Just to clarify: how educated do you need to be? Founders don’t appear to be obligated to tell you when they make deals that effect you, and more importantly retroactively reduce how much they paid you.

If you are paid in stock, and the founders make a deal that reduces the payout value of that stock (in this case to zero) they have stolen from you in a way that has no recourse. Literally they paid you with something that was presumably claimed to have value, and then after a few years made deals that made that worth less. Even though you had already been “paid”.

How much education can you do that would protect you from this?