My cofounder is sleeping with an employee and lying to me about it. - Startups Anonymous

A couple of months ago I noticed my cofounder was too protective of a new employee – who was in all fairness doing a good job but not flawless. In fact, the flawed part is hard to swallow for me: I have caught her lying, blaming coworkers for her shortcomings, being careless with money (so much so that we removed any money-related responsibility from her hands) and acting as her coworkers boss when she actually isn’t.

I realized almost immediately there was this high sexual tension between them and confronted my cofounder about it. I’m all for responsible adults being free to have sex with each other, but this was clearly not the case. Whatever was going on there had more to do with this employee stepping well beyond her boundaries and him being a damn fool. Anyway, he ended up admitting there was tension but that he hadn’t and wouldn’t do anything about it. We kept the employee on because she is the best person we’ve had in her job since we opened, by far. We removed some power and gave her some feedback, and everything seemed to be going well.

Until a few weeks ago when she started acting like she’s the boss or something, choosing her own responsibilities and lying through her teeth to get more power. Her manipulative behaviour is somewhat ridiculous – when she realizes she got caught doing something wrong, she’ll act almost childlike, trying to get people to pitty her, or worse: she’ll hit on people. And I don’t mean she’ll flirt harmlessly, I mean she is on a mission. She hits on my other cofounder too, but with little effect as he is married and not interested apparently.

I started noticing her overconfident behaviour and realized she and my cofounder are having sex. There were particular situations in which I realized they were lying right to my face about it. I have no concrete evidence to “incriminate” them, but I have seen subtle non-subjective signs of her presence in his house for instance, among other clues.

But what really tipped me off is that he’s become completely lenient regarding her bad behaviour – something we talked about in the past and he agreed was something we had to work hard on to deal with. In the past week I caught her lying A LOT, badmouthing coworkers to management unfairly, throwing coworkers under the bus for her own mistakes AND flirting with the financial guy to get “forgiven” for a budget she disrespected (spent more money than budget given). In every situation I called her out on it (professionally as upper management) and she had the worst reaction. Instead of taking the feedback and retreating, she got pissed off and said some really unprofessional shit.

My cofounder’s reaction was to think she’s just “a bit crazy”.

Now, I’ve had successful workplace relationships but man… don’t fuck someone you work with just because they’re hot. It really makes you a moron. I’m not at all worried about the employee or the cofounder as I will deal with it in whatever professional manner is required. But I have lost a lot of respect for the fools in this story going through all this blindness for a lousy lay.