Pretty much all employment is risky. It doesn't matter that you have a car payment and a wife going thru graduate school. Those are financial risks you took.
Your employment could end at any time. The company could be seized by the government as part of some investigation and shut down, the CEO could be hit by a bus, you could screw up in a big way and get fired. You could be hit by a brain aneurism and simply not be there to provide for your car payment and your wife's schooling.
Every employee is taking risk that their employment might end for any number of reasons.
This is one of the reasons that, when something like that happened to me, I said "That's it, my livelihood will never be in someone else's hands again" ... and have been self employed / doing my own startups since.
Just because these things can theoretically happen at any company doesn't make them equally likely. Startups are far more likely to go bust or lay off people with little warning.
The difference is that most of those things are risks you can't reasonably plan for. If you know that the start-up you're working for has x months of runway, then you can plan for looking for a new gig, ensure you have savings to carry you over, or decide to work elsewhere.
But you can't plan for it if the company's owner hides it from you. If you think you need to lie to your staff about the company's finances, then you're an untrustworthy prick.
And if you get lucky, no one will ever know. And if you don't get lucky, everyone will know that you can't be trusted, and that could affect your ability to get contracts and employees at your next venture.
I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that the article was expressing apprehension at hiring the guy (e.g.: he was concerned as to whether he'd be able to keep him employed for more than 2 months)... there's no indication that the financial state of the company was hidden from the employee.
At least in my experience, while I haven't known the exact financial state of startups I've worked for, I've generally known the level of risk I was signing up for.
If you're completely up-front about the financials then there's no reason to be apprehensive, surely? After all, the employee is deciding their own level of risk then.
There's no way never to have your livelihood in someone's else's hands ever again; the world's too small. Probably the closest thing is growing your own food in a remote area based only on supplies you produce, but that leaves you exposed to acts of aggression aimed at control or destruction of the land.
Your livelihood depends on so many people when you're doing a tech startup (your clients, the organizations running the internet, the government, the army, your neighbours) it's not even funny.
I absolutely agree. There are zero guarantees in life.
I left a reasonably stable small company to take a risk as employee #2. But where my experience may have diverged from what OP describes was in the hiring process. My new employer was very up front with the fact that, hey, it's a startup, and it might not take off. We discussed some alternative options & put some timelines in place to help reduce the risks I'd face.
Might everything fall apart tomorrow? Sure. But my company was 100% up front with me regarding my risks -- at least if we fail, we fail together.
I've had friends who have joined companies as the #1 where the owner completely misrepresented the situation of the company throughout the whole process, were burned, and are now working stable jobs that they hate. That's the biggest shame of all.
Your employment could end at any time. The company could be seized by the government as part of some investigation and shut down, the CEO could be hit by a bus, you could screw up in a big way and get fired. You could be hit by a brain aneurism and simply not be there to provide for your car payment and your wife's schooling.
Every employee is taking risk that their employment might end for any number of reasons.
This is one of the reasons that, when something like that happened to me, I said "That's it, my livelihood will never be in someone else's hands again" ... and have been self employed / doing my own startups since.