Interviews were good. HR round seemed as expected - basic and to the point. Hiring manager interview was excellent and so was the subsequent panel interview.
Finally the co-founder interview felt strange. Rather than assessing culture and fit, I was asked to "sell" the technology all over again and somehow convince the co-founder why my ideas were well founded. It was odd considering that the job post mentioned that the co-founder round was more a signing off on culture fit.
The bigger issue was that the team despite having completed all the interview rounds, just kept me hanging on with excuses about people not coming back to work post holidays. They dragged the process to nearly 3 months.
Towards the end, they removed the job post from the website and probably signed with another candidate while telling me they were still waiting for people to come back to the office.
All in all, very good start to the interview process but extremely poor finish and follow up.
To make it worse, the reason they gave me for moving with another candidate was vague and impractical.