I don't think anyone is saying that she (the dev) didn't use her leverage to her advantage. We all recognize that it was the OP's fault to give her that leverage in the first place.
However in business, relationships and "karma" - for lack of a better term - are really what things are about. There are times when you should be looking at maximizing your position, and there are other times when you should be looking to cooperate in order to maximize a collective position.
Many of the people here (myself included) are simply stating that the dev displayed poor business acumen by being too aggressive in taking advantage of another's weaker position. The key being who that other person is - her supposed partner.
Partnerships need to have a level of loyalty beyond any particular transaction or they simply won't work.
I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing that when she took the job, she thought "Sure, this'll be a cinch. I get a full salary, and if it works out, a nice bonus." Then it turned out the job was much harder than she expected, she saw the founder with 94% doing basically nothing, and said "Dude, if I'm going to slave away with this code for months, I should get founder-level shares. Otherwise, I could just do what you're doing and take the 94% you're getting" and tried to renegotiate for a stake that'd make the development pain worthwhile. The OP refused, so she walked.
Chalk it up to first-time founder mistakes on both sides. Almost everybody drastically underestimates the amount of effort required to get a startup off the ground. So what seems acceptable at first ("yeah, this won't be hard for me, I can whip it off for you") starts to feel like you're getting massively ripped off later.
And I totally agree with the comments on other subthreads that she's probably not a very good Django dev. I wouldn't be surprised if this is her first Django project. I remember that I expected my first PHP project to take 3 months; it ended up taking 3 years (I didn't charge for it; it was a volunteer project in college).
"threatened to quit and raise her own funding" unless equity was raised to 35%, that is very very hostile. - she only quit once they ran out of money., actions just speak louder than words for me.
I don't get it. This isn't MTV's The Real World: Tulsa Edition. She didn't like the deal she had. She told the founder, whose stake dwarfed hers, what her issue was. It didn't work out. She left.
What are you asking her to do? Stay on in an untenable situation? News flash for you: when you make a mistake signing on with a company, you aren't "honor-bound" to stay there until the situation plays itself out. If your situation sucks, leave. She did.
There's another unfortunate lesson here. When people threaten to quit, counteroffers are often a waste of time. People with MBAs will tell you not to make them at all. I've learned this the hard way; I got a really good offer in the middle of my last PM job, brought it up with my current company, and they upped my stake. But for the next 2 years, they were constantly on the defensive assuming I was going to quit again; it damaged the working relationship severely.
If you're a solid company, and someone gives you an ultimatum, a no-foul clean break is often going to be the right move. I wish it wasn't like that (I had no intention of quitting), but some political situations are untenable.
Just smells wrong, to take $6,900/mo + 6% (and agree to it) then for no reason demand more equity (which can't pay your bills) so basically the only reason to demand more equity is selfish-ness and you realize the founder is in a bad spot.
- She only left cause they were out of money, I suspect she would have rode that horse to death.
-I'm done debating; it was really fun, I got work to do; Im sure you do too... .rb
That was a huge management error. A significant capital investment went into development. But it doesn't sound like any effort was put into consolidating the gains they made throughout the year she worked there.
Again: the project could have been broken into milestones, maybe with each demo-able. The founder wasn't technically capable of doing this, but could have had the dev write up a spec milestone-by-milestone, and then managed the project to that spec. At any point during the year, the dev could have left and the founder would have had something usable to work with.
Not only that, but by not managing the project well, the founder sent a message to the dev: "I don't really know what I'm doing, so I'm throwing money at you to make things work". There's nothing wrong with that when the person you're throwing money at is a full partner whose interests are aligned with yours. This person wasn't.
I'm making a lot of assumptions here, and I apologize if I'm off the mark.
