Awesome story and takeaways. What happened to your product and what did you learn you could not keep up with or grow into?
Because of this I had multiple levels of bosses above me in the company. They all got really interested in starting to manage me and the product once we hit 5M users. They had a different vision, attachment and passion about the product.
Around 2008, we were spending a lot of money on text messaging. Most people where using the product to send messages for cheap to their friends and family (essentially like WhatsApp vs Twitter).
I wanted to slowly phase out text messaging in favor of Data (essentially become WhatsApp!). CEO didn't believe that Mobile Data will get adoption in India for a long time. He instead wanted to focus on monetizing - by sending ads on text messages, making people pay for premium content etc. We tried 8-10 things - nothing worked (this can be a really big post in itself).
Soon I quit and moved to US. It was like a bad breakup!
My biggest learnings were:
1. If you do not have ownership like a founder, do not that take responsibility like a cofounder.
2. Personally for me: do not work where I don't have veto rights. But bills need to be paid and family has to be supported. Took me 5 years of really hard work to get there!
May I ask you about your first 'biggest learning': how do you eschew cofounder responsibilities in an early company? Someone who genuinely cares and/or is really interested in the core business (pretty common among first hires of startups) may have a hard time turning work away or willfully not participating in major discussions/planning when they believe their contributions could be valuable. In other words, situations when you know you can contribute but the company will get the 'better end of the deal' as you take on more responsibility without taking on more compensation.
It sounds difficult to ride that out - were you able to do that successfully or are you saying "This happened to me, don't let it happen to you?"
If someone is joining a startup at an early stage, work like it is your own baby. You are spending your most valuable currency by being here - which is your time!
With time, hopefully, you will get rewarded for your effort and results. You will likely not get a founder level say and stake but your role should gradually expand. In the end founders take almost the same risk as the first employee, but get a lot more equity because founder was there at the start. Join a startup as an early employee only if you are able to accept this fact - otherwise you are setting yourself up for a lot of resentment and pain.
This above advise applied to me too for the first two years of my employment, before I started working on the ultimate successful product. We were building an offline search engine and as a part of that I build distributed file systems, crawled a billion pages and I was appropriately rewarded with career growth.
However with the new social product that I built, the situation was dramatically different. For that product I was there from day 0. I was owning the whole engineering (sole engineer at start and head engineering till I left) and significant portion of product. Till we got 5M users, I had a co-founder level say (but not the stake of course) and I worked with a co-founder level of involvement and dedication till that time. However once we got 5M users, multiple levels above me started doing meetings and taking critical decisions without involving me. I still had a co-founder level passion and it hurt to see the product flounder and being unable to do anything about it.
So I was in a uniquely bad situation and it is not common to be in this situation. However if someone really is and there is no way to get a founder level control - move out as soon as you can. And this is what I did - albeit 2 years too late.