After my first start up I always asked for money not stock. Told em if we did well I’d buy the stock legit
The hours you discribe are typical. Kind of like living at the job site
In the startup where I was replacing the EEs, C++ and Java programmers, I really had the run of the lab. A couple real sharp helpers fabricating the interface boards and packaging the devices. Inside the brief case was the equivalent of an "on star" type device. Since no real world cars had been built, I created full function simulators for 5 different cars from 2 manufacturers.
The safety engineer asked me if the alpha-numeric display on the radio could scroll messages. I asked him to come back after lunch. On return, I had "Attention K-Mart Shoppers" scrolling. He had to write an explicit prohibition against doing that in the production cars.
The point of putting the 5 simulated cars into brief cases was to fly them around the US and test interaction with cell phone towers from a variety of suppliers. At my end in the lab, I had created a full simulation of the enterprise, but the two desktop machines only had enough bandwidth to support 10 concurrent users. The true enterprise level had to support a population of 250,000 cars. My lab was enough to demo for venture capitalist show and tell with the company VP.
One evening just after 8 PM, rows of chairs were being setup in my lab area. I asked what was up. It was a project management meeting. I had a chance to preview the MS Project Gantt charts. It was hard to avoid laughing. The project managers were out of touch with the development staff of the enterprise level systems.
After all the lab and field devices were built, I turned the lab and testing effort over to another employee and returned home to Idaho. A few weeks later, I got a phone call at 8 AM. Security officers were posted around the building. Employees were escorted to their desks to retrieve personal property. The building had very expensive gear inside that had to be protected from growing legs. The startup was over. The enterprise developers could not deliver the platform in time to start the manufacturing process of 250,000 cars equipped with the new device. Disappointing after all of the effort.
The defining event that shut it down occurred when 10 company executives were supposed to start a trial against the enterprise platform. The lab could have supported it, but the enterprise could not.
I noticed that startups tend to be full of playful, creative people. That needs to be managed to keep them productive and not treating the effort as a party.