At the outset of my career I was lucky (in a way) to have the veil ripped forcefully off of my face as to the ugliness inherent in the VC backed tech world.

I was believing I was working on something very important as one of the initial hires in a 10 person standup, with series B funding "on the way any minute now," knew it was a risk but believed strongly in the tech, maybe naively.

Found out later, the CEO had been given a generous buyout offer by a competitor, in the 8 figures, a modest amount but far exceeding our level of debt/investment to that point, would have made several of us including him a decent chunk of change. This guy got it in his head at that point that the offer was insulting, and we should be worth billions, not this 'paltry' sum. I could barely believe it when I heard it way after the fact (I would have quit earlier if I had known). What I understand is the board of investors was not very happy with this and there would be no more funding to come in after that point. Within 6 months of that, I went from this bright eyed person to a person not receiving a paycheck for several months, wiping out my early-grad finances in record time, and a significant amount of debt, all the while they shopped our team around the country desperately looking for a buyer. (they did not find one and had to borrow more money to pay our wages).

Needless to say after that I resolved never ever ever to work at any kind of 'startup' ever again, and my career many years later has finally recovered (though my cynicism has not).