Should I Leave My Startup?

Good article and warning signs to look out for when deciding what to do. It sucks being left in the dark.. my last company acted like everything was going great, we would be successful "if we made X amount of sales by X quarters"

Telling your employees one thing and doing another, like the CEO of my last company did, telling us that we were all safe, and then laying me off first, and then everyone soon followed. One thing that most companies don't realize: keeping secrets from your employees is never a good idea.

I get it: A company wants to retain its employees until it can no longer do it, so they are always after their own best interests. I would have rather known up front: "Hey, we aren't doing so well and some of you may be let go" would have been a lot better warning than calling me into an office on a regular day, a Wednesday, and telling me that they need to see me, and refusing to let me go back to my desk afterwards.

I'm lucky I was laid off first.. they even gave me a severance package, while all of my former co-workers had to take the company to court to get their few last paychecks. If they had warning, they all could have been looking for other jobs in advance, but the company only thought about its own interests.

But the article definitely sums up the last company that laid me off.. and then they went under themselves. Another thing to add to that list, however is this:

"Checking in on the competition" and "Keeping up with the latest technology"

IF a startup / company chooses to ignore or even check in on what their competition is doing and really take heed to what they discover ... they are giving their competition the edge and will ultimately fail.

IF a startup / company knows there is better technology that exists or there is an update to the current technology, but refuse to update and/or change it, they are giving other companies the edge and will ultimately fail.

What seemed obvious to me was not so obvious to the company I worked for... I tried to warn my supervisor who assured me he would discuss it with his higher ups... but I'm sure it never happened, is the reason why what otherwise would have been a great company to continue working for (I enjoyed my time there), went out of business.