I’ve been the tech co-founder (CTO) of a startup for a year now. I wanted to develop an MVP of the non-tech cofounder’s (CEO) idea and get it into the hands of potential customers. CEO decided that we don’t show anyone anything until the entire product is fully developed. I pushed back because that sounded crazy, but he said to trust him because he knew the customer base.. so I trusted him.
I found some mentors ~8 months ago who could potentially start helping us develop investor relations. He didn’t want to speak to mentors OR investors because they could take the idea and run.
I wanted to bring 1-2 devs on board after 5-6 months of development to start scaling it up and to complement my weaknesses and to start maturing the foundation of what I had built so far. He didn’t want to because it would be giving up equity too early.
Today, we’re almost out of money, no sales (been live for ~4 months now), I’m burnt out being the only dev working 12+ hours/day every day (plus helping with biz operations) for the last 6-7 months.. He just now started looking for funding. I’m very unhappy and not super confident in his ability to lead us to success.
Should I stay or should I go?
Go.