Ask HN: Reasonable expectations of a senior co-founder?
I joined as the third, youngest, least skilled, and most junior partner. The others I'll call the CEO and CTO. The CEO is very smart and fairly technical, but not familiar with most of the tools I am going to be using, so he can't really mentor me on my day-to-day work. The CTO is an excellent hacker, and using the same tools that I'll use. I came on with the expectation that I'd be learning from the CTO and eventually rise to his level of technical skill.
Our CTO decided to take a working vacation to San Diego, starting Oct. 20, for entirely personal reasons (family + dislike of Chicago weather). When I joined the company, I knew about this, but was led to believe that it would be one month. However, he pushed it out to two months, then a little more, and now it's essentially indefinite.
I'm an ardent opponent of the two weeks' vacation policies set by Big Dumb Companies, and I'd be completely fine with him taking a 1-month working vacation (especially since I knew about it when I took the job) but an indefinite and possibly 3+ month absence during a startup's critical phase just seems excessive to me. He's writing code and putting in the hours, but I don't find email and phone calls to be conducive to mentoring. As far as education goes, there are too many intangibles that work only in person.
I'm the newest and most junior co-founder, so I'm not in a position to tell the CTO what to do, but I am starting to get pissed about the indefinite nature of the absence, and the fact that his reasons are entirely personal. First of all, I think anyone who has as much equity as he has ought to be fully committed to building the business, which means more than writing code. Building the business also entails being there in person, mentoring the new guys, interviewing (when that becomes an issue), et cetera. Second, his working vacation benefits neither me nor, in any way I can see, the company. It's personal and not of an urgent nature. Third, it's frankly discouraging to me that our CTO isn't planning on coming back to Chi on a definite and reasonable date, and it's starting to affect my work. Fourth, I don't feel like either he or I have "earned" the right to take 3-month working vacations; shouldn't we build a successful company first, and take lifestyle liberties after accomplishing that? Fifth, I wouldn't have ended my job search had I known that one of the partners, especially the person who was supposed to be mentoring me, was going to do this.
Am I getting bent out of shape over something I shouldn't, or do I have a legitimate grievance? Also, what should I do? I'm considering bringing the matter up with the CEO on Monday, but I don't really want to "play politics" against the CTO. He's my friend, a co-founder, and a great hacker I hope to learn a lot from. On the other hand, though I might be asking too much, I feel completely shorted on this matter. I'm not learning nearly as fast as I would if the CTO were on-site, and I frankly feel like this point in the company's trajectory is too important for 1/3 of the company to be thousands of miles away.