So yeah… my week hasn't started out great.
Me and my cofounder (let’s call him "Dave", not his real name obv) started a B2B SaaS about 18 months ago. It’s been a grind but we actually hit some MRR that might get us semiprofitable soon.
Anyway, last few weeks he’s been getting weird about "ownership". Keeps saying stuff like "I feel like an employee in my own startup". Which… idk, maybe sorta fair? He’s at 35% equity. But I’ve been the one doing all the fundraising, sales, ops, support, marketing, you name it.
This morning I wake up to 47 Slack messages. He rage quit last night, forked the entire repo to his personal GitHub, and sent an email to a few of our paying customers saying he’s the real founder and that he’s "starting fresh without the baggage". Then he deleted himself from our Slack.
Our dev team is freaking out. Investors are texting me "wtf happened?" and I’m somewhere between panic and laughter at this point.
Anyway, lawyers are now involved.. Has anyone else ever had a cofounder go nuclear like this? Is there any coming back from this, or is it just scorched earth and move on?
Posting from a throwaway account here... sorry guys. I'm actually quite active on my regular account and I think I've seen a eerily similar story here a while back (an omen?) but I can't seem to find it anymore to see what the advice was.