I have to 100% disagree about your assessment of ethics. If you're hiding things from your employees so you can get your bailout and shaft everyone else, how is that ethical?
You're statement has an underlying assumption that founders are hiding things from employees.
As stated above, I think its that employees aren't asking the right questions.
It's like when purchasing a vehicle; it's up to the buyer to educate themselves. Savvy buyers get better deals. We'd like to think of our industry as a meritocracy; but it's still largely based on humans with monkey brains,and greed is a powerful incentive.
Who are we talking about here--founding employees who are presumably taking lower than market salaries for more equity, or someone else?
I asked our CEO to give us an update on our runway, and he told me. I guess he could be lying, but I don't see what purpose that would serve.
At my previous company, the CFO was invited to our semi annual engineering meetings, and he'd give us the last quarterly numbers, along with a lengthy Q&A.
At the startup I co-founded before that, the CEO/co-founder was very transparent about our financials and gave me all the time I required to understand the impacts of the business decisions he was making.
Before that, at INRIX, at least once a month during our weekly all-hands, we'd get our financials detailed to us.
Being a founder requires optics, progressive disclosure, and getting creative with the representation of data, but in my experience, I've yet to be in a situation where I felt I was lied to, or purposefully misled.
I actually worked for a startup and during its last days, they had weekly meetings telling us the status. We all knew the end was coming. After we all got laid off, we took our severance, and everyone had a job in two or three weeks.
