Cheap founders. They'd expect everyone to work 10h a day including weekends but wouldn't even fix or replace broken equipment, wouldn't pay market salaries, or buy the services needed to achieve their "vision" (servers, licenses...)

It worked for them apparently because engineers seem to love being treated like crap, they sold the company a few years ago to a large brand and a lot of key engineers are still there.

Absent founder.

The non-tech founder hired a typical consulting/dev-shop to build the initial prototype. When completed, he hired the engineers that worked on the project into his company and let them manage themselves. He drops in once a month to espouse where he sees the company and product going, what we should do and what the product is missing. Then he fucks off and doesn't return calls or emails.

Meanwhile, the engineers now have to take on the role of product owner, project manager, customer support and even sales.

Once the founder of the startup where I was working as a PHP developer asked me to develop a fingerprint scanner in PHP using jquery.