I had been freelancing my technical skills out of my house when a startupy coworking space opened. I was a founding member and really into building that community. There was a lot of solid professionals and team spirit in the beginning. I used to run free classes for electronics and web dev. I met a couple of guys who wanted to brainstorm business ideas with me and some other guys I worked with. They seemed ok, had been hanging around at all the events, and one of them became my gym partner. Everyone liked a particular idea so we formed a 5 person team, my 2 associates I had been working with and the 2 other guys who initiated the whole thing. There was a lot of team spirit, we wanted to put our city on the map for tech startup stuff more than we wanted to make money. I agreed to work part time to build the hardware for 10% equity. The next 6 months there was a lot of pressure, everyone was waiting for the prototype. It was just me building the prototype and I was often staying past 11pm and making my girlfriend cry about how I was never home. I built a hardware platform and a web backend for it. Once we had a working prototype, people started offering us money. First we got 10k and things started to come apart. I only wanted to build 2 more prototypes but instead the money was completely wasted on building 50 prototypes that weren't ready. At first I was angry but then we got into techstars so I calmed down. Then my 2 associates were fired for no reason. I never really got over that but looked past it because we were going to techstars. My 10% equity for part time product design became 10% equity on a 4 year vesting schedule for full time work and an insulting salary. I was told we needed the extra equity to bring in more technicals but I found out later that my 2 cofounders had given themselves 25% equity each and there wasn't enough equity to bring in more technicals. I'm pretty sure techstars doesn't condone this sort of advice but a techstars "advisor" was having secret meetings with my cofounders where he advised them to take 25% each and to give me 5%. When I found out about that I quit and tried to do another startup with my original associates. Nobody wanted to listen to us because I was known as a quitter and my associates had been badmouthed as lazy or whatever to justify firing them. I had to move away.