8 years ago I went through exactly this situation.
I was 50/50 shareholder, voting rights and co-director in a bootstrapped startup with no shareholder agreement. I worked as the CTO building the product for 4 years and hired a team of 4 other developers. My co-founder hired a full time salesperson who eventually left when he couldn't make quota. I was 21 when we started the business, he was 31, and over those 4 years I just grew up to realise he wasn't a good CEO.
After multiple failed attempts to raise money I eventually called one of the investors to ask for honest feedback why he didn't invest, he told me the vast majority of his failed deals happen when co-founders fall out and predicted that would happen with us too. I decided 3 months after that email to leave the business.
I started a new company with a similar product but focussed on large/enterprise in that market, while the previous company was focussed more on small clients. I kept my shareholding but resigned as a director. The co-founder went nuclear and decided to dilute me out of the business by issuing new shares and buying them. If I had bought them I would have just been giving him the money which he'd just pay himself as a bonus and then repeat, so I just had to watch my shareholding go down to 25%. All legal avenues I went down just confirmed that the cost of litigation would cost more than whatever I'd get out of it.
The year before i left my Grandad died and left me $15k and at the time I decided to forego my salary for 8 months to help the company's cash flow situation. So I eventually offered a settlement where I would sell out of the company for $15k and be done with it.
Forward to now, my new company, still bootstrapped, is over $10M ARR and profitable with 113 employees growing at 60% a year. I have over 51% of the shareholding and over 60% of voting shares. I still write code every day and behave more of an engineer now than I ever did in the previous company.
My advice to you is to take the money and leave, start something new and just start building. You have already realised the biggest value of that company; lessons about what to look for in a future co-founder, how to run a company and build a product. Leave everything else behind, move on and I promise you'll look back at this moment in 4 years time as being the best decision you ever made.
My biggest issue with all of the frameworks is their lack of maturity. If you're working on a large platform with a team of people, you're going to want database migrations, localisation/i18n, asset management, proper testing framework, continuous integration and general proof of scale.
Meteor.js seems great but is still a bit of a gimmick in my eyes. But If I'm pressed to pick one, I have to say I'm much more interested to see what happens with Go and web frameworks like martini.
Yea we get stuff wrong too. That was a massive balls up, but well before the time of the GDS team.
Also note that the NHS system was about building a database for every NHS health record across the country; prescription notices, medial history, etc. etc.
I'm not sure it'll even be legal now. HealthCare.gov isn't going nearly as far as that.
The government contractors should of just built healthcare.gov as a data service and asked people like these guys to build an intuitive front-end for it. Then if people don't like the interface, they can do something about it :) This may also help to dissipate the traffic load and present the same data in more relevant ways to different types people. The idea of building apps as single, monolithic system is out-dated.
Even though I'm a Brit, some governments are making moves to modernise and open up their data for others to play with, over here we've got a great government-funded team working on exactly that (called the GDS). (http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/)
Frankly I think this is a massively expensive and missed opportunity for the US Government's digital service team.
I don't understand the selling point here, maybe someone can explain to me why:
1) I'll buy a board that's more expensive than all of it's competitors.
2) has a website that's impossible to understand any detail, it's all sales chat.
3) Has a tiny processor and even less RAM.
4) Very underwhelming specs all round, i'm also not that bothered about x86 (should I be?)
As far as I can tell, Intel has turned up late to the party with a cheap bottle of wine. I don't understand the unique selling point here at all, maybe someone can elaborate?
However, if intel's chip was super power efficient, and the board had a built-in li-ion battery that could power the whole thing for a month between recharges, now that would be interesting.
I was 50/50 shareholder, voting rights and co-director in a bootstrapped startup with no shareholder agreement. I worked as the CTO building the product for 4 years and hired a team of 4 other developers. My co-founder hired a full time salesperson who eventually left when he couldn't make quota. I was 21 when we started the business, he was 31, and over those 4 years I just grew up to realise he wasn't a good CEO.
After multiple failed attempts to raise money I eventually called one of the investors to ask for honest feedback why he didn't invest, he told me the vast majority of his failed deals happen when co-founders fall out and predicted that would happen with us too. I decided 3 months after that email to leave the business.
I started a new company with a similar product but focussed on large/enterprise in that market, while the previous company was focussed more on small clients. I kept my shareholding but resigned as a director. The co-founder went nuclear and decided to dilute me out of the business by issuing new shares and buying them. If I had bought them I would have just been giving him the money which he'd just pay himself as a bonus and then repeat, so I just had to watch my shareholding go down to 25%. All legal avenues I went down just confirmed that the cost of litigation would cost more than whatever I'd get out of it.
The year before i left my Grandad died and left me $15k and at the time I decided to forego my salary for 8 months to help the company's cash flow situation. So I eventually offered a settlement where I would sell out of the company for $15k and be done with it.
Forward to now, my new company, still bootstrapped, is over $10M ARR and profitable with 113 employees growing at 60% a year. I have over 51% of the shareholding and over 60% of voting shares. I still write code every day and behave more of an engineer now than I ever did in the previous company.
My advice to you is to take the money and leave, start something new and just start building. You have already realised the biggest value of that company; lessons about what to look for in a future co-founder, how to run a company and build a product. Leave everything else behind, move on and I promise you'll look back at this moment in 4 years time as being the best decision you ever made.
Good luck!