I don't know, because I'm not delusional maybe?

Even if he was forced out how does this involve YC in any way. Everything in both timelines With regard to Jeremy and Kyle ceasing to work together happened prior to YC even agreeing to invest in the company.

Because YC accepted the application with the names of both founders and a 50/50 split. Vogt has not produced documentation that, at the time that YC accepted Cruise or shortly afterwards, that they formalized the fact that Vogt was sole founder.

A couple of years later, just as it is on the verge of sharing in a big payday, only now does YC take an interest in saying that Guillory is an extortionist who shouldn't get a co-founder's due. If you're someone who believes Guillory's side of the story -- that he was forced out -- then yes, you might see YC and Vogt conspiring against Guillory.

Even if he were forced out, do you honestly believe that someone who was fired after 1 month at a company is entitled to full 50% ownership in that company? Can you honestly not see how that claim, given its timing, is being construed as extortion?

Come on, stick to the actual claims, don't make up strawmen scenarios.

Jeremy isn't claiming 50% of the company, he is claiming 50% of Kyle's share, minus whatever Kyle would be given in exchange for the $100k he put in.

Noone is saying that Jeremy is entitled to that share because of a month of work. Jeremy is claiming that Kyle promised him a 50/50 split, and that their YC application video is a writing of this promise. And if that's the case, then the magnitude of Jeremy's effort doesn't matter legally.

I didn't say that I believe that Vogt and YC claim of extortion is false. You asked, "How do you get this crap out of the written complaints in any way?", because you seem surprised why any reasonable person could consider Guillory's side, given the facts stated in the complaint and counter-complaint.

Well, his counter-complaint claims that he was integral to the development of the company. To back that claim, he has actual paperwork, the existence of which has not been disputed by Vogt. Of course, there's plenty of time for Vogt to produce documentation showing that Guillory's stake was rescinded, but we haven't seen it yet, not even in Altman's principled "screw the lawyers" blog post yesterday.

As someone who has worked in early stage startups for 9 years now, I'd be hard pressed to believe that anyone who worked at a company for one month at its beginning was 'integral to the development of the company'. That's just not how startups work. The value isn't in the initial idea, or the detailed initial plan. It's in the hard work, the long nights writing code, the prototyping and testing, and prototyping and testing again, the recruiting, the sales, the fundraising, the deal-making. So no, I don't believe that anyone who has worked for 1 month at any company at any stage deserves 50% of that company. That is fundamentally unfair.

Fundamentally unfair happens all the time, especially when the law is at play. But unfair doesn't mean immoral, illegal, or even "mean".

Further I would dispute the notion that the value is in the hard work, long nights, etc. Value definitely does lie there and that's definitely measurable. But there's TONS of value in outlining the correct approach, dividing the problem correctly, etc. That's called architecture and I've worked on projects with none of it and it's a disaster.

For the starkest example of how this plays out, I would invite you to watch the NOVA special "The Great Robot Race" which outlines how all the competitors worked on getting "the best X hardware" where X was the piece that they thought was the most crucial to success including now giants like CMU. In the end it was folks from Stanford who recognized that the exact car, exact LIDAR, etc weren't the crucial missing link, but rather that the software was the problem. And they won based primarily on that insight and then successfully executing.

I have a counter-example. I worked at a small SaaS company where I built the foundation web service and performed query optimization that took from them a highly-inadequate non-scalable product to something that handled scale gracefully. A substantial amount of this work was done in my first month there - in my opinion, my domain knowledge ensured that what I did for them in this month would have taken them a lot more hardware and many months to even get close.

You seem to be very dismissive of turning-point ideas and crucial features that make or break companies. Archimedes' principle, the foundation of modern naval history, was a Eureka moment thought up in a bathtub. Should we ignore this contribution because it took moments to come upon this insight?

I am not taking sides here and wish to let the courts work through this complaint without casting aspersions on either side.

How do you justify use of the term "fired"?

If you have 50% of equity, therefor 50% of the vote in corporate decisions, how can the decision be made to "fire" you without your active consent?

"Fire" seems to apply to someone compensated under the normal "right to work" ("right to fire") legal framework in the US, not a founder. So the terminology seems very odd to me.

(Maybe this just reflects my lack of understanding of business law?)

It has the appearance of involving YC because the president of YC posted an aggressive blog post about it.

>I don't know, because I'm not delusional maybe?

The fact that you find it unfathomable that maybe, possibly, some rich SV-types could be the bad guys here is delusional.