I already quit thinking of working for a startup (specially when VC, angel monies, etc are involved). Also, I usually work learning different stuff, as few people here work with them (like Salesforce.com, Play Framework, etc, which I had to learn).

Ability to learn is “uninterviewable”, people only reach to me because they already know I do that.

So I did participate in some interviews in startups and established companies. The last one, for a Ruby (basically Rails) position in a german company, was a fiasco both because I am a woman and for the assumption that I don’t know anything: no technical questions were asked at all, and the interviewer ended saying we could do a test later, but gave the feedback as negative even after mentioning a test and not seeing a single line of code.

So now I only freelance, and am very happy to commit to private repositories those companies cannot see anyway, but I quit searching. Isn’t it an option?

If a known company asks you off-topic questions, ask them why they killed product X, Y and Z, why they acquired company A and killed it afterwards, why their API B had no substitutes for their same-purpose API C and forced people to upgrade to API D, why they suddenly changed interfaces and put that putrid panel online without all functionalities, etc. lol :P

Disclaimer: I prefer 300-year banks than startups, sorry :P