The product was not the problem
I worked on a startup in stealth. The product still lives, so this is not a story about a failed idea or a post-mortem of somebody else's company. I left because our values were no longer aligned.
A strategy disagreement can be tested. A product disagreement can be put in front of users. Values are harder. They show up in how decisions are made, what behaviour is accepted and which trade-offs people are willing to make when there is pressure.
I did not recognise the depth of the gap immediately. At first, I treated it as the normal friction of building a company with other people.
First, follow
My first response was to follow. That did not mean agreeing with every decision. It meant accepting that a company cannot move if every disagreement becomes a veto, committing to the chosen direction and trying to make it work.
Following is useful when the disagreement is about method and the underlying values are shared. You can lose an argument and still trust how the decision was reached. I tried to give that process time.
Eventually it became clear that I was not dealing with a temporary difference in tactics. Following any further would have meant acting against things I considered fundamental.
Then, lead
Before leaving, I tried to lead. I made my concerns explicit, argued for a different way of working and tried to change the decisions I believed were symptoms of the wider problem.
Leadership does not guarantee that people will follow. It also does not give you the right to hold a company hostage until it adopts your position. You state the case, do the work and pay attention to the answer you receive in actions rather than reassuring words.
The answer was clear. The values gap was not closing.
Get the fuck out
That left the third option: get the fuck out. The phrase sounds aggressive, but the decision was the opposite. It meant stopping the internal fight, accepting that I could not turn the company into the company I wanted it to be, and leaving rather than becoming permanently resentful or destructive.
The product continued without me. I am glad it did. Leaving was not a verdict on whether it deserved to exist; it was an admission that I was no longer the right person to help build it under those values.
Lead, follow, or get the fuck out is not a macho slogan. For me, it is an order of operations: follow honestly, lead openly, and if the values remain fundamentally misaligned, leave clearly. Staying is not automatically loyalty. Sometimes leaving is the most honest decision available.