> Have you been an employee in a startup? Because in my experience it has a lot of the downs of the founder, but none of the ups.

Have you been a founder? If not, I'm not sure you fully realize what goes into the job. Everyone wants to be a founder, but nobody wants to _be_ a founder.

> I'm not sure you fully realize what goes into the job.

Can it be a lot worse than working as many hours as possible and burning out? Because startup employees do that, without the compensation the founders get.

To be fair, most startups fail, and the founders of these companies can end up with similar or worse compensation than their employees. Maybe they've volunteered to take a lower salary than their early employee. Maybe because by the time they've started hiring employees, they've been working without any salary at all, burning through their savings and credit cards for a year or more before getting any meaningful funding.

My advice would be not to do that. Set firm boundaries when you discuss the role and then enforce them. No employee will ever care as deeply about a company as its founder, and good founders understand that.

So start your own company then.

Maybe I should, so that I could abuse from the employees and then explain how I deserve to get rich if MY startup succeeds but my employees don't (because it is MY startup, you see? I don't need them).

Good luck with this! Let us know how it goes.

Founders have leverage, because they started the company. If you don't like it, start your own and don't join someone else's.

Where I come from, that's an ultra-liberal point of view.

I mean, you could certainly start your own company, and then be more generous with your employees around these sorts of things. Sadly, you might have more trouble attracting investment, but you could probably still pull it off.

Which would not solve the problem of startups generally being a Ponzi scheme and being toxic for employees, though.