...and it goes on and on and on. I may go back and read this later but this seems a lot like the whiny rant of the one person stupid enough to take the job after the smart people ran screaming.

I submitted because it's a hilariously awful story of the scamming that goes on in the startup scene. I have a few friends who've shared similar stories (CEOs lying about funding, office leasers not being paid, etc), but this one takes the cake for absurdity.

The HN people tracked down the real company behind the story, and the CTO / co-founder at least had seemingly decent history of work. But otherwise red flag 6 and on-wards would make me start researching flights back home. Up to that point, I could see someone who was inexperienced or naive falling prey, thinking that was just the crazy world of startups. "hire fast and fire fast" isn't too far from "move fast and break things" in the list of SV-insane-utterances.

Then again, I would have turned the other direction at "* with machine learning / NLP".

With any luck, that CEO won't get any more money after a testimonial like this. Or maybe they'll go to jail for fraud.

Also, the author wasn't kidding about the spongebob facebook memes.