> “I started a company and I’m totally wild about it. It is my life. If it is not your life too then you don’t belong here.”

I assume he's diluting his own equity to make sure everyone has as equal of a stake in the company? That's the only way I'll accept this statement.

I worked at a startup and I could tell that the founders viewed the company as if it were their baby. They wondered why their employees, the "babysitters", didn't give the same effort and attention to their baby as we did. That is, no weeks significantly past 40 hours, no responding to email after hours, etc.

If you think of it in terms of babies and babysitters, it's clearly absurd to expect the babysitter to bend over backwards to help your child outside their paid duty. Yet the founders can't see it.

As a founder, there is nothing I hate more than other founders expecting their employees to work 996 for them. It shows they don’t respect their employees time and abuse it for their will. Unfortunately, this seems common in the startup world. I also think that’s why VCs love young founders as well.

I got this vibe too. Now I know to stay away from this Scale guys if I'm looking for work one day. Work/life balance is just as important as taking pride in your work. Any mentally healthy individual knows that.

He is 22 or something. It’s a common thing in founders in their early 20s, just out of college, to be overly obsessed about their work/companies.

Eventually he might grow or has to grow out of it.

I think it's more likely he cashes out and becomes another "young prodigy angel/VC/investor".

He doesn't have the work experience to understand the problem domain well enough to build a company to solve it and he doesn't have the life experience to apply what work experience he has had. I'd bet the money I'll net after the lockup on an IPO I'm in that close to 100% of the value of "his" company was built on that bed of VC funds and their connections he lucked into.

He's a cute anecdote for the company's marketing--that's the entire sum of his value. He's not likely to build another company or achieve any further success outside the VC bubble.

In the meantime, wouldn’t be surprising if he’s horrible to work with, which was OP point.

> Founders are supposed to be obsessed with their company. (Though I question that too.)

I question it too. As a cofounder, I strive to destroy this sort of attitude. Doing my part by example to establish that culture.

The financial incentive structures are also pretty skewed. Upside for founders is much, much higher than employees.

Proper incentives entice employee engagement.

The downside is also much bigger for founders. The board will cut the founder pay when times are tough, long before they touch rank-and-file employees, because they know you value your equity. The other folks can walk.

That's kind of the point: it's absurd to expect an employee--who doesn't see either the same rewards or the same risks as founders--to be as passionate about the company as the founders are. I'd go further--it's not just absurd, but astoundingly stupid and naive. It demonstrates a profound lack of both reasoning ability and experience.

Nothing stops a founder from walking away. Plenty of founders sell their shares to investors/cofounders in order to cash out.

Boards are typically stacked in the founders favor, so any reduction in pay would be the founders own decision. Which makes sense, because they want to keep the company that they have significant equity in alive.

I think you're talking about a company where things are going well. I'm talking about one where they've gone badly, and the founder has lost most control.

If the founder has lost most control, they also have way less equity. So way less reason to stick around. If things are going that badly, dump the stock, and GTFO, same as the smart employees are likely to do.

Also not good for the business. It means you attract people who pretend to care about it. So, people who can tell a good story, not those who will talk honestly to you.

it's not obvious to me that hiring good storytellers is a negative.

I think you can make the case that that's not the sole criteria or highest criteria you should seek, but I've seen remarkable longevity in companies where people are willing to fake it til they make it. (Longevity defined here as keeping people employed and keep raising money when needed. Not changing the world or anything.)