I love building. I’d do an MVP for much less equity if I’d actually get it. But I won’t. One of my MVPs turned into a $500M acquisition. Got $0.
This is normal in Silicon Valley. So many unicorns hiding skeletons of enthusiastic side-project coders.
I’d say don’t do it, but... to be honest, I never could have hyped my own prototype the way they did. I didn’t have the rich kid VC connections that they did. And I needed my day job. So really I lost nothing. At least I got the story.
Whatever happened was probably entirely legal and probably ethical as well.
You can be a cofounder, and have ownership even if there is a lack of contracts and paperwork, and that likely would have come up during that $500M acquisition. I can't find it, but there was a Ycombinator - backed startup whose sale was blocked by a founder who went AWOL early.
If he was an employee, or did otherwise hand over / accept compensation for his work, well, that's just business as usual: employees generating wealth for owners.
The lesson is to have clarity of what you want out of a certain work, and then have some kind of contract, before you start working.
Oh boy... Well, doesn't do me any good, so never before told, but I guess I only have so many stories to tell before I get hit by a bus, so... Briefly:
2007-2009 Satellite project at Stanford. Very modest capabilities. Prof had idea. Design and operating system by adjunct. Hardware by LMT volunteer (the real hero). I, also volunteer, wrote control software, did radiation testing at UCD LinAc. Bunch of students too. Then deployed to Afghanistan, heard nothing. Came back 3 years later, went to random meetup: person I've never seen presenting talk about founding company with brilliant undergrad who built a tiny satellite that could read license plates from space. Wait... what? Oh that guy. Hmmm... well, I wouldn't have done it, but hey, the pitch worked. $100M funding... wow. $500M acquisition by Google... eyes wide open. AFAIK, others not involved. Hope HW hero got something: quiet, humble, fast, obsessive, helpful, learned so much from him, but seems to have disappeared.
This is normal in Silicon Valley. So many unicorns hiding skeletons of enthusiastic side-project coders.
I’d say don’t do it, but... to be honest, I never could have hyped my own prototype the way they did. I didn’t have the rich kid VC connections that they did. And I needed my day job. So really I lost nothing. At least I got the story.