A Story

Hi HN,

I’ve been around HN for the better part of a decade, and really feeling like I could use the collective advice of the community. Using an anon account because of HN contacts irl. If you do recognize my story, I'd ask that you email me privately.

Our company is a distributor of various goods, and at the time  (early 00s), my father was going to 25-30 trade shows a year and selling to local businesses when not on the road. We had one other employee, who was basically at the office to answer the phone. During my middle school Christmas break, after hearing my parents talking about how slow the business was, I asked if I could try putting together an online store.

(The story now goes that the business was very close to shutting down, as it was losing money).

I had no clue what I was doing, but I setup a very simple PHP store (osCommerce!), copying and pasting php over the break, and every night after school, to bulk import our products. Submitted the site to a bunch of directories and worked to get the site indexed by the major search engines.

A month later, we got our first order! I still remember coming home from school and refreshing the admin panel for the millionth time to see ‘Orders: 1’ pop up, and it was for $800 (paid by check no less)! This order was from someone my father met at a trade show, but only 10 days later, we got our first order from someone we had no connection to! For the next few months, we averaged an order every few days.

Not long after, we found a trade show organizer willing to let us send an email to all attendees. I fired up a pirated copy of photoshop, and stitched together some marketing material and copy. We doubled down on our ‘buy online’ message.  It was early days in email marketing (people still opened them), and the response to our email was fantastic.

By late spring, we had sent a few emails to that list, and we were now getting a few orders a day! Our transition to online-first sales was so swift that my father had to check me out of middle school when some customers called and were unable to finish checking out their baskets. He had also started dropping trade shows from his schedule as we continued to build out our online presence.

Over the next four years, my father and I worked closely together (we shared his office) to create some amazing things to run a growing company that faced unique challenges. We were constantly brainstorming on improving our operations through software. It was such an amazing, collaborative environment. If we liked an idea, I’d work on that project next.  I built inventory management systems, scan-based invoicing systems, shipping systems, and iterated on the customer frontend to make our shopping experience effortless (our customers are bulk buyers, so purchasing 100+ SKUs in a session is the norm, and has unique challenges).

I would start the occasional chat about maybe getting paid for all the work I was doing, and my father’s answer was always a variation on the company being mine one day. That there was no sense in him paying me, because the company doing well was good for the me, and the work I did was creating a better company for myself. I’d guess we had this discussion ~5 times during middle and high school. It’s an awkward conversation to have with your father, but he had never lied to me before, and I trusted that he was true to his word.

When I went to college we had grown to ~$1 million/yr in sales. My father and I were always chatting about the company. What could we build next? How could we improve our process through software? The occasional 911 email when there was something so broken the guy we hired to do day-to-day maintenance couldn’t figure it out. Two years into college, we nailed a really big product, and sales jumped to $3 million/yr.

When I graduated and started looking for jobs in software development (my parents saw virtue in working outside our company), It made me view my relationship with the company a bit differently. Yes, I 'involved' with the company, but I really had nothing to show for it. I had never been paid, I had no equity in the company, so much of what I had spent years of my free time building was behind an admin login and I couldn't show off to potential employers. Not to mention I’m absent from any company material. Like some kind of ghost who was never really there. The story of a young kid founding a company translated to "Oh, your parents gave you a job".

I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind -- it was my father after all, he’d never done me wrong, and at his encouragement took a Jr. Dev job for a startup in a major city.

The startup was acquired after two years, and I left the acquirer after a year to launch a startup of my own. During that time, my father and I would talk almost daily about our company, and I’d hear how the software running the company was starting to tear at the seams. Stuff that was designed for a small company was now being used in ways we couldn’t have imagined at the time it was written.

While I was working on my startup, my brother started working for the company as a warehouse manager. This was great news. I always felt a little weird when we would talk business when we all got together and he wasn’t really able to be included in that. Additionally, as our SKU count had increased, the lack of real leadership in our warehouse operations was seriously showing.

After almost two years my startup failed, and as we were winding down the operations, my brother called to tell me the seams were really ripping apart. Our revenue was flat, we were building up inventory, and selling product we didn’t have. When he took over the warehouse, he discovered just how bad the issue was. Software that worked for a few thousand SKUs was having trouble scaling to triple the inventory. We were still profitable, but our margins were collapsing.

I asked my father if I could help get things back on track, and he agreed. At this point, I wasn’t in a position to forego a salary, so when we were discussing salary, to my surprise, he offered me half of what I was making at my post-college startup. When I balked, he said he couldn’t pay me more, because he needed to keep my brother and I ‘on the same level’.

My heart sank.

In another meeting I pressed him on a livable salary. I asked for my Junior Developer salary. It wasn’t about the money, it was my company, and I simply needed to be able to live while I helped right the ship. I told him if anyone understood why our salaries would be different, it would be my brother. He was, after all, the person who called to say they really needed help in the first place. My father’s response was, when he retires, the company would belong to my brother and I, and he just didn’t want to create any animosity over salaries.

My heart sank.

He did finally agree to the salary, and I didn’t want to have another hard conversation. But surely he didn’t mean that the fact that I literally helped found the company didn’t merit any consideration? It’s a family business, I’m not opposed to my brother being a part owner -- but he joined the company after we were already making multiple millions per year and got a comparable salary to his previous job.

Over the next two years, we completely modernized the entire stack, all without undertaking a ‘rewrite’. We were able to wrangle our warehouse management, add audited inventory levels, multi-carrier shipping, digitized supply chain, complete customer frontend redesign, and so much more. Growth was returning. With every release, we were empowering our employees to do more with less effort. Realistically we could double in size without adding more staff.

Later that year, there was a disagreement between my father and I on which direction to take the company. We both had a strong opinion and the discussion was heated. He looked me right in the eyes and said “This is my company, you don’t get to decide what we do and don’t do. Don’t you forget that.”

My heart sank.

I was so rattled by that conversation. Everything came sweeping back. I felt taken advantage of. I had convinced myself that, in the end, everything would work out. But my father just confirmed my worst fear. I had no actual leg to stand on. No leverage. No actual ownership.

That Christmas, as the last “gift” of the night, my parents gave my brother and I a ‘Christmas bonus’ and a note that said ‘equity in the company’. It felt like a slap in the face. it’s hard to explain. On one hand it was great. On the other hand, it’s like they gave a fraction of what was mine, and wanted me to be thankful.

It’s been two years since then. Nothing official has been done with the equity. My father and I had one last ‘big convo’ about the equity, my status in the company, etc. He does agree I was a co-founder, and said he would think about the equity. But nothing has come of it. He said he would announce changes to the employees, and never did. Cynically, I realize that keeping the status quo is to his benefit.

I just really need some help. I’m sorry for the rambling, but I feel completely disillusioned. Between my dad and brother I feel like my voice at the company has been totally lost. My work environment has devolved, Their interactions with me are like I exist only to pound out code for their ‘most important task’ of the day. Recently, my father started insisting he prioritizes all projects, and it just feels like my ability to focus on longer-term growth oriented projects has been drowned out by a micro-managing of my time. I have protested, the company is going to double sales again this year, maintaining our relatively small staff size. In part because of a longer-term project I was able to complete that doubled our YoY retention rate. The sudden change in attitude when we are as successful as we have ever been is baffling.

I want to have a final meeting with my father -- I’d like to correct course. To me, he and I built this company from the ground up (He even acknowledges that). I was unpaid, but was promised future equity (he thinks he may have said that, but generally disputes meaning it). I want to go to him with something actionable that we can agree to, but I don’t even know where to start.

Is it crazy to think that we were 50/50 co-founders of this company? Was I just an unpaid intern? Am I an entitled millennial that just needs to get over it? This feels like it’s eating me alive. I’ve invested a decade of my life building a company I thought I had equity in, only to find out that I have nothing at all, by a person who I trusted 100%.

Any advice is welcome.

If you’d prefer to email, there is an address in my profile.