
Should I Leave My Startup? - ztratar
https://www.jobstart.com/posts/warning-signs-is-it-time-to-leave-your-startup
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mattbgates
Good article and warning signs to look out for when deciding what to do. It
sucks being left in the dark.. my last company acted like everything was going
great, we would be successful "if we made X amount of sales by X quarters"

Telling your employees one thing and doing another, like the CEO of my last
company did, telling us that we were all safe, and then laying me off first,
and then everyone soon followed. One thing that most companies don't realize:
keeping secrets from your employees is never a good idea.

I get it: A company wants to retain its employees until it can no longer do
it, so they are always after their own best interests. I would have rather
known up front: "Hey, we aren't doing so well and some of you may be let go"
would have been a lot better warning than calling me into an office on a
regular day, a Wednesday, and telling me that they need to see me, and
refusing to let me go back to my desk afterwards.

I'm lucky I was laid off first.. they even gave me a severance package, while
all of my former co-workers had to take the company to court to get their few
last paychecks. If they had warning, they all could have been looking for
other jobs in advance, but the company only thought about its own interests.

But the article definitely sums up the last company that laid me off.. and
then they went under themselves. Another thing to add to that list, however is
this:

"Checking in on the competition" and "Keeping up with the latest technology"

IF a startup / company chooses to ignore or even check in on what their
competition is doing and really take heed to what they discover ... they are
giving their competition the edge and will ultimately fail.

IF a startup / company knows there is better technology that exists or there
is an update to the current technology, but refuse to update and/or change it,
they are giving other companies the edge and will ultimately fail.

What seemed obvious to me was not so obvious to the company I worked for... I
tried to warn my supervisor who assured me he would discuss it with his higher
ups... but I'm sure it never happened, is the reason why what otherwise would
have been a great company to continue working for (I enjoyed my time there),
went out of business.

~~~
ztratar
Absolutely agree, Matt!

We run our operations with transparency. It takes a lot of loyalty and trust
in order to be transparent from a managerial perspective, but if people don't
like real data they may not be a fit anyways for the company.

The competition point is more nuanced, I think. It's common among the founder
groups to say that worrying about competition is silly. It's exceedingly rare
for competition to be the death of a startup -- instead, it's because they
often didn't focus on their users well enough or create a viable
product/market/biz-model fit.

Thanks for sharing your story Matt. :)

