”
perhaps , it was not his attitude and rather lack of incentives that drove him out of the startup. I had hired a similar kid out of college who I tried to pay next to nothing . He accepted at his junior level , that the salary was fair and began working. He also asked about equity but I laughed at him , I had somehow managed to retain 95% of the startups equity by paying the rest of the team salaries. Soon he realized though , that he was almost working for free with no incentives helping build my company ( he never once complained about the occasional grunt work , only did he mention something while I decided to enforce his one month leaving policy ). He was obviously smarter and better acquainted with startup norms compared to rest of the team , who sat quietly getting measly salaries without any equity.

So I don’t know why you were “speechless” , he wanted to work in areas that he was not experienced in , so in the process , he could build his skills and at the same time help my company. Additionally I must mention , I stifled him from access to the company servers , databases and critical areas . Every time he would implement something he would have to wait , for one for my overworked team to implement the requests.

Hence I reached the realization , that he was of a different breed , one that I could not exploit , for my grunt work + other “cool” and “good” stuff that he could boast to his college friends about. I let him go and we parted on the good note. I realized that one day his company could be bigger than mine and he will be a great contact to have. “