The software on Hacker News is telling me that my comment is too long, so I will have to break it into 2 comments.

Here is part #2:

2 weeks later:

Entrepreneur: Are you ready to hear our new investor pitch?

Me: Yes, I'm ready.

Entrepreneur: We are going to blow you away! We've working till midnight every night to perfect this, and, wow! It's just going to blow you away!!!

Me: Okay, great, I look forward to hearing it.

Entrepreneur: Tom, read him the Executive Summary that we wrote for the business plan.

Tom: "The VisionClaus movement will put you in the driver's seat of conscious, real-time human evolution." *

Me: What?

Entrepreneur: It gets better!!!

Tom: "Humanity now faces an inflection point in its history. Creatures of communication, our societies will be transformed by the growing world awakedness facilitated by the revolution in communication technologies."

Me: What?

Entrepreneur: It gets better!!!

Tom: "What sort of changes can we expect? Will these new technologies empower humanity or enslave the masses? Will we be uplifted to the mountain top, or dropped into the pit? Are we green? Are we social?"

Entrepreneur: What do you think?

Me: That is your Executive Summary????

Entrepreneur: Punchy, isn't it?

Me: You have got to be kidding!!!

Entrepreneur: Uh, what? Why?

Me: What the hell are you selling? You didn't even mention how you are going to make money!!!

Entrepreneur: We didn't? Tom, did we say how we are going to make money?

Tom: Uh, hmmm, that must have gotten cut from the final draft.

Entrepreneur: We better put that back in.

Tom: Uh, okay. So, "monetizing the eyeballs of humanity's new wakefulness?"

Entrepreneur: Was that our final version?

Tom: Uh, or maybe it was "Facilitating real time interaction among needers and givers of services in the new era?"

Entrepreneur: Let's go with that.

Me: Don't you think it would be better to state something a bit more concrete?

Entrepreneur: No, no, we've got to be about vision. It's what makes us unique. Otherwise we'll just be another fly by night startup with a cheap gimmick.

Me: Well, we could also write software that works.

Entrepreneur: Of course, of course, that is very important. Don't you think that's important, Tom?

Tom: Very important.

Entrepreneur: But at this early stage, it's crucial that we impress people with our understanding of the larger picture.

Me: Look, I don't know much about fundraising, but I don't think your approach is going to work.

Entrepreneur: I'll have you know we just had a meeting with the CEO of a $6 billion dollar company.

Me: What! Wow! That is incredible! How the hell did you pull that off?

Entrepreneur: With vision! We impressed him with our vision!

Tom: It's true. He was impressed by our vision.

Me: But how did he hear about your vision? How did you get in front of him in the first place?

Entrepreneur: Oh, he was having dinner with my dad and I dropped in. They are old college buddies. But, listen, he was dazzled with our vision. And I believe he is going to invest $1 million dollars!

Me: Well, if that works out, then we are on our way!

Entrepreneur: We are on our way!

Tom: We've finally made it! After all our hard work! We've finally made it!

Me: So, I guess we have to give a demo?

Entrepreneur: What do you mean?

Me: I mean, of our software?

Entrepreneur: Why?

Me: Well, uh, he's not going to invest $1 million dollars without seeing the software, is he?

Entrepreneur: hmm, I hadn't thought of that.

Tom: Could be a serious roadblock.

Me: But I've got the prototype mostly working. We could explain that there's still some bugs to fix and features to add. Surely he could see through the flaws and understand the basic idea of what we are trying to do?

Entrepreneur: The problem is, we're no longer in the video space.

Me: What?

Tom: Yeah, the video idea was never that great to begin with.

Me: What?

Entrepreneur: I mean, YouTube is way ahead of us already when it comes to tracking clicks and stuff.

Me What?

Tom: If we could track eyeballs, then that would be different.

Entrepreneur: Yeah, see, if we were tracking people's eyeballs, that would be innovative. I could sell that.

Me: What?

Tom: The billionaire dude seemed to like the idea of magnets.

Me: What?

Entrepreneur: Yeah, programable magnets. You put them next to each other and they use self-organizing principles, just like ants, to assemble themselves into the marketing slogans of various companies.

Tom: So like, magnets for Apple would self assemble into the words "Think Different".

Entrepreneur: Like ants.

Tom: Self organizing.

Entrepreneur: We told him you could write the software in a week.

Tom: Can you do it?

Me: What?

Entrepreneur: You realize in a startup situation sometimes its important to pivot?

Tom: Especially in the face of setbacks in the marketplace.

Me: But we haven't suffered a setback in the marketplace. We haven't gotten to market yet!

Entrepreneur: That's because you have failed to give us anything that we can use to raise funds from an investor to hire a team so we can build something that gets to market! We're just trying to cover for your various failures!

Tom: Yeah, dude, and, to be completely frank about this, we're kind of tired of always having to carry you.

Me: What?

Entrepreneur: But we are willing to give you a second chance. You just need to write the code for the self organizing magnets.

Tom: In a week.

Entrepreneur: Can you do it?

And then, surprisingly, I suddenly ended my relationship with this entrepreneur.

Follow up notes: I'm only exaggerating slightly in my description of the above events. There were really several discussions which, when described with perfect accuracy, draw a reaction of "That can not possibly be true." But, yes, it really did all happen like that.

I have, above all, condensed events -- things that played out over many months I'm here describing as if they occurred during a few weeks. I'd have to write a book to describe all the details. Other friends of mine were there with me, working at the same place, and I'm emailing them this thread on Hacker News, so they can comment if they wish.

The funny thing is, I worked with this entrepreneur, on and off, almost full time for 18 months, and part-time for longer, (sometimes paid, sometimes not) and after awhile I realized all the projects we worked on were doomed, because he lacked the seriousness to pull it off. And, funny thing, when I finally quit he threatened to sue me, and he said that I'd betrayed him, and he was very angry. It was a really odd situation.

All of this is to say, there are moments when a developer realizes they need to drop an entrepreneur. That is, sometimes the programmer needs to fire their entrepreneur. As you get to know an entrepreneur, you develop a sense about whether they are capable of pulling something off. Especially if you are working for equity, it really is crucial to believe the entrepreneur can succeed, because if they can't, then you get nothing for all of your hard work. And if you have multiple offers in front of you, you've got to go with whichever entrepreneur seems the most likely to succeed.

Without money, written agreements have almost no value, even in the courts. If an entrepreneur can not pay a programmer, then a written agreement is worthless. Giving equity in a company that has no assets is sort of a joke, and it is a bit of a cruel joke if all the assets in the company need to be created by the programer themselves -- in that case you (the entrepreneur) are basically offering to pay them with equity in themselves: "I'll give you 5% of all of your hard work if you give me the other 95%."

Anyway, I love startups and have spent most of the last 10 years working mostly with startups, and I have to say, if the entrepreneur doesn't seem 100% solid, the programmer should just walk away.

* This is an actual sentence from an actual Executive Summary that I heard as it was read to Michael Donovan ( http://www.donovandata.com/about/executive-biographies.html#... ) by someone who wanted money from him. I've only changed the name of the company that I "worked" for. I later got a copy of that business plan and I keep it with me as a sort of memento of a very strange time.