[capsule_toy]

I agree with the sentiment that the best course of action would be to focus on your own work and not get caught up in the coworker's performance.

If you take the founder at face value, he's basically saying that keeping the coworker maximizes the chances of raising money. So another way to look at it is, would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars today to maximize your chances of raising millions tomorrow?

And I definitely do think there are situations where that could be the case. The founder might have sold the investors on your coworker being a valuable part of the core team during a tumultuous period where the company let go of two engineers and had to rewrite the code.

While you may believe that getting rid of your coworker would maximize the chances of success, the reality might be completely opposite, regardless of how much weight the coworker is or is not pulling.