Yea - there's a few things that blew my mind and understanding of the world at the time.

One of those things is - if you have hit product market fit, a company becomes hard to kill. I do think it's dying a slow death, but had they done what they did later, it might not have, look up the Cisco story. After all, in a way starting a company that no longer needs you to run it might be the definition of success for a startup (e.g. it's what leads to a successful acquisition).

As for what happened - as a first-time founder I hadn't put normal founder protections in place, and this meant that at the time that I was about to close the round referenced in the article that valued Smartrr at $75mn, it was possible for investors to push me out and take pretty much all my equity which was worth tens of millions of $ and could have been worth billions were the company to go on to succeed.
The incoming investors wanted to get rid of this vulnerability and increase my control ("we're betting on you here...") and there was some tension around that with existing investors. I viewed my first sales hire as a very close friend and confidant and was going to promote them to President to formally be my righthand as part of the round and give them a large chunk of equity that would otherwise have been my own.
Instead that first sales hire used what I had confided to collaborate with existing investors and push me out of the company the night I was to sign that deal.
Instead of closing that world-class round I woke up the next day without the company I had started.

You might read that and think I was a naive moron and that's okay, I now think I was too, but I also don't think there's any moral shame in that.

At that time I believed that people were good or at least wanted to be and much was built on that foundational view. This experience broke that foundation, but I now believe the scarcity of being good makes it that much more special.

Regarding their story, the investors and the present CEO who did it gave no public statement apart and privately lied and said that I had somehow stolen money from the company (the WSJ wouldn't have included me if this were true).

I think what you're really asking is what would their "true" story be, the one in their minds not their mouths. They'll never be honest publicly if they wouldn't even be privately, but that itself in some ways reveals the answer. They just saw an opportunity to take a lot of equity worth a lot of $$$ from an overly trusting first-time founder who hadn't protected themselves, and so... they did it.

I used to believe that everyone needs to convince themselves that they are good for humanity in order to sleep at night, it's a nice to think that but try reconciling that with the existence of Ted Bundy.

With regard to what I would have done differently, there are a lot of tactical things (look up "double trigger clause", that's really the most important one).

In a way though, my fatal mistakes stemmed from the optimistic view of the world that says if you work hard and are honest and do right by people, good things will happen. That view led to a lot of poorly placed trust, certainly in that first sales hire who I brought into my thing and sought to elevate and is now has my former job as CEO of the company, but also in an investor that I viewed as a mentor figure.

While I believe the dollars I lost are certainly eye-popping and would have been nice, I just don't have that kind of emotional attachment to money, that's not what hurt.

What hurt was rebuilding from that shattered of that world view and accepting a much more nuanced one, where being good in the classical sense is often exploited as a vulnerability and in order to preserve the good you need to be able to fend that off.

That's where I ended up, but it was a journey through hell to get there, one where I saw the people that were hurting me and my family so much get lauded on social media and in the press for the short-term success of my Smartrr following my departure.

Anyways - if you happen to stumble on this and it helps you, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, happy to help further if I can.