I need advice: Built My Boss's Entire Tech Platform (Full-Stack), Now He Won't Pay Me and Is Threatening My Share. What Do I Do?

3 weeks ago 20

Hey, I need some real talk from anyone who’s been burned by a "partner." This is a tough situation for me.

I'm a young dev, still in high school, but I'm the single technical brain behind everything this company does. My boos, let's call him "visionary man", is all sales and big promises. I'm the one who built the whole stack: Rust/Node APIs, Tauri/React desktop apps, manages all the servers, load balancing, database. I literally build all the engine for all high-stake client projects.

The amount of work done is huge, the pressure is constant, but the pay is nonexistent. For months, our Whatsapp chat has been a broken record: me begging for my weekly pay, and him giving the excuses: "I'm at zero", "waiting for money to come in," or just to busy flying around. To keep me motivated, he only keeps talking up about the future, how we'll "get rich" later with his next big project ,and that I just need to be patient.

The whole thing blew up recently. He's obsessed with this personal project, and when it slowed down because I was actually focusing on my school and personal stuff, he went off on me. He accused me of not being dedicated, compared me to his own insane workload. He then threatened my financial stake: he warned that if he has to invest more of his own money to keep his pet project moving, the whole percentage picture changes.

This is the bottom line: I built the business assets, but he treat my labor like free capital, and now he's threatening my future.

I need some advice of what decision should take, i don't have any experience with this things. What would an experienced entrepreneur do?

I'd be happy to answer any questions and provide more information about the situation, without revealing any personal details about the project or the company.

Sorry for my bad english, it's not my native language.

[IMPORTANT EDIT]

Thank you for all the advice you've given me in this post. I think there were many details I didn't mention because I assumed they were obvious (obviously my mistake).