You could engage a labor lawyer, but if this was pre-series A and the founder was self-funding, there might not be any personal assets there either.
If you think the folding of the company is in good faith, you might just want to take the loss on this one.
This is astonishingly bad advice! It is the fundamental opposite of what you should do in this situation!
If you work for someone, you deserve to be paid for your work. Full stop. There are state agencies to assist with this exact situation that are funded by your tax dollars, avail yourself to them!
What you think happened to the company is immaterial. I am genuinely baffled by the phrase “folding of the company in good faith” as I can’t imagine a good faith reason to tell people to work for free based on how your feelings align in relation to a business entity.
The only people that would benefit from this becoming the norm would be con artist founders that are working to perfect an “Aww shucks, payroll is sooo hard for a smol bean like me!” excuse for getting folks to work for free.
I would also not work for anyone that would even slightly agree with this advice.
A company is bankrupt if a point in time can be foreseen, where the company can no longer pay its debtors (employees here are debtors, sometimes even a higher-priority class of such). And while one can argue about the "foreseen" part, e.g. by saying "I did reasonably expect that incoming payment to arrive, which didn't". As soon as you were unable to pay a debt once, or like here even twice, you are actually too late in declaring your bankruptcy. Which, in most jurisdictions, is a crime. And it certainly is in bad faith. If the company isn't actually bankrupt, could pay but won't, then it is also an act of bad faith.
Go for it, sue and put in jail whoever owes you payroll money. Jail is a very good motivator to pay what's owed.
Do not take this loss. You should if you are a founder and decided not to take salary, but as an employee this is unacceptable. That money is yours.
OP performed labor at an agreed-upon rate. The hypothetical broke and failed founder should “take the loss”, even if it requires taking on further financial burdens.
Externalized risk is one of the most rampant and harmful moral hazards of this age.
It's not clear it's asinine: the cost of trying to recoup money from an entity that is completely out of money can very easily become not worth it.
That would be giving the owners a pass on the risk that should be inherent in starting a business venture at the expense of OP’s already-delivered labor.
I stand by my tone. That kind of risk shuffling is cancer to the whole realm of private ventures and contributes to general distrust of business as a means of organizing and motivating collective human action.
However the extent to which they should take this case is pretty wide.
At least the guy should ask for his wages.
Maybe he should insist on them if he needs it.
Should they sue the founders and get an lien on their houses? I don’t know.
The first two shouldn’t remove good faith or good feeling. The third means bridges burned.
But I also concede that, in some cases, the cost of recouping might not be worth it.