I'm a founder of a startup, and I really want to quit.
But the consensus seems to be that if you quit your startup you'll "never work in this town again", you'll burn all bridges, etc. So, I thought I'd get HN's specific advice.
EU-based, working remotely with an international team. I'm effectively the COO. I keep the trains running on time, manage staff, etc. I'm working for almost nothing on the startup. I do other consulting work to actually keep food on the table.
I nominally own 33% of the company and am one of the founders, but the other 2 founders (who are also the investors) always vote together, so I have no real decision-making power. So far that's led to us abandoning an MVP model in favour of an all-bells-and-whistles release, hiring useless “consultants”, and losing our sole developer over a price argument. Now we're hiring for a new developer, they want to hire someone who only has half the old developer's skillset (no complex 3D / topology maths), because “all of that bit is already done”.
We were 2 months from launch when the developer quit. Dropping a new developer into the project: my best guess is an additional 2 months. [Thoughts?]. One co-founder also wants to add more features before launch.
Also, the investors have decided to change price model (block vote) which it seems will pretty clearly make a lot less money (but has less risk attached). This turns my projected share from $12k pm to maybe $3k pm if all goes well. Sadly, I agree that the market has changed.
The product isn't a "change the world" thing, but a specifically targeted product aimed at a small B2B market. I'm not doing this for the dream, but for income
I'm involved in other projects with the investors and other people too, and those are going better. I don't want to blow up my relationship with them.
Suggestions?
But the consensus seems to be that if you quit your startup you'll "never work in this town again", you'll burn all bridges, etc. So, I thought I'd get HN's specific advice.
EU-based, working remotely with an international team. I'm effectively the COO. I keep the trains running on time, manage staff, etc. I'm working for almost nothing on the startup. I do other consulting work to actually keep food on the table.
I nominally own 33% of the company and am one of the founders, but the other 2 founders (who are also the investors) always vote together, so I have no real decision-making power. So far that's led to us abandoning an MVP model in favour of an all-bells-and-whistles release, hiring useless “consultants”, and losing our sole developer over a price argument. Now we're hiring for a new developer, they want to hire someone who only has half the old developer's skillset (no complex 3D / topology maths), because “all of that bit is already done”.
We were 2 months from launch when the developer quit. Dropping a new developer into the project: my best guess is an additional 2 months. [Thoughts?]. One co-founder also wants to add more features before launch.
Also, the investors have decided to change price model (block vote) which it seems will pretty clearly make a lot less money (but has less risk attached). This turns my projected share from $12k pm to maybe $3k pm if all goes well. Sadly, I agree that the market has changed.
The product isn't a "change the world" thing, but a specifically targeted product aimed at a small B2B market. I'm not doing this for the dream, but for income
I'm involved in other projects with the investors and other people too, and those are going better. I don't want to blow up my relationship with them.
Suggestions?