Ask HN: Let go from startup I was cofounder at. What to do next?

[throwaway111m]

I've been working at this startup for the last two years as a cofounder/CTO, and I was informed just this morning by my CEO that they want me to transition out of the company over 1 month.

For the majority of the two years, I was the sole developer and had a massive workload, and we made our second hire on the dev team only a few months back, and the switch to a management role is something I was struggling with, along with being very burnt out.

The reason for asking me to leave is that our product has stagnated over the last two years, and only seen maintenance-level work being done on it. We tried various things to make the product move faster but all failed. This has been blamed on my inexperience. They also believe my vision does not align with the companys vision. They're going to outsource development now.

They've told me that they're not going to give me my equity that had vested as they do not want someone not working in the company to have equity. Instead they're offering to continue paying my salary for the next year.

I'm 21 y.o., a high school dropout, and I joined this startup when I was 18. So basically this has been the focus of my entire adult life up till this point. It's like my life has fallen apart in front of me, and I have no idea what I should do next. I don't think I'll be able to go work as an employee somewhere after this.

My skills are full stack web development (Node, Django, React), but I'm self taught and while I can figure things out, I have holes in my knowledge.

I know this post is a mess, but so am I at this point. What do I do now?

[bryanrasmussen]

If you don't have a contract you still might be able to get more based on correspondence etc. but if you're not willing to fight for it because you don't want to hurt the company then agree to the getting paid for a year (although that is probably very little money?) If you were noted as CTO in some way it looks good on CV, go somewhere you can get more money and build up something over the next year is what I would do (perhaps you will find that you like getting paid enough to be an employee for some time)

[throwaway111m → bryanrasmussen]

I'm being asked to give up 7.5% equity. We're bootstrapped. I was paid around 1/2 the market price for 2 years, and I gave up that amount because I valued the equity more, and now they're telling me I can't have any of my vested equity. What would be fair compensation in this case?

I've worked with Django, React, React Native, Node. Rather than a job I think I'd prefer to freelance while I travel. Do you have any recommendations on how I could get started?

[bryanrasmussen → throwaway111m]

It's not about what's fair it's about you could reasonably expect to get, you don't have a contract but if you have some documentation etc. you might be able to get them to give you that 7.5 - probably less than that though. Should probably consult a lawyer.

I don't really know about the freelance while traveling route, I freelance and do reasonably well at it, my experience in my part of the world is that there are consultant companies the big companies will hook up with and accept freelancers through them. The consultant companies markup your rate by about 30-50%, so if you could conceivably get a gig without using one of these companies then you can increase your fee.

So maybe you can find out who the consulting companies are in areas you want to travel to - for example if you look at https://rightpeoplegroup.com/open-assignments/ you can see how typical external consultant gigs are structured. There are other similar companies, Hays for example, in my area of the world it is companies like Cybercom, Prodata etc.

Based on my experience, if you have CTO on your CV and managed some other developers it improves your value a bit.

How much you should charge - figure out what the wage is for a developer in your area, in my experience you should make at least double that (but my experience may be wrong for some parts of the world) - after all you don't get a lot of the perks a normal employee gets, the benefit of course is if you have a decent accountant (or can do it yourself) and incorporate a lot of your expenses are tax deductible.

[z3]

My honest advice is to find a good lawyer. I hope you have a signed contract.

[bryanrasmussen]

you should maybe delete your comment here, and redo it as your throwaway account though?

[z3 → bryanrasmussen]

maybe you should do the same now :)

[bryanrasmussen → z3]

yeah I don't have the ability to edit the comment it seems, so it will just free float there?