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For the last year, I have worked in a startup. There are five people in the core team: the founder, the CTO, two domain experts, and I. I developed the core technology along with the domain experts. I know the founder from grad school, but nowadays I mainly work with our CTO.
So our team works relatively well, but our CEO has becoming more and more a headache for all of us. He is constantly changing directions without consulting the rest of us, and is very opaque and autocratic about the whole thing. Many of the team members have left or developed serious mental health issues because of him. Recently, he even hired his girlfriend as the sales director (who is totally unqualified), and she is starting to bypass the product manager and directly influence the development process, which as expected, results in absolute chaos.
I have talked with the whole team and the CTO, and we unanimously felt that the product works, and the team is amazing, and the sole problem really IS the founder. We have dedicated lots of efforts into this product, and we want to try to atleaset preserve some of our hard-work. And now we are thinking about going directly to the investors and have him removed, but we are not very optimistic about it.
Has anyone ever been in a similar situation? What would you do if your are in my situation?