Don't leave until you've clarified your equity stake and dotted all your Is and crossed all of your Ts. However, you should then cut your losses and get out of there. Half of a job is with whom you work and you've learned a great lesson with 'idiot' detection. I've worked with assholes recently, and they can actually be amazing assets at a company, but about 10 years ago I stopped working with idiots and I haven't looked back.

I'm starting a cloud company in Nairobi if you want to do something totally crazy ....

How are you going to make people pay for the clouds? Is this government-sponsored? Otherwise it sounds really cool, I've seen such climate improvement projects before, but I thought they require a huge scale (entire or several countries), can a single company really make a significant impact?

After seeing some downvotes, etc., I'm starting to think you mean a hosting company... Maybe the mention of Nairobi, Kenya made me think of clouds-as-in-water-vapor :)

If this is a joke, it is well over my head,;-)

Sod the legals, walk away, write it up to experience, re-tailor your CV and suck up a "proper" job (try looking for smaller companies through friends) for a year.

Talk to the people you meet and a new startup will come your way before that year's out.

AdamN, am in Nairobi and would love to chat concerning this. You can ping me on email mokua83ke [at] google's email service.

Pud knows an f'd company when he sees one. ;)

I agree totally but i will add one more option based on this quote "I believe in our product, but I don't believe in our business model." If this is the case and assuming u have nailed a customer pain point down since its been 15 months, i would suggest that you leave and execute the same idea with the business model you believe will work. If you and the VC are on the same page and these guys don't have much tech experience then they are clearly failing to execute and no salary, health insurance, free lunch is going to make you happy. Since at the end, they are still driving you into a ditch. If no other VC's want to bite then scrap the idea.

Since you already are doing consulting on the side, i think you may be able to squeeze 3 months in on trying to get funding, just make every action Fast, Focused and Fundamental to your objectives. Godspeed!

It seems like you would be opening yourself up to lawsuits if you take this course of action and are successful. Not that I might not do it if I believed in something, but I'd want to be very careful.

If you're out of money it might be hard to pull this off as I've heard seeking funding is a full time job (or two, as your cofounders have shown) so the product has to be mostly good to go (for at least the time being) if that's going to work.

Using the product you already built with company funds is almost definitely off limits (IANL), so I'm not quite sure how that strategy could be feasible.

and these are also family members. Doing business with family can be very tricky, let alone when you try to create competition with your own family...

As for the time you've invested ... That's the fallacy of sunk costs. If you'll never get x back, how would you get x+y back?