At this point I honestly have no idea what people at startups are supposed to do if they suspect wrongdoing/foul play by executives. Tell your boss, who tells the CEO, who fires you. Tell an investor, who wants to protect their investment, and they fire you. Tell the CEO and they fire you. Tell the HR manager and, again, their job is to protect the CEO and the exec team so they fire you. I'm genuinely wondering what the expectation was here. I imagine if this person had expressed these concerns to Suster he would have been shushed/fired, so thats why he didn't...
CYA is pretty much the only rule. Whistleblowing always works out badly for the whistleblower. It's strange but true that it's far easier to get hired from a failed startup than as a whistleblower, so the only thing to do is keep your head down and look for a new job. Let them fly the investors' money into the ground as long as your name isn't on anything illegal.
Fortunately SV startups are rarely capable of getting people killed with a bad product. I'd like to hope that someone would whistleblow the safety issues on home thorium reactors before the Bay Area is rendered uninhabitable, but I know it would be career suicide for the person that did.
