One gave me trust, access, and the freedom to do the best work of my career. The other showed me how quickly the same structure can become unstable. From the outside, they looked nearly identical.
Founder Ledger helps you tell the difference before you join.Read firsthand accounts, compare transparent company scores, and understand what working inside a founder-led company is actually like.
Anonymous accounts and transparent scores from people who worked inside founder-led companies. Know what you are joining before you sign.
Current Founder Index scores, based on employee ratings
Bad week, bad meeting, bad news at 4:50 on a Thursday. Say it somewhere that isn't your group chat. No company attached, nothing permanent, gone in 24 hours.
Something happened and it should be on the record. Post it as a factual account, or as a labeled opinion about the founder with your disclosures attached. Then find out how many people it happened to.
Rate the company you worked at on five questions, once. Those scores become the Founder Index, the number candidates read before they sign and founders read to find out what they built.
An interview shows you the company on its best behavior, chosen and rehearsed. This shows you the same company on an ordinary Tuesday, described by people with nothing left to gain.
Read the index, read where it breaks, then read the entries behind it. Every open role on the job board carries its company's score whether that company likes it or not.
Your people will not tell you this in a skip-level. Not because they are cowards, but because the cost of being wrong in front of a founder is their job, and they know it.
You cannot buy the number, remove an entry, or reorder the page. You can post roles for free, publish a written response, and see through the lens of your own people.
Every company keeps a book the employees never see. This is the other one. Vent it, file it, or score it, then read what people wrote before you sign anything. Founders read it too. That's the point.
Anonymous · Public record · Corrections never expire
Five questions that only matter at a founder-led company. Scored by the people who lived them. The composite is the Founder Index, 0 to 100, higher is safer. Recent ratings count for more: a score halves in weight after about a year, so a company that fixed itself stops being judged on who it used to be.
Openings at other companies, each one carrying its Founder Index, set by the people who worked there, not by whoever posted the job. Posting is free, for anyone, always. Nobody can buy the number next to their name, so a high one means something.
Nothing here lasts more than 24 hours. No company field, no disclosures, no effect on anyone's Founder Index. Some days you don't want to file anything. You just need to put it somewhere that isn't your group chat.
Venting helps with a bad week. It doesn't do much for a bad year. If work has been eating your sleep, your health, or the people you like being around, that's worth talking to someone about, a doctor, a therapist, or anyone who knows you well enough to notice. If things have gotten darker than that, please reach out to a crisis line in your country; in the US you can call or text 988, any hour.
Employer review sites aren't a new idea. They mostly fail the same way: the anonymity is a promise rather than a design, the score can't tell a good year from an old one, and nobody can see what gets removed. Here's every place we made the other call.
Post a review to unlock the reviews. A wall between you and the only thing you came for, which quietly guarantees a pile of throwaway posts written to get past it.
Free to read, forever. No wall, no account, no email. You contribute because you want to, which is the only way the writing stays worth reading.
Anonymity is a policy. Your identity is collected, then promises are made about it, and policies change hands when companies do.
Anonymity is architecture. No accounts, no email, no identity collected at any point. We can't hand over what we never had, and no future owner can decide otherwise.
Either a blanket ban that stops you describing the person actually causing the problem, or no real limit at all.
Officers only, in a labeled opinion. Founders, CEOs, and C-suite can be named. Coworkers never can, and an automated scan catches names and contact details before anything publishes.
One text field. "They promised a refresh in writing and never issued it" sits alongside "my boss is a monster," formatted identically, weighted identically.
Two separate post types. Records state facts. Opinions get stamped as opinions and carry six disclosures, including how you left and whether you're in a dispute, printed next to every word.
A review from 2019 weighs exactly as much as one from this morning. Companies that genuinely fixed themselves stay buried; ones coasting on an old reputation stay propped up.
One-year half-life, plus a trend line. Recent ratings dominate the Founder Index, and the company page plots how the score moved so you can see direction, not just position.
A flood of fresh five-stars following a layoff round looks identical to genuine improvement. The average absorbs it silently.
Surge flags, in public. If half a company's ratings landed inside one week, the page says so. We don't delete them or discount them, we show you the shape and let you judge.
A single star average, built from categories generic enough to apply to a bank and a bakery. A 3.8 tells you nothing actionable.
Five questions that only bite under a founder. Straight answers, decisions that hold, equity you can trust, room to disagree, life outside it, plus a "where it breaks" readout naming the weakest axis.
It's just gone. No notice, no reason, no count. Which is exactly why people assume employers can buy removals.
A public transparency log. Every takedown notice, its outcome, and the written reason. A moderator can't decide anything without publishing why.
Placement, branding, and a widespread belief, fair or not, that spending moves the number.
Listings and a right of reply. Never the score. Job posting is free for everyone. The Founder Index is computed from employee ratings alone, and no tier removes, reorders, or suppresses a post.
A paragraph of PR boilerplate thanking you for your feedback and inviting you to reach out to HR.
A structured reply. Three fields: what we're changing, what we dispute, what we won't change. A founder who won't fill those in has told you something too.
Requires signing into the account you never wanted to make. Change your mind after clearing your browser and you're stuck.
A one-time deletion key. Issued the moment you post, works from any device, no account. We store only a one-way hash, so nobody here can look it up, or be pressured into it.
Nowhere. Every word is permanent, public, and attached to a company forever.
A vent room that empties itself. Twenty-four hours, no company attached, no effect on any score. Some days you don't want to file anything.
The Talent pool is a separate offering with its own problem to solve: wanting out of a founder-led company without your employer finding out you are looking.
Your profile is a billboard. Tick a quiet box and hope, while recruiters at your own company scroll the same list you are on. People stay stuck because being seen looking is the risk.
Your employer is blocked before you finish signing up. Name where you work and they are filtered out, along with anyone else you add. Company names are matched on a fingerprint, so writing it differently does not get them back in.
Buy a seat and download resumes in bulk. Your name, your employer, your dates, your whole history, handed over before anyone has spoken to you.
Nobody browses resumes here. Employers see a redacted card: function, years, location, skills, target pay. No name, no employer. They request an introduction, you decide, and nothing of yours moves until you say yes.
A score you never see decides whether a human ever reads you, built from criteria nobody will explain and audited by no one.
We do not rank candidates at all. Employers search and read for themselves. No match percentage, no automated sort, no algorithm quietly deciding who is worth a conversation.
Worth saying plainly, because a comparison page that claims to win every row isn't worth reading.
Every one of these started as a small, reasonable-sounding decision somewhere else.
If any of that changes, the transparency log is where you'd catch it first.
One gave me trust, access, and the freedom to do the best work of my career. The other showed me how quickly the same structure can become unstable. From the outside, they looked nearly identical.
At its best, founder-led work feels unusually alive. Decisions happen quickly. Good ideas do not have to survive layers of approval. You can work across teams, solve problems in real time, and see your fingerprints on what gets built.
The work may still be demanding. Mine was. But hard work feels different when expectations are honest, decisions make sense, and the people around you are pulling in the same direction.
I would take that job again tomorrow.
The same concentration of authority can also create chaos. A quarter of planning can disappear over a weekend. Disagreement can become disloyalty. Roles, priorities, and promises can change without discussion.
When no one can challenge the founder, their pressure becomes everyone’s pressure. Customers feel the shortcuts. Employees absorb the uncertainty. The qualities that helped build the company can eventually begin to work against it.
The pitch can sound exactly the same. The experience can be completely different.
I could not find a reliable way to tell the difference before joining.
Interviews show companies on their best behavior. Personal networks are limited, and the people with the clearest view may still work there. Traditional review sites reduce complex companies to broad averages, often giving an old review the same weight as a recent one.
Founder Ledger is the resource I wanted: firsthand accounts, transparent company scores, and questions designed specifically for founder-led workplaces.
Recent experiences count more. Opinions include relevant context. Everything can be read without creating an account or surrendering your identity.
Founder Ledger is not an argument against founder-led companies. Some of the best work happens inside them.
It is an argument against finding out the hard way.
The people who understand a workplace best are the people who have worked there. Founder Ledger gives them a safer way to share what they know. It also gives everyone else a better way to decide.
A public place where current and former employees describe what it was like to work at a founder-led company. Three kinds of posting: a record of something that happened, an opinion about an officer of the company, and a vent that deletes itself after 24 hours. Ratings are separate and produce the Founder Index.
No accounts, no email required, no password. Your handle is generated in your browser and is not linked to anything about you. We do not ask who you are and we do not store it.
Talent profiles, resumes and introductions run on their own domain with their own store. That side takes an email address, because a company has to be able to reach you. It shares no identifier with the ledger and holds nothing that connects the two. We cannot produce a link between a ledger post and a talent profile, because no such link is created.
We can't hand over what we never collected, but that is not the same as a guarantee. Courts can compel platforms to produce whatever they do hold, server logs, IP addresses, timestamps. Sites like this have been ordered to unmask posters before. If a post would be catastrophic for you if traced, weigh that before writing it, and consider talking to an employment lawyer instead.
We deliberately blur timestamps into wide buckets, use departments instead of job titles, and never publish raw post times, because those three details together identify people at small companies.
Everything is scanned before it publishes. Nothing sits in a queue waiting for a human by default, most posts go up instantly.
There are no accounts here, so there is no password to prove a post is yours. Instead, every post hands you a deletion key at the moment you publish it, shown once, stored nowhere in readable form. Keep it and you can delete that post from any device, forever, no questions asked.
Posts made on this device are also listed below automatically, so you usually won’t need the key at all. The key matters if you clear your browser or move to another machine.
If you lose the key and clear this browser, we cannot delete your post on request. Not because we’re unwilling, because we have no way to tell you from the founder asking us to remove it. That is the trade for collecting nothing about you, and it’s worth understanding before you post.
If you are the subject of a post and believe it states something false, tell us. We aim to respond within five business days. We do not remove posts for being unflattering, and we do not remove opinions for being unwelcome, but a specific, identified factual claim that you can show is false will come down, and we log every decision either way.
Copyright claims go to our registered DMCA agent rather than through this form.
Every notice we receive appears here, whatever we decide. Complainants aren’t named. The company is, along with what we did and why. If we ever start quietly removing posts for paying employers, this table is where it would show up. That is the point of publishing it.
Moderator access: In production this sits behind staff authentication and is not linked from a public page.
Two things land here automatically: posts the name scan held before publishing, and posts three readers flagged. Nothing in the queue is public. Approving publishes it and clears the flags; removing deletes it permanently and tells nobody.
A private talent pool for people who want out of a founder-led company but cannot be seen looking. Nothing here is public. Your resume is never browsable, and the companies you block never see you at all.
Employers never browse resumes. They see a redacted card: function, years, location, skills, comp range. No name, no employer, no dates that pin you down.
Your current employer is blocked automatically. Add any others, competitors, a former boss's new company, and they are filtered out before a single card is sent to their browser.
Interest arrives as a request, not a download. You see who is asking and what the role is, and nothing of yours moves until you say yes.
Redacted profiles of people actively leaving founder-led companies. You request an introduction, they decide. You will never see your own people here. Anyone who blocked you is filtered out before the list reaches your browser.
The ledger and the jobs side are run as separate services that happen to share a name. Nothing crosses between them. Not because we promise not to look, but because the link was never built, so there is nothing for us to look at.
Entries, opinions, ratings, vents
Talent profiles, resumes, introductions
The jobs side runs on its own domain. Browsers scope storage and cookies by origin, so the two cannot read each other even inside your own machine.
Separate database, separate backups, separate access. A request aimed at one cannot sweep up the other, because they are not in the same place to begin with.
Your ledger handle never appears on a talent profile. Different namespace, different generator, no id in common that could be used to join the two.
We never suggest jobs because of something you posted, or a company because of a role you viewed. Every one of those would be a link we had to create, and creating it is the thing we are avoiding.
Anyone can put the same email into both, or write in a style that gives them away, and no architecture stops that. What we can say is that we hold nothing that connects the two, and that a court cannot order us to produce a link that does not exist.
Founder-led companies hire people who have been burned by founder-led companies. The score is the reason candidates come here. You can post against it, and you can answer it, but you can't buy it.
Entries and ratings. No tier removes, reorders, or suppresses them. A company that pays and a company that doesn't see the same ledger.
The Founder Index. It's computed from employee scores only. Nothing an employer buys touches the math.
Anonymity. Handles are generated in the browser. No employer tier reveals who filed what, because the product never collects it.
Paid placement is always marked as paid. The moment a reader can't tell the difference, the score stops being worth anything and so does the ad.
Friday morning: the entries that got corroborated most, the biggest index moves, and every new role at a company scoring above 70.
Entries are anonymous to readers, but anonymity is not a shield. Statements of fact about a named company can be litigated if they are false. Post what you can substantiate.
If you are describing illegal conduct such as wage theft, retaliation, or securities fraud, a public post is not your remedy. Talk to an employment lawyer first.