Nobody joins a startup thinking they are about to be exploited. At least, that is not how the story usually starts.
It often starts in a much nicer way. A small office, a founder speaking with energy, a product that is still not finished, a small team, and ideas much bigger than the company’s bank account. You sit with the founder for one or two hours, and at some point you forget that you are discussing a job. You start discussing the future. He says “the project,” and after a while you also start saying “our project.”
I know this feeling very well because I have always liked projects that are not fully built yet. I like entering places where everything is still messy, where the team needs structure, the product needs direction, the numbers need someone to understand them, and there are more problems than people available to solve them. In a big company, you can spend years inside one small box. In a startup, you can start the morning fixing a content problem, spend the afternoon discussing the product, and finish the day trying to understand why sales went down.
That kind of chaos taught me a lot. But it also taught me something I needed years to understand clearly: chaos is a great place to learn, and also a great place to be exploited.
In Morocco, the situation becomes even more strange because we imported almost the full vocabulary of Silicon Valley before importing the conditions that come with it. We speak about ownership, agility, growth, high performance, founder mindset, and moving fast. But when we reach the most practical word in the whole conversation, compensation, we suddenly return to another reality.
The Moroccan market is difficult. The startup is still young. Investment has not arrived yet. The runway must be protected. The budget is limited.
All of this can be understandable, until you notice that the only thing that is not supposed to have limits is what can be asked from you.
A startup may say it is looking for a Content Manager, but what it really wants is someone who understands social media, paid ads, basic design, SEO, video, copywriting, community management, analytics, and maybe customer support when needed. It may say it needs a Marketing Manager, but that person is also expected to manage a team, talk to agencies, follow sales, understand the product, read dashboards, and solve random problems that belong to nobody.
And now that AI tools exist, the situation can become even easier for the company. One person can suddenly be asked to do the work of two or three people because “AI makes everything faster.”
In a well-organised company, if you need five roles, you hire five people, or at least you admit that one person is doing the work of five roles. In some startups, we found a more economic solution: hire one person, give them a nice title, then call the lack of resources “a learning opportunity.”
And the dangerous part is that, in the beginning, you may actually enjoy it.
You are suddenly invited to meetings that your job title would never give you access to in another company. You take decisions bigger than your level of experience. You learn in one month what could take one year somewhere else. This is one of the real advantages of startup life, and I do not want to pretend it is not.
The problem is that the same thing that helps you learn quickly can also make it difficult to see where the opportunity ends and the exploitation begins.
You accept the first small sacrifice because the company is still young. You work late because there is an important launch tomorrow. You open your laptop on Sunday because there is a problem that cannot wait. You answer WhatsApp at midnight because you saw the message anyway, so pretending you did not see it feels strange.
Then something changes slowly.
Every exception you gave voluntarily becomes part of what the company expects from you.
Nobody officially tells you that your working day is now twenty-four hours. It happens in a more elegant way. Your availability becomes normal, and one day your unavailability becomes the thing that needs explanation.
The word “available” also changes meaning. It no longer means available during working hours. It starts to mean always reachable, almost like a server, with one small difference: when a server becomes overloaded, the system shows a warning. When you become overloaded, someone may tell you that you need to be more resilient.
This is where one of the strangest relationships in startup culture begins.
The founder wants you to think like a founder.
At first, that makes sense. A person who understands the full picture is always more useful than someone who waits for instructions. But the problem starts when “founder mindset” stops being a way of thinking and becomes a way of sacrificing.
You are expected to worry about sales like the founder, think about cash flow like the founder, stay late to save a launch like the founder, and treat the loss of a client almost like a personal problem. If the startup needs the weekend, you are expected to understand that startups do not know Saturday and Sunday.
But when the conversation becomes about ownership, the limits suddenly become very clear.
The shares belong to the founders and investors. The final decision belongs to them. If the company becomes ten times more valuable, that value goes to the people who own it.
You may get a good line on LinkedIn.
This is probably one of the biggest contradictions inside startup culture: asking the employee to carry the painful side of the founder experience without necessarily receiving the good side of it.
If a founder works until 3 a.m. to save the company, I understand it. It is their company. If it succeeds, their life may completely change.
If an employee works until 3 a.m. to save the same company, the reward may be a small salary increase at the end of the year, a new title, or a long message in the company WhatsApp group saying how important their contribution was.
Still, we use the same sentence for both:
“We are all in the same boat.”
Not always.
We may be in the same sea, but some people own the boat and others are being paid to row.
The Moroccan reality makes this even more difficult because the global startup conversation often assumes there is some reward for taking the risk: stock options, competitive salaries, a strong job market, and companies competing for talent. Here, sometimes we copy only the part of the model that says people must sacrifice, while forgetting the page that explains what they receive in exchange for that sacrifice.
This is where one sentence appears again and again:
“We need someone who believes in the project.”
Years ago, I heard this sentence differently. I thought it meant the company wanted someone who cared about the work and did not only wait for the salary. I still believe good people should care about what they are building.
But today, I hear another question inside the same sentence: why does my belief in the project always need to appear as a sacrifice from my side?
If I believe in the project and decide to give more, that is fine. But if my belief is expected to become part of my compensation, then give me equity. Let me believe in the cap table too.
If you keep the capital, ownership, and final decisions, while I bring the belief, patience, late nights, and extra mile, that is not partnership.
It is simply a very smart distribution of roles.
Then comes another famous word: family.
Whenever a company tells me, “We are a family,” I start feeling that someone will soon ask me for something that is not written in the contract.
A company can be a very human place. You can meet people there who become real friends, sometimes even closer than some members of your family. But the company itself is not a family. This is not an insult. It is actually healthier for everyone.
A company can let you go when the numbers change. You can leave when the deal is no longer right for you. That is a professional relationship, and it can still be respectful, warm, and human.
The problem with calling the company a family is that boundaries start looking like betrayal. You do not tell your family that something is not in your job description. You do not stop answering your family after 6 p.m. You do not ask your family for a salary increase because your responsibilities doubled.
And suddenly, asking for something normal starts to feel selfish.
But maybe the darkest thing I have seen in this world is that being good at your job can become your punishment.
In an unorganised company, every person who can solve a problem receives more problems as a reward.
You are good at content? Great, take social media too. You are good at social media? Maybe you can also help with ads. You know how to manage people? Perfect, the team is now yours. You understand the business? Join the strategy meetings too.
Every time, you tell yourself this is growth, and sometimes it really is.
Until one day you discover that you have become an entire department walking on two legs.
The company may be very happy with you at that point. They call you a key person, a pillar, maybe even a rock star if the English is strong that week.
But most of these titles do not have a field in the bank transfer.
Even worse, your ability to survive pressure starts becoming a measure of your professional value. Instead of asking why the work requires this amount of pressure every week, the company starts classifying people.
- This person can handle startup life.
- This one cannot.
- This one has startup mindset.
- This one is too corporate.
- This one is hungry.
- This one wants comfort.
And just like that, a problem in the design of the company becomes a problem in the personality of the employee.
If the company constantly needs ten hours of work to complete what should fit into eight, maybe the answer is not more motivation. Maybe you simply need one more person.
But one more person costs money.
Motivation videos on YouTube are free.
When the employee finally becomes tired, the most ironic part begins. The same person who was “impossible to replace” six months ago suddenly starts hearing that they have changed. They are not taking initiative anymore. Their energy is lower. They count their working hours now.
Maybe they “lost the passion.”
Very rarely do we ask the simpler question: what did we do to that passion?
Passion is not an unlimited resource. You can take a lot from it, but if your company depends on always finding someone excited enough to replace missing resources with their personal life, then you did not build a strong culture.
You found cheap energy.
This is why I also started looking at burnout differently.
Sometimes burnout is not an accident inside the company. Sometimes it is part of how the company works.
If the business succeeds only because ten people are permanently doing the work of fifteen, those missing hours do not disappear. Someone pays for them with sleep, stress, relationships, or time that was supposed to belong to their life.
Startup founders love talking about runway. We have twelve months of runway. Eighteen months. Twenty-four months.
But sometimes I wonder about the runway of the people.
How many months can a person continue at that speed before something inside them starts switching off?
You will not see that number in the dashboard.
It is not part of CAC or LTV.
It does not appear in the investor update.
But it is still debt, and one day someone will pay it.
After saying all this, I still do not hate startups. Maybe the opposite is true.
A big part of what I learned professionally came from projects where everything was moving fast and job descriptions were never completely clear. I know the feeling of building something from zero, watching a small team grow, and seeing something that was only an idea become a real organisation.
That is exactly why I do not like seeing the best part of startup culture, the passion for building, being used as a way to get cheap labour.
A startup with limited money is not an evil company. It can simply be honest: this is what we can pay, this is what we expect, this is the risk, and this is what you receive if the risk works.
The person can accept or reject. At least the deal is clear.
But when you want a senior person with five years of experience, able to do four jobs, always available, thinking like a founder, carrying founder-level pressure, and then you offer a junior salary and tell them the difference will be paid in “learning,” this is no longer startup culture.
It is just a very good deal for the person who owns the company.
And that is probably the biggest lesson I took from this world: never confuse loving to build things with giving other people the right to consume you.
If you are a partner, be a real partner.
If you are an employee, make the deal clear.
And when someone tells you to work like the company belongs to you, maybe there is one simple question worth asking:
How much of it actually does?