A senior product-marketing candidate interviewed with the founder of an early-stage startup and was asked for a take-home: an interactive website with a full go-to-market analysis. She built it, submitted it, and then heard nothing for ten days.
In that silence she did what unemployed marketers do. She talked to other founders, sketched a separate business idea, and floated it to several of them — including the one who had gone quiet on her application. When she mentioned the idea on a follow-up call, the founder's warmth evaporated. He accused her of moonlighting and suggested she go work for the foreign firms if they paid better.
The next morning an email arrived branding her “very sly and dishonest” and instructing her not to make contact again. She had applied for one job, done unpaid work for it, waited a week and a half in the dark, and emerged recast as a schemer for having ideas of her own.
On r/recruitinghell the verdict was an ego meltdown: the founder wanted ownership of her thinking for free and panicked when it wandered off-site. The take-home, needless to say, was never mentioned again.