It&#x27;s the kind of thing that you can only learn through a few painful experiences, I think. You do learn your lessons: never pay in advance for anything, don&#x27;t put your own savings or core livelihood on the line for someone else&#x27;s dreams, get everything in writing, talk to former employees of a company&#x2F;colleagues of a founder before getting involved, never ever assume that what you have is anything more than an employer&#x2F;employee relationship, etc.<p>I have to say that I&#x27;m impressed by how the poster handled it - keeping documentation, filing wage claims, etc. - the only thing she could have done better was not staying on so long when she wasn&#x27;t getting paid, but it&#x27;s an understandable mistake when you&#x27;re in the moment.<p>I for one am glad I learned my lessons at 22 rather than at 45 with a family to care for and a mortgage to pay. The upside is that there are plenty of genuinely nice, passionate people - when you find them, stay close to them.