My CTO just left me 2 angry voicemails...
SwellJoe: No, startups are not "ALWAYS" anything; there is a wide variety of people involved in startups.  Startup founders, often very successful ones, can be polite and generous people.  Most people do have flaws of some sort, and sometimes there will be people who have flaws that are distinctly incompatible with your own flaws.If you aren't comfortable with the working environment, you should quit; the world is too wide and life too short to do otherwise. You might prefer to line something else up first, if you're unsure of your prospects or don't have sizable savings.It may just be that you're taking it too seriously. If you have owned up to your mistake, done what you can to reduce its impact to the rest of the team, and apologized, you should let yourself move on. If your boss doesn't see it that way, he's an asshole, and probably isn't worth working for.Also, if he's being such an asshole that he's chasing off and firing people at an alarming rate, the finances of the company may be dramatically worse than you are aware of and he's deluding himself and others into thinking he's being proactive, when really he's just unable to admit that his company is going down the toilet and he should own up to those problems. Actually, I can't think of any instance where a founder was being truly a dick where it didn't boil down to things going really badly and the founder not knowing how to cope with the failure. (I'm sure there have been many...people are sometimes just dicks. But, I can't think of any examples right now, but I can think of several examples of poor financial situation leading to emotional falling outs among founders and employees.)