If the Shoe Fits: the Wrongest Way to Close a Company
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
In June we learned the right way to close a company and last month we got a lesson in the wrong way to do it.
Right, wrong; what’s left?
How crooked?
Penny Kim is a marketing professional who relocated from Dallas in July to work for WrkRiot (formerly known as 1for.one and apparently also known as JobSonic) for $135,000 a year plus equity and a $10,000 signing bonus for relocation expenses,
It ended with her dismissal in August after she filed a complaint with the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement over failure to properly pay her
If you wonder whether she’s just another disgruntled employee, she’s not.
Not when the CEO gives everyone faked documentation of wage payment.
“Thursday, August 4th was D-Day … That afternoon in the office, Michael emailed each employee a personalized PDF receipt of a Wells Fargo wire transfer with the message: ‘Here is the receipt. It has been calculated for the taxes on your semi-monthly salary and signing bonus. The money is arriving either today or tomorrow. I am sorry about the delay.'”
But the receipts were fake.
Al Brown, former CTO and one of the founders, confirmed much of her account, even the most outrageous accusation: The CEO she dubbed “Michael,” whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as Isaac Choi, gave employees fake receipts for money wire transfers to convince them the company had paid their back wages when in fact it hadn’t.
Not even a good fake, since the photoshopped receipts said 2014.
Even after that two employees lent the company an additional $65K.
All told, Choi burned through $695,000 (his own initial $400,000, Brown’s $230,000 and the borrowed $65,000) in less than a year.
A comment on Hacker News should serve as a bona fide caveat emptor for everyone in the global startup world, not just in Silicon Valley.
“Welcome to the club. It’s pretty much a rite of passage here to spend some time with a psychopath VC, a completely self absorbed CTO with a rich investor dad that fuels his fantasies, or an idiotic CEO with an ego problem, and to pay the price for it (just time if you’re lucky, time+money if you’re not).”
This isn’t a warning not to join, just a note to do so with your eyes open.
There’s a reason it’s called “due diligence” and it’s as much for employees as it is for founders and investors.
Image credit: HikingArtist
