“Here’s a hoodie and a $50 card,” The CEO’s daughter mocked as she fired me and withheld my $100k bonus. But at the Series B meeting, the lead investor reviewed my termination file. He pushed it back across the table and said to the CEO: “Congratulations, you just lost your company.”

 

Part 1 – The Hoodie

The hoodie hit the conference table with a soft, humiliating thud.

A cheap, gray pullover, still creased from the bulk shipment, folded with the kind of careless neatness you get from an intern in HR. On top of it, a plastic sleeve with a gift card peeking out — corporate logo, eighty-percent markup, fifty-dollar value.

“Here,” she said, pushing it toward me with one manicured finger. “Company swag and a fifty-dollar thank-you card.”

Her tone was light. Practiced. The same voice she used in promo videos when she said things like we care deeply about our team.

My termination letter sat between us. Her signature, the legal team’s digital stamp, the cold, clean phrase:

Your employment with NovaShield is terminated effective immediately “for cause.”

I read that line at least three times. The words blurred at the edges.

“You’re serious,” I said.

Lily Harrington — Chief Brand Officer, eldest daughter of our CEO, and Instagram’s favorite “girlboss” for a brief quarter — smiled in a way that made me think of knives.

“Oh, Alex,” she said. “Let’s not make this weird.”

She had worn white. Not a coincidence. White blazer, white slacks, white sneakers that probably cost more than my rent. The only color on her was the blood-red smear of lipstick and the rose gold watch that flashed every time she flicked her wrist.

At the other end of the conference table, her father sat with his hands folded over a leather notebook. Victor Harrington: founder, CEO, and a man who had never in his life been told “no” without a lawyer present.

He didn’t look at me.

“Is this about the bonus?” I asked. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

The Harringtons exchanged a glance. That little micro-expression said everything about who was really in control now.

“What bonus?” Lily asked.

“The performance bonus,” I said. “The one in my contract. One hundred thousand dollars upon delivery of ShieldOS 3.0 and hitting the Q2 uptime milestones. The milestones we hit, by the way, twelve days early.”

“Ohhh, that,” she said, like I’d reminded her of an old inside joke. “Well, since you’re being terminated for cause, the discretionary bonus is —” she fluttered her hand, “— moot.”

“For cause?” I repeated. “What cause?”

She slid a second document across the table. HR letterhead. Bullets.

• Violation of company communication protocols.
• Failure to respect chain of command.
• Creating a hostile work environment by undermining executive decisions.

The words were vague enough to be meaningless. Or to mean anything, depending on how you wanted to spin it.

“I flagged a security flaw in your new billing integration,” I said slowly. “I refused to ship until it was fixed. That’s… ‘undermining executive decisions’?”

“Your negativity was impacting the team,” she said. “We can’t have that energy in a scaling organization.”

The HVAC hummed overhead, too cold. Outside the glass wall of the conference room, I could see our open-plan office — rows of standing desks, the barista bar Lily had forced into the corner, the neon sign that said WE ARE OUR CODE.

I’d put that sign up myself.

“Victor?” I asked, turning to him. “You’re really signing off on this?”

He flinched like I’d pulled him out of a daydream. Cleared his throat.

“Alex,” he said, voice tight. “This isn’t personal. We’re moving into a different phase. Different needs.”

I let out a short laugh. “Different from having a working product?”

Lily’s eyes flashed.

“You’re a brilliant engineer,” she said. “Nobody’s saying you’re not. But you’re not… adaptable. You don’t play well with brand direction.”

“Brand direction,” I repeated. “You mean lying to our users about what our software actually does?”

The letter called me insubordinate. The truth was simpler: I had said “no” in a room where Lily needed everyone to say “yes.”

She gave me one last bright, empty smile.

“Anyway,” she said, standing. “You’ll need to turn in your badge and your laptop. HR will send you details about COBRA and all that boring stuff. This is your —” she tapped the hoodie, “— little goodbye gift. Most companies don’t even do that anymore. So.”

Her shrug said: you’re welcome.

My chest felt hollow. I thought about the first night in the garage, before there was a logo, before there was funding, when it was just me and Victor and two overcaffeinated interns.

Back then, NovaShield was nothing but code and an impossible idea: real-time anomaly detection for SMBs that couldn’t afford a full SOC team. I’d sketched the first architecture on an old whiteboard. I’d stayed up three days straight writing the first prototype.

Lily hadn’t been there then. She’d showed up months later, fresh from a failed fashion startup, rebranded as a “visionary storyteller.” Her father made her Chief Brand Officer. We all pretended that wasn’t a terrible joke.

That joke now owned my employment status.

“Can I at least say goodbye to my team?” I asked.

Victor winced. Lily shook her head.

“We’ll communicate it,” she said. “We’re going to frame it as you pursuing other opportunities. You’re welcome.”

She kept saying you’re welcome like she was handing out party favors.

I stared at the hoodie.

It was generic, no logo. I flipped the tag: Gildan. The cheapest of the cheap.

I thought of the bonus I’d been counting on. One hundred thousand dollars. Enough to finally pay off my student loans. To move my mom into a place where the ceiling didn’t leak. To breathe.

“Your last paycheck will be deposited Friday,” Lily said. “Minus the equipment fee. Your laptop had… unauthorized software on it.”

“Unauthorized software,” I said. “You mean my own IDE?”

“Company policy,” she chirped.

I took a breath that felt like swallowing glass.

“Right,” I said. “Well. This has been enlightening.”

I stood. I left the hoodie on the table.

“Don’t forget your gifts,” Lily called after me. “You’ll want something to remember us by.”

I paused, turned back, picked up the hoodie and the gift card with two fingers.

“Oh, I’ll remember you,” I said.

Her smile tightened at the edges.

In the elevator down, my hands shook for the first time. I clutched the hoodie like a lifeline and stared at my distorted reflection in the stainless steel.

Twenty-eight floors later, I walked past the reception desk, dropped my badge in the tray, and stepped out into the sun with a cheap sweatshirt under my arm and a hollow where my future used to be.

It wasn’t until I got home — dropped onto my secondhand couch, hoodie tossed onto the coffee table — that it hit me:

My entire net worth had just changed because a CEO’s daughter didn’t like being told she was wrong.

And unless I did something about it, she had just walked off with my product, my bonus, and my name.

 

Part 2 – Paper Cuts

Shock is loud. Rage is louder.

The first forty-eight hours were a blur of both.

I ignored the “so sorry to hear” texts trickling in from coworkers, watched my Slack account go dark in real time, and did not open the email from HR titled Exit Checklist.

I stared at the ceiling and tried to remember how to breathe.

On the third morning, survival instincts finally cut through the static.

I am an engineer. When something breaks, I debug it.

So I made coffee, dragged my laptop to the kitchen table, and opened a different kind of codebase: my history with NovaShield.

First stop: email. I downloaded everything. Every thread, every forwarded memo, every “great work” from Victor that mentioned specific features.

Then the repos. They’d cut my access, but I’d been thorough over the years — offline backups, dated commit archives for my own reference. I pulled those up. Commit messages, timestamps, branches.

Next: Google Drive. Old design docs, technical specs I’d written, screenshots of whiteboards from the garage days when we didn’t have a scanner.

Finally, a dusty corner of my Documents folder: Legal.

I opened the founding paperwork.

Articles of incorporation. Cap table. Founder agreements. An old SAFE note template I’d pulled from Y Combinator’s website.

And there it was.

Founder IP Contribution Agreement – Alexander Cole.

My name. Not “employee.” Not “consultant.”

Founder.

I’d almost forgotten how it had happened. We’d been two idiots in a garage with a dream and no money. Victor had put together some boilerplate paperwork with a cheap startup lawyer so we could open a bank account and not get sued into oblivion by early testers.

“Here,” he’d said back then, sliding the document across a card table. “This is just to formalize ownership. You handle all the tech, I handle all the business. Fifty-fifty on the code, company owns everything.”

I’d skimmed it. We were broke. I was twenty-six and naïve.

But I’d still read the important parts — the ones about inventorship and rights.

Now, rereading in my quiet kitchen two years later, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before.

Section 3(c):

“Notwithstanding the foregoing, Contributor retains a twenty percent (20%) undilutable interest in the Core Detection Engine (as defined in Exhibit A) in perpetuity, unless such interest is expressly assigned in writing with Contributor’s consent.”

Undilutable interest.

Perpetuity.

I scrolled to Exhibit A.

“Core Detection Engine” was defined exactly as the architecture I’d designed in those first months. The same engine that still sat at the center of NovaShield, rebranded as “NovaCore” in glossy decks.

My pulse sped up.

They had never amended this.

There were later documents — stock option grants, a revised cap table when Series A came in, my promotion from “Lead Engineer” to “VP Engineering” with an embarrassingly small salary bump — but nobody had ever prepared a separate assignment extinguishing that 20% interest.

When Series A’s lawyers came in, they’d just filed whatever paperwork Victor gave them, assuming, as everyone does, that founders clean up their own mess.

They’d missed it.

So had I. Because I trusted Victor. Because we were building something and there was always another fire to fight.

I stared at the clause until the words blurred.

Then I called someone I hadn’t spoken to in years.

“Alex?” the voice on the other end said, rough with sleep. “It’s nine a.m. on a Saturday. You okay?”

“Hey, Maya,” I said. “How do you feel about suing my old company into the ground?”

I’d met Maya Patel at Berkeley. She’d skipped software engineering and gone straight into law. Last I’d heard, she was at some boutique firm in the city that specialized in startup disputes.

“Bring me coffee,” she said. “And your paperwork.”

Two hours later, I sat in a glass-walled conference room downtown, my hoodie folded in my lap, my laptop open in front of us.

Maya flipped through the Founder IP agreement, her brow furrowing.

“Jesus,” she muttered. “They really signed this?”

“They were desperate,” I said. “We both were.”

She pointed to Section 3(c).

“This,” she said, “is a loaded gun.”

“You’re the lawyer,” I said. “Tell me what it means.”

“It means,” she said slowly, “that unless there’s another document somewhere assigning your interest back to the company, you own twenty percent of the core tech in that product. Not stock. Not options. Intellectual property.”

“But they fired me,” I said. “’For cause.’”

“That affects your employment,” she said. “Maybe your unvested options, depending on your equity plan. It doesn’t magic this clause away. The company can own the implementation. But the underlying IP… that’s at least arguable.”

I frowned. “Arguable?”

“This is law, Alex, not algebra,” she said dryly. “Nothing is one-plus-one-equals-two. But if I were them, and I was about to raise a fat Series B, I would not want this clause sitting in a data room unaddressed.”

Series B.

Lily had been crowing about it for weeks before she fired me.

“We’ve got Titan Ventures in the lead,” she’d told the whole company at all-hands, standing under our neon sign. “This is going to put us on the map. Think bigger salaries, better benefits, real brand presence.”

The irony hurt.

“So what do I do?” I asked.

“First,” she said, “we create an entity.”

“A company?” I asked.

“A holding company,” she said. “We assign your interest in the IP to that entity so it’s clean and separate from you personally. Then, we record that assignment. Quietly. Then we watch.”

“Watch what?”

“Watch them walk into due diligence with Titan,” she said. “And pray Titan’s lawyers aren’t idiots.”

I swallowed.

“And if they are?”

“Then we decide how loud you want to be,” she replied. “There are… leverage options.”

She tapped the hoodie with her pen.

“Tell me about this,” she said.

“That’s their idea of severance,” I said. “Plus a fifty-dollar gift card. They also withheld my hundred-thousand-dollar bonus.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Performance bonus? In writing?”

“Yes,” I said. “In my employment contract. Conditioned on shipping 3.0 and hitting uptime. We did both.”

“Send me that,” she said. “We’ll add wrongful withholding to the mix.”

She sat back, considering.

“Alex, I need you to be honest with me,” she said. “What do you want out of this? Money? Revenge? To watch their office burn down on live TV?”

I thought of Lily’s smile. Victor’s silence. The way my name had slowly disappeared from our origin story slides over the last year.

I thought of the kid on my team who’d sent me a frantic text after I got home: “They told us you left to ‘seek new opportunities.’ What the hell is going on???”

I thought of my mother, still working double shifts at the clinic.

“I want what’s mine,” I said. “My bonus. Recognition. Maybe… enough money to not have to worry about rent for a while. I don’t care if they survive. I don’t care if they don’t. But I’m not going to let them erase me.”

Maya’s eyes softened.

“Good,” she said. “That’s a rational answer. Rational anger makes better plaintiffs.”

We spent the afternoon drafting.

Assignment of IP from “Alexander Cole” to “Hooded Architect LLC” — Maya’s idea, of course, once she heard about the hoodie.

“Too on the nose?” I asked.

“You’ve earned it,” she said.

We signed, notarized, filed.

As the sun set, she leaned back in her chair and cracked her knuckles.

“Now,” she said, “we wait for Titan Ventures’ due diligence team to earn their retainers.”

“Do you think they’ll notice?” I asked.

“Titan?” she said. “They have an entire floor of associates who do nothing but read Delaware filings and look for time bombs.”

She smiled, slow and sharp.

“And congratulations, Alex,” she added. “You might’ve just become one.”

 

Part 3 – Due Diligence

Two months later, I sat in a café across from Titan Ventures’ downtown office, hoodie folded beside my laptop, watching the building’s revolving doors.

Maya said I didn’t need to be there. “They’ll call when they call,” she’d said. “Go live your life.”

But I couldn’t.

I watched the NovaShield team arrive instead.

First came Victor, in the navy blazer I’d seen him wear at every important meeting. Then Lily, in a white pantsuit and expensive sunglasses, laughing at something on her phone as if she were heading into a photo shoot instead of a financial autopsy.

Behind them, the new VP of Product I barely knew, clutching a laptop like a shield.

I took a sip of my coffee and tried to ignore the knot in my stomach.

“Stop torturing yourself,” Maya texted when I sent her a photo. “You’re not a ghost. You’re gravity.”

Inside, on the thirty-fourth floor, Victor was doing his Founder Dance.

I could picture it perfectly. I’d seen it a hundred times.

“NovaShield is redefining security for the mid-market,” he’d be saying, pacing in front of a big screen. “We built our core detection engine from first principles to democratize threat hunting.”

He’d gesture at slides I’d made months ago, now stripped of my name, my comments, my fingerprints.

Lily would sit poised at the end of the table, ready to chime in with market-size numbers and brand vision when required.

Across from them, Titan’s partners would sit in tailored suits, legal pads open, faces inscrutable. At the head of the table: Raj Mehta, co-founder of Titan, a man whose blog posts about founder responsibility had gone viral more than once.

Raj was known for two things: backing winners early and walking away at the slightest whiff of bullshit.

He was also, according to Maya, a “documentation hawk.”

“You may actually like him,” she’d said.

I doubted that. I didn’t like anyone today.

Back inside, the pitch rolled on.

When the main deck ended, the Q&A began.

“Let’s talk about your tech,” Raj said, flipping through his copy of the diligence packet. “I see you’ve got patents pending on NovaCore?”

“Yes,” Victor said. “Our secret sauce. Totally proprietary.”

“Who are the inventors listed?” Raj asked.

“Uh, our current team,” Victor said. “Our CTO, engineering leadership…”

Raj paged through the documents.

“Hmm,” he said. “And this?” He held up a slimmer folder from the stack: Employee Termination – Alexander Cole.

Lily’s smile didn’t even flicker.

“Standard stuff,” she said. “Old engineer. Not a culture fit. We parted ways amicably.”

“For cause,” Raj noted, reading. “Interesting.”

He flipped another page in the larger binder. A photocopy of the incorporation docs, necessary for any serious Series B.

His finger paused.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Victor squinted. “What?”

“This clause,” Raj said. “Founders IP Contribution Agreement. Section 3(c). ‘Contributor retains twenty percent undilutable interest in Core Detection Engine in perpetuity unless expressly assigned in writing with Contributor’s consent.’”

He looked up.

“Who’s ‘Contributor’?”

Victor swallowed. “That’s… old paperwork. Early days. It’s been superseded by later agreements.”

“Has it?” Raj asked mildly. “I don’t see an assignment from Mr. Cole back to NovaShield here. Do you?”

Lily smoothed her hair.

“I’m sure it’s in the additional documents,” she said. “Our lawyers probably have it. Old stuff. Doesn’t really matter anymore.”

Raj’s gaze didn’t leave Victor.

“You fired this engineer two months ago,” he said. “For cause?”

“There were behavioral issues,” Lily said quickly. “Negativity. Noncompliance with brand direction.”

Brand direction.

Raj raised an eyebrow.

“And this same engineer,” he continued, “is the only one named as ‘Contributor’ in this IP agreement covering your core detection engine.”

“It’s just form language,” Lily said. “The company owns everything he built. That’s, like, how this works.”

“Sometimes,” Raj said. “Sometimes not.”

He reached into his folder and pulled out another document.

Maya had promised me this was where the fun started.

“This,” Raj said, sliding the paper toward them, “is a recorded assignment of that twenty percent interest from ‘Alexander Cole’ to ‘Hooded Architect LLC.’ Filed in Delaware last month.”

Lily blinked. “What is that?”

“An entity,” Raj said. “Which now holds a documented claim to twenty percent of your core IP. An entity that is not on your cap table. An entity that has not signed any of the waivers in this packet.”

He let the words sink in.

“Mr. Harrington,” he said, turning fully to Victor now, “who owns your core technology?”

“We do,” Victor said quickly. “We built it. We paid salaries. That clause is a… relic.”

“Delaware courts love relics,” Raj said dryly. “Especially signed ones.”

He pushed the termination file back across the table with two fingers. The motion was slow, deliberate, almost gentle.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You just lost your company.”

The room went deathly quiet.

“Now hold on,” Lily said, laughing too loudly. “You can’t possibly—”

“NovaShield’s deck represents to us,” Raj cut in, voice calm, “that you own, outright, all IP associated with NovaCore. That there are no encumbrances. That there are no outstanding founder rights issues. That statement,” he tapped the file, “is currently untrue.”

“It’s a technicality,” Victor said. “We can clean it up.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can,” Raj said. “If Mr. Cole is in a generous mood. But until you do, Titan is not wiring eight figures into a company that doesn’t clearly own its secret sauce.”

He closed the binder with a soft thump.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “You’re going to talk to your lawyers. You’re going to talk to Mr. Cole. You’re going to fix your cap table and your chain of title. If, in six months, you’ve done that and the market hasn’t moved on, we might revisit this conversation.”

He stood.

“Or,” he added, “we might just back whatever Mr. Cole does next.”

Lily’s face went pale.

“You can’t do that,” she said. “He’s… he’s just an engineer. He doesn’t know how to run a company.”

Raj smiled faintly.

“I backed an ‘engineer who didn’t know how to run a company’ twenty years ago,” he said. “He knows now. His name is on the side of two skyscrapers and a foundation. We like learning curves.”

He tucked the folder under his arm.

“For what it’s worth,” he added, “none of this would matter if you’d treated him decently. People rarely weaponize paperwork when they’re not provoked.”

He nodded once, an almost respectful gesture.

Then he left.

Outside, at the café, my phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

I stared at it for a heartbeat. Answered.

“Alex Cole,” I said.

“Mr. Cole,” a smooth voice said. “This is Raj Mehta from Titan Ventures. Do you have a few minutes?”

I looked through the glass at the thirty-fourth floor, imagined the look on Lily’s face.

The hoodie on the chair next to me felt suddenly heavier.

“I might,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I just sat through a very interesting meeting,” he said. “It appears you and I have been reading the same Delaware filings.”

I let out a slow breath.

“I have good lawyers,” I said.

“Clearly,” he said. “Titan is… disinclined to invest in companies with messy IP. However, we are very interested in products with strong core technology. And in the people who built them.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“What if,” Raj said, “instead of begging the Harringtons to do the right thing, we funded you?”

I blinked. “Funded… me?”

“To build a clean version of what you actually invented,” he said. “Under your control. With grown-up governance. We’d need to talk through non-competes, of course, and the exact scope of your original IP. But… yes. You.”

My heart pounded.

“I’m still under their NDA,” I said automatically.

“We’re not asking you to steal,” he said. “We’re asking you to rebuild. On your own terms this time. Sometimes the easiest way to correct a bad story is to write a better one.”

I thought of Lily’s smirk. The hoodies. The withheld bonus.

I thought of my architecture diagrams. Of the little tweaks I’d always wanted to try but couldn’t because “brand” needed something else.

I thought of the 20% clause in my folder.

“What about my… leverage?” I asked. “With Hooded Architect LLC. With them.”

“Up to you,” he said. “You can sell them a license. You can demand a buyout. Or you can let them twist in the wind while you build something they wish they had treated better.”

He paused.

“Here’s what I can promise you,” he said. “If we back you, we will not let anyone hand you a hoodie in a conference room and pretend it’s compensation. You’ll have a real seat at the table. With paper to match.”

I looked at the hoodie. The Gildan tag. The fifty-dollar gift card, still in its sleeve.

“How soon can we meet?” I asked.

“Tonight,” he said. “Our office. Bring your lawyer.”

I hung up.

For a long moment, I just sat there, hand still on the phone, heartbeat loud in my ears.

Then I picked up the hoodie, stuffed it into my backpack, and texted Maya.

“You free at seven?” I wrote. “Titan wants to talk. Oh — and you were right. Their lawyers aren’t idiots.”

Her reply came back instantly.

“On my way,” she wrote. “Wear something scarier than that hoodie.”

 

Part 4 – Rewrites

Six months later, I stood in a different conference room.

New building. New glass walls. New neon sign: HOODED LABS, rendered in clean white letters above a stylized icon of a hoodie with a code bracket stitched into the chest.

Maya said it was “satisfying.” I had insisted on subtlety.

We compromised.

Outside, the city glowed. Inside, my team argued about hash functions.

“Look, we can’t just swap in SHA-3 and hope nothing breaks,” Priya was saying. She was my first engineering hire, a woman I’d mentored at NovaShield who’d walked out a week after I was fired. “We want speed, not just theoretical security.”

“That’s why we’re doing a hybrid,” Marco replied, jabbing at his laptop. “SRAM-based PUF plus keyed Blake2. We talked about this.”

“And I told you, your test harness is lying to you,” she shot back.

Same chaos. Different energy.

This time, nobody was erasing my name from the whiteboard.

Titan had come through.

The term sheet we signed was lean and clean: five million in seed funding in exchange for 20% equity, standard founder vesting for me, and, at my insisting, ironclad clauses about IP attribution.

No “form language.” No “we’ll fix it later.”

Every invention we filed would list real contributors. Every press release would be vetted for accuracy by someone who actually cared about the truth.

We named the company Hooded Labs in honor of the sweatshirt that had started it all. Our product: a next-generation detection platform designed for the same mid-market customers NovaShield had abandoned when they pivoted toward flashy enterprise deals.

I’d spent weeks with Titan’s legal team carefully mapping what parts of my original design counted as “general knowledge” and what, specifically, had been NovaShield work product. We danced around NDAs like a minefield. We erred on the side of caution.

Turned out, when you build something once, you can build something better the second time.

Hooded’s engine was lighter, faster, cleaner. Years of experience had honed my instincts. Priya’s input sharpened it further. We didn’t copy code; we reimagined architecture. We’d ship an MVP in months that would have taken me a year in the old place.

As for NovaShield…

They had taken the deal.

When Titan pulled out of the Series B, smaller funds circled but balked at the IP mess. NovaShield’s board got nervous. Cash burn suddenly mattered in a way it hadn’t when they thought ten million more would land by the end of the quarter.

Lily’s first move had been predictable: she tried to buy Hooded Architect LLC’s interest quietly.

Her lawyer sent Maya a six-line email:

Our client is prepared to offer $250,000 in exchange for full assignment of Mr. Cole’s IP interest and a mutual non-disparagement agreement.

Maya had grinned when she showed it to me.

“Cute,” she said. “They still think this is a misunderstanding.”

We countered with something more realistic.

“Four million for the assignment,” Maya wrote. “Plus payment of Mr. Cole’s wrongfully withheld $100,000 performance bonus, plus correction of the founding story in all public-facing materials. And we’re not signing your gag order.”

They balked.

Then their board balked at their balking.

Two weeks later, four-point-two million dollars hit Hooded Architect LLC’s account.

A hundred thousand of that came straight to me, labelled “Performance Bonus — Settlement.” I printed the remittance slip and pinned it above my desk.

The rest went to lawyers, taxes, and seed money for a nonprofit Maya and I started together: Founders First, an org dedicated to teaching technical founders how not to get screwed.

We held workshops. We wrote template agreements. We published guides with blunt titles like READ THE CLAUSE EVEN IF YOU’RE TIRED.

The thing that surprised me was how many people showed up.

They weren’t all engineers. Designers. Data scientists. Product managers whose ideas had been repackaged under someone else’s name.

“I saw your story on that podcast,” one woman told me after a session. “The hoodie? The investor? I thought I was the only one.”

“You’re not,” I said. “You’re really, really not.”

NovaShield limped along.

They eventually raised a smaller, down-round Series B from a fund willing to stomach risk in exchange for a big slice of control. The brand took a hit. The engineers kept the lights on while Lily filmed tearful videos about “toxic people” who “tried to sabotage her dream.”

Victor retired — early, “to spend more time with family” — and took a backseat advisory role. Word around the ecosystem was that he’d wanted to fight me; the board had told him to take the deal and go.

We never spoke again.

Lily never apologized.

She posted a photo once, at a conference, standing in front of a slide that read FAIL FORWARD in giant letters.

Her caption: “Sometimes people betray you. Sometimes they’re just jealous. Either way, you learn and glow up.”

The comments were full of heart emojis.

I scrolled past and didn’t bother to roll my eyes.

I had my own conference panel to prep for.

“Alex?” Priya’s voice called from across the room. “You’re zoning out on us. You gonna weigh in on this or just stare at your neon sign dramatically?”

I smiled.

“Sorry,” I said. “Hash function war, right?”

“War won,” Marco said. “I convinced her.”

“Temporarily,” Priya muttered.

I grabbed a marker and walked over to the whiteboard.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about what happens when a hash collision occurs mid-stream. We need a graceful degradation plan that doesn’t explode our alert queue.”

We fell into the problem like we always did.

This time, though, when we reached a solution, there was no one waiting at the end of the table with a PR script and a cheap hoodie.

There was just us. The people doing the work. The ones whose names would actually go on the patents, the commits, the story.

Years later, when Hooded Labs closed its own Series B — clean, solid, led by Titan — Raj sat at the head of the table and grinned at me as he slid an updated cap table across the wood.

“You own this one,” he said. “On paper and in reality.”

I glanced down. My name, clear and uncontested, sat at the top of the founder list.

“Feels better than a gift card,” I said.

He laughed.

“Least we could do,” he replied. “You did the hard part.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Learning that the hoodie was a symptom,” he said. “Not the disease.”

 

Part 5 – Future Tense

Five years after Lily slid that hoodie across the table, it sat behind glass.

On a wall in a small, strange museum that should not have needed to exist.

The Startup Archive lived on the ground floor of a converted warehouse, all exposed brick and polished concrete. Venture funds and tech companies donated artifacts to it the way people donate heirlooms to historical societies.

Early prototypes. Hand-drawn wireframes. The first laptop a now-massive CEO had coded on, complete with coffee stains.

And, in one corner, mounted on a simple dowel: a gray Gildan hoodie with a printed card beneath it.

Exhibit 27: “The Severance Hoodie”

Donated by: Alexander Cole
Circa: Year 3 of NovaShield
Description: Presented in lieu of contractual bonus to a founding engineer at the time of his termination. Subsequently became a symbol of IP power imbalance in early-stage startups.

Further reading: “Paper Over People: Why Documentation Matters” – talk by A. Cole at Founders First Conference 2027.

Sometimes, when I had a free afternoon, I’d wander in and stand at the back, watching people read the plaque.

They laughed at first.

“How petty,” one person would say. “Who fires someone with a hoodie? That’s so on-brand.”

But then they’d read the next line on the wall — a brief summary of the clause in the founder agreement, the Series B blow-up, the four-point-two-million-dollar assignment — and their faces would change.

Someone always whispered it out loud.

“‘Congratulations, you just lost your company,’” they’d read. “Damn.”

The museum was part education, part warning. We’d built it with Founders First funds, stocked it with both cautionary tales and success stories.

“This industry chews people up,” Maya had said at the opening. “We figured it should at least keep receipts.”

Outside, Hooded Labs had grown from six people to sixty. Our product now protected thousands of small and mid-sized businesses, many of them run by people who’d never heard of NovaShield.

The work was never glamorous. Security never is. When we did our job right, nothing spectacular happened.

Which was exactly the point.

At one company, a breached credential attempt triggered our engine on a Tuesday at 3:17 a.m. We blocked it. The client never knew how close they’d come to catastrophe. They just knew their payroll ran on time. That was enough.

We built a culture that remembered.

We remembered to put designers’ names on slides.

We remembered to list junior engineers as co-authors on patents.

We remembered to send real severance when someone left, with respect.

Whenever a new hire asked about the name Hooded Labs, I’d tell them the story. Not in a bitter way. In a matter-of-fact way.

“This is why we read contracts,” I’d say. “This is why we treat people like partners, not props. This is why I will ask you to initial every line in your offer letter, even if it annoys you. Because the paper can hurt you. Or it can protect you. Depends on how honest we are when we write it.”

One day, I got an email from an address I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade.

Subject: Coffee?

Sender: [email protected]

I stared at it for a full minute.

Hi Alex,

It’s been a long time. I saw an interview you did on “Code & Capital” and… it made me think. I know I have no right to ask, but I’d like to apologize in person. No agenda. Just coffee.

If you’re open to it.

– Lily

I forwarded it to Maya.

“She getting sued again?” Maya wrote back.

“Apparently not,” I replied. “Says she wants to apologize.”

“Do you want to hear it?” she asked.

I thought about it.

I thought about the day in the conference room. The hoodie. The gift card.

I thought about the young woman I’d been — tired, trusting, blind to the knives.

I thought about the woman I was now — tired in a different way, trusting more carefully, knives replaced with contracts.

“I don’t need it,” I typed back. “But maybe she does.”

We met at a neutral coffee shop.

She was older. So was I. Her hair was shorter. Her clothes were less loud. She wore minimal makeup, a cardigan, jeans. She could’ve been any thirty-something startup veteran trying to look normal.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

We stood there awkwardly until I stuck out my hand.

She took it.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she blurted, sitting down. “Apologize, I mean. I’m terrible at it.”

“You did okay in the email,” I said.

She laughed, shaky.

“Look,” she said, “I was… awful to you. I know that now. At the time I thought… I thought I was protecting my vision. I thought ‘founder’ meant I could do whatever I wanted. I thought contracts were just… background noise.”

“You and half the industry,” I said.

“I told myself you were just bitter,” she continued. “That you were trying to sabotage us. That you were… jealous. Then I watched Titan walk away. I watched investors stop taking my calls. I watched people leave. For a long time, I still blamed you. It was easier.”

She picked at the edge of her cup.

“Then I did some therapy,” she said. “And some reading. And some listening. And I realized… you didn’t do anything to me. I did it to myself. You just… refused to go quietly.”

“That’s a generous interpretation,” I said.

She met my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For the hoodie. For the bonus. For erasing you. For all of it.”

The apology hung there between us.

“Thank you,” I said.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“So what are you up to now?” I asked.

She smiled faintly.

“Trying to build things the right way,” she said. “Smaller. No more C-suite titles I didn’t earn. I go to every Founders First webinar now, by the way.”

I laughed.

“You do not,” I said.

“I do,” she insisted. “I use a burner account so you don’t see my name. Your ‘READ THE CLAUSE’ talk scared the hell out of me.”

“Good,” I said. “It’s supposed to.”

We talked for half an hour.

We did not become friends. That’s not how this works. Some bridges stay burned, even if you plant flowers on the ashes.

But we left the table with something resembling closure.

After she left, I sat with my empty cup and watched people hustle past the café window.

Young founders. Veteran investors. Engineers with stickers on their laptops. Designers with sketchbooks under their arms.

All of them building something.

All of them trusting, to some degree, that the work they did would be honored.

I pulled out my phone and opened a draft of a talk I’d been working on for the next Founders First conference.

Title: “The Hoodie, The Clause, and the Quiet Power of Saying No.”

I added a new line at the end:

Sometimes the justice you get isn’t the justice you fantasized about.

It’s not the CEO in handcuffs. It’s not the daughter begging you for mercy. It’s not a viral tweet with a million likes.

It’s sitting in a chair in a company you own, signing a contract that protects the people who trust you.

It’s walking into a museum and seeing your cheap severance hoodie behind glass, knowing no one will ever wear that kind of insult again without thinking twice.

It’s a lead investor pushing a termination file back across a table and reminding the world that paper, in the end, remembers.

I saved the draft.

On my way out of the café, I passed a kid in a NovaShield T-shirt, laptop open, headphones on. The logo had been updated, but the name was the same.

They were still out there. Still shipping builds. Still patching bugs. Still trying.

I didn’t feel anger.

I felt… distance.

I went back to the office.

My office.

Where my name was on the door, on the paper, on the code, and, most importantly, on the story — not because I shouted the loudest, but because I’d learned, the hard way, to put it there.

When I walked in, Priya waved a folder at me.

“Sign this?” she asked. “It’s the contributor list for the new anomaly module. I put everyone’s names on it, including the intern’s.”

I took the pen.

“Good,” I said.

Then I signed.

Not as a prop in someone else’s narrative.

As the person who had finally, irrevocably, learned that when someone slides a hoodie and a gift card across the table and calls it goodbye, the best revenge isn’t shouting.

It’s making sure that, next time, the person sitting in my chair has a contract that would make that impossible.

And then going back to work.

THE END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.