I don't think it's an ordinary path. The founder had success before, and the company I was a part of skipped seed and started with a series A before raising more pretty quickly.
edit:
From the looks of it, they have 500+ employees now.
Seems like you would have had a good case to a lawsuit, at least enough to give them a headache settle in court. Strange that they dumped you if you were valuable to the effort. Did they just squeeze you for what you were worth and decided they could get by with other engineers or did they not see your work as valuable?
> Strange that they dumped you if you were valuable to the effort. Did they just squeeze you for what you were worth and decided they could get by with other engineers or did they not see your work as valuable?
Yes and no? I was certainly brought on as a valuable asset to the company.
I was introduced to the founder via a mutual acquaintance. I had other job offers at the time and had no intentions of joining, but the acquaintance asked me to speak with the founder and hear him out. I was basically tossed an offer that was silly to refuse.
I provided a lot of value and was responsible for building the most successful product the company offered.
I think things went a bit south when they wanted to raise even more money and bring in more investors. I think I was a bit of a black sheep in the company (I didn't have the phd+company pedigree as the other founding members). I felt like maybe I didn't look so good when they presented to investors. They certainly pitched the company as being built by the elites of AI and machine learning... and yet there I was ;p
