Maybe I'm naive but I was struck at how empty this company's mission and vision was (nevermind its ethics, which were well-covered in the original Medium post), and yet the founder and his friend/CTO put in so much of their own money into it. Were they complete greedy fools, or is VC money that easy to glom on to? WrkRiot didn't even have a "soon-to-be parodied by Silicon Valley HBO", TEDdy nonsensical ring to it, e.g. "its like Airbnb, but for your 401K". It was just a straight up dull and stupid "Yeah, we're gonna beat Linkedin" pitch, just as if someone were to throw $1M of their money behind the claim "We'll take on Google by using advanced AI machine learning!"

According to their Crunchbase [0] (which could obviously be incomplete), there's no institutional investors listed in their initial or seed round. I mean it's one thing to waste other people's money on a dumb idea, but this seems masochistic.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/1for-one#/entity

edit: Another befuddling thing besides the enormous headcount was the fact that the original whistleblower was brought in from Dallas and offered equity and a $135K salary and a signing bonus. That seems like a huge chunk of money for a marketing executive at a small tech startup. Again, ignoring the reality that he couldn't really afford her, what did the CEO imagine would be investors' reaction to such a pricey hire?