Some workplace stories end with a lesson learned. This one ends with someone else’s payday built entirely on your unused idea.

One employee spent three years watching a concept she pitched get dismissed, reworked by leadership against her advice, and ultimately blamed for a failed product launch that had nothing to do with her actual design.

After that boss stepped down, his replacement, someone she initially liked and trusted, called her original prototypes garbage before eventually freezing her out and laying her off.

What she didn’t see coming was discovering months later that the same CEO had shut down the company entirely and covertly launched a new one using her exact designs, unpolished, unchanged, and already generating paying customers, all without her getting a cent of equity if it takes off.

Keep reading for the full story.

Boss laid me off and started a new company with my designs he trashed

3 years ago someone said I had a good idea and told me to present it to leadership.

When I shared it, they told me my idea “made their head hurt.”

So I created some prototypes, tested it with our customers, and they were genuinely excited about it. One of the devs who believed in the idea too took it on as an extra project to build a proof of concept.

But the CEO wasn’t too impressed and insisted they go with his idea.

The CEO vetoed a lot of it in favor of what he liked because “the customer doesn’t know what they want.”

When we brought my designs with his modifications to customers, they were disappointed.

This didn’t end well for the CEO.

We ended up going to market with his idea anyway, and the whole thing didn’t do so well, he was asked to step down.

An old advisor was brought in to be the new CEO. I got along with him a lot better.

So the topic of the old designs came up yet again.

He was usually nice and encouraging.

When I showed him some of the old designs, he said they were crap. He saw them when he was an advisor and always thought it was a bad idea.

Within months of him joining, the new CEO took things off the rails.

Turns out, the new boss really wasn’t that much different.

He had a similar approach of trying to convince people of what they want instead of listening. I noticed he was icing me out, so it wasn’t a surprise when he laid me off.

But then he did something actually surprising.

What I didn’t expect is a few more months later he would sunset the company and launch a new one, using my designs! He didn’t even use a more polished version of them. He just built the wireframes. And people are already paying for it.

Now if that new company happens to do well, I won’t even get equity.

I should have just quit the day I was told “you’re making my head hurt” by someone who is supposed to have seniority over me. Unbelievable.

This workplace is about as toxic as they come.

What did Reddit make of all this?

This commenter shares a wise word of advice.

Next time, it’s good to keep her ideas to herself.

Situations like these almost never end fairly.

Many toxic workplaces have taught traumatized employees to never trust anyone.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a hotel guest that made a scene in the middle of the night, then immediately wished they hadn’t.

Calling something crap and then building a paying business on it isn’t a change of heart, it’s straight up theft.

This boss had a financial incentive to strip out the person who created it before capitalizing on the work himself.

Getting laid off was just the icing on the cake. After all, it’s a lot easier to launch someone else’s idea as your own once the actual creator is no longer around to point it out.

This boss isn’t just bad — he’s practically barbaric.