2026-05-14

2026-05-14 — Lora week-2 reality check, invoice + pause plan

Summary

Day 8 of the Lora work trial. Verbal full-time offer at day 3 ($180k + 2%). No written contract, no NDA, no IP assignment, no signed equity grant. Same pattern Michelle ran on the prior founding engineer — 2 months on contract via OPT before W2. “CEO was busy” both times. The work trial was specifically designed to surface pre-seed-CEO failure modes; this is the signal it was built to produce.

Decided: hard stop at the 2-week mark. Send an invoice at my consulting rate for work to date, pause all new work until a written contract exists. Don’t disclose Pync. Pync is BATNA, not a bargaining card. See lora-vs-pync-decision.

What I actually shipped at Lora in 8 days

Multi-engineer-month output as solo senior, no CTO, new grad as only other eng:

• Vault + architecture + stack lock, infra plan, two Railway services
• Bun/discord.js bot, monorepo, Postgres + pgvector
• Chat-turn loop with bounded agentic rounds, four tools, prompt-as-file routing, pino logs
• Provider port + OpenAI adapter
• DB stack landed, Railway deploy live
• Cold-session empty-reply fix, private threads on mention, prod-readiness pass (dedup, single-flight, buffer merge, debounce, daily turn cap, PII scrub, DB health)
• Daily Note scoped + shipped end-to-end (scheduler, enrollment, seed, handoff thread)
• SVG natal wheel ported, server-side rendered, Chiron propagated from JPL osculating elements
• Facts-as-rows schema migration, repo rewrite, tool rewrite with provenance, e2e regressions diagnosed live
• Two iOS final-rounds run and debriefed
• 60+ PRs

That is the foundation of the company’s backend and core product. Built by one person in 8 days, no paper.

Why this is structural, not a “CEO is busy” oversight

• Pattern. The prior founding engineer hit the same wall. “Busy” twice in a row is policy.
• Equity backdated to start is worth nothing without written terms.
• Verbal offer + 8 days of foundation IP + no IP assignment = the company’s leverage compounds while mine bleeds.
• $3–5M raise targeted this month. Post-close, the pool is set, cap table is harder to move, leverage collapses. Window is now.
• 2% is low for sole-senior-no-CTO scope. Founding engineer band at pre-seed is 3–7% when there’s no CTO. I’m doing functional CTO work at low-end founding-engineer equity.
• Environmental load: VC office no rest space, $12/day commute + 1 train transfer, away from wife, no guitar, no walk. Week 2 exhaustion compounds linearly while the work compounds nonlinearly. Not a willpower problem.

The plan

Before the 2-week mark:

• Draft the invoice. Itemized, dated, payment terms net 7 or 14, consulting rate (not backed out from $180k—actualmarketrateatmyseniorityandscope:$200–300/hr range, pick one and hold).
• Bill all hours including interviews and Slack product threads. All of it is work product.
• IP clause on the invoice itself: “IP for work performed under this invoice transfers upon payment in full.”
• Draft the pause message. Short, neutral: “Two weeks in without a written agreement. Pausing new work until we have a signed contract. Invoice attached for work to date. Happy to resume same-day once paperwork is in.”

At the 2-week mark:

• Send invoice + pause message together. Frame as already-done facts, not asks.
• Stop pushing new work. Mid-flight PRs OK to finish only if I choose. No new branches.
• Keep local copies of journal, plans, branches in case access gets revoked mid-negotiation.

Conversation guardrails when it lands:

• Separate threads: (a) pay the invoice for work done, (b) terms going forward. Don’t let her bundle “we’ll get you a contract this week” as a substitute for paying.
• Don’t disclose Pync. The moment Pync surfaces, this becomes a bidding war instead of a labor-rights conversation, and Michelle gets to reframe legally-owed wages as leverage play.
• Don’t sign anything that retroactively reclassifies the C2C trial period as W2 or releases the unpaid-wage claim.

Labor law angle

• W2 vs 1099 determined by actual relationship, not what it’s called. I’ve been treated as employee-in-fact (set hours, office attendance, integrated into team, company systems). Either framing supports unpaid-wage claim.
• State wage-timing laws apply. Worth checking my state’s waiting-time penalty exposure before the conversation lands.
• C2C via my own LLC is the cleanest defensive structure for the trial period — push for that explicitly in the going-forward contract.

Going-forward asks if Lora produces paper

Anchor:

• Equity 3–5%, refresh grants at financing, pro-rata, written grant date.
• Cash unchanged or modestly up ($180–200k). Cash is fine; equity is the gap.
• Remote days or commute/WFH stipend. Frame as productivity preservation, not lifestyle ask.
• C2C until visa-enabled W2 (if applicable to my status — matches the Pync structure).
• IP assignment scoped to in-period work, not pre-existing IP.

Walk number: 180/2% with no remote and no C2C path. If they come back at original terms and treat the invoice as adversarial, take Pync Phase 1.

Three-branch decision frame at the 2-week mark

1. Lora produces written terms at 3–5% + remote/stipend, clears the invoice. Stay through trial. Run Pync Phase 1 in parallel if 15–20 hrs/wk fits. Decide at trial end with full data.
2. Lora produces written terms at original 180/2% or treats invoice as adversarial. Walk. Take Pync Phase 1.
3. Lora goes silent or stalls past the pause. Walk. Take Pync Phase 1. Pursue unpaid-wage claim if invoice unpaid past statutory window.

Action items

• Draft invoice with IP clause, decide rate (range $200–300/hr), prepare for send by 2-week mark (2026-05-20 if start was 2026-05-06)
• Draft pause message
• Check state wage-timing law for waiting-time penalty exposure
• Confirm Pync Phase 1 timing window still open; flag to Claire that decision lands by trial end
• Decide walk number on going-forward Lora terms before any negotiation conversation happens
• Keep local backups of Lora journal, plans, working branches

Cross-references

• lora-vs-pync-decision — full comparison and decision framework
• pync-ceo-discussion, pync-corey-call.md, pync-status-2026-05-02
• lora astrology app