Stay small and build knowledge. Spend very little and do projects until you have a great team and you know a lot and no funding problems before you try to catch the big fish.

Fuck VC culture. It kills your business

This hit way too close to home lol

This hurts.

Holy! This is the last 10 years of my life.

I was waiting for the new guy to completely destroy Luigi’s code that nobody wanted to touch and take down the company once and for all

If you're going to do that, take 30% at least. And make yourself CEO.

You know you're going to work a lot, at least reserve yourself the choice on how to work and have a say in how the business is administered.

Hits way close to home

But as the "founding engineer" from this story, I made a lot of product level calls to avoid the layering of "urgent easy features" that would cost x100 in support down the road.

I also heavily protected my team against crunch and was the only one affected on the rare occasions it was required.

Learning how to say no constructively is a core engineering skill in startups.