I'll tell you what went wrong: everything. Okay, not everything. But a lot went wrong.
Building a company and running a startup is hard, don't get me wrong. Especially when you're trying to move up-market (which we were). But, there were some inexcusable shortcomings, like that one time we showed up to work and they forgot to pay us. Whoops. Or forgot, for months, to charge us for insurance and refused to eat the cost.
Budgets were never given to teams, we had prepaid credit cards with only limited funds at a time. Try paying for tools with that.
CEO/founder had a vision, the issue was that it changed almost every other day. We were constantly scrambling to keep up with his bizarre shifts in direction. Nobody could focus or get any valuable work done. Things you worked long, hard hours on would get tossed out the window because he had a change of heart overnight. The other founders either had no clue what they were doing, never in the office, or refused to work with others.
I don't know if anybody, when I was employed, felt like they were valued (monetarily or otherwise). Leadership was bad, culture was bad, pay was bad, and you never felt like your work went anywhere or contributed to anything meaningful.
