I can't advise you to leave b/c that's just the way sales happens -- you aren't going to escape this sort of thing even if you go to work for a non profit. Non profits often exaggerate the amount of good they do and how important their cause is -- and how efficient they are or are not.
The bottom line is that it's tough to bootstrap a company and sometimes the salespeople will "throw the ball ahead of the runner" a bit.
The morality has to do more with whether or not the founder believes that what he's saying will be true soon enough that telling the customer that info isn't misrepresenting the company.
If you went to work for a big company you'd sit in a cube and not hear any sales conversations, but they'd probably be much more distorted -- at least in a startup everyone can help make the dreams (of the founder and the customers) a reality... there is much more of a team mentality.
When you hear the founder say such things you should be thinking "wow, he really believes that we can do that" and feel motivated by it. It's part of the entrepreneurial psychology. He has you on the team b/c he believes you can make whatever he says true.
If you don't like spirited optimism, I hear the IRS is hiring :)
I ran a consulting company that did some work for large "name brand" corporations. I bid on projects for companies we should have never had access to and I didn't have to lie to do it. Its a positioning game, you position your weakness as strength. For an excellent contemporary example of this see Barack Obama's campaign. Whether you like Obama or not, he has managed to position his relative inexperience as a strength. Similar tricks are possible within a company, NO LYING REQUIRED.
It sounds like you're trying to convince yourself that lying as a means to the end is OK. Its a pretty weak argument, or rather excuse to not work hard and do things honestly.
The suggestion that what this founder is doing is "spirited optimism" is sickening.
I'm not saying that lying is good, but in any small company there is (or should be) a collective belief in the success of the company and its product. If we wanted to be rational we could just look at the numbers and realize that over 80% of startups fail and mention that when on the phone with prospective clients!
My point is that it's not a good idea to get overly worked up about someone in sales stretching the truth a bit. Sales is the part of the organization that responds to customer needs, and so if they promise a feature to a client, you as the developer are more likely to end up building that feature than if it was never promised and the sale was lost.
It's an imperfect system, but at its core it's not any different from Ford running a commercial that suggests that its operations actually benefit the environment. People believe what they want to believe in order to give themselves an excuse to buy what they want. If the founder in question is outright lying, then he's just not very good at helping customers rationalize the purchase.... :)
The bottom line is that it's tough to bootstrap a company and sometimes the salespeople will "throw the ball ahead of the runner" a bit.
The morality has to do more with whether or not the founder believes that what he's saying will be true soon enough that telling the customer that info isn't misrepresenting the company.
If you went to work for a big company you'd sit in a cube and not hear any sales conversations, but they'd probably be much more distorted -- at least in a startup everyone can help make the dreams (of the founder and the customers) a reality... there is much more of a team mentality.
When you hear the founder say such things you should be thinking "wow, he really believes that we can do that" and feel motivated by it. It's part of the entrepreneurial psychology. He has you on the team b/c he believes you can make whatever he says true.
If you don't like spirited optimism, I hear the IRS is hiring :)