You’ll have to trust me on this: the story of just about every early-stage startup is peppered with tales such as mine. Backroom deals negotiated via phone calls to leave no legal trace, behind-the-back betrayals of investors or cofounders, seductive duping of credulous employees so they work for essentially nothing (e.g., Adchemy itself). The picture I’ve painted of AdGrok—and there’s more sordidness where this came from, not to worry—is not some weird exception; it is the absolute rule. The tech startup scene, for all its pretensions of transparency, principled innovation, and a
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