9 interviews (2 technical "screens"?) for an early startup?? If you were some HFT unicorn offering 400k salaries I'd understand, but you might want to consider relaxing your interview process. You're not going to get top candidates this way, they can spend 1/3 of that time to get similar/better offers somewhere else. I was about to apply, then I read through the process and decided not to.
That interview process is just a bit pompous. In my experience, companies that try this "every single person in the company needs to sign off" sort of strategy are looking for pretty much any slipup or inconsistent answer to a question and will use that at any point to make a negative decision. It's also a glaring red flag that the team might be awful at making decisions.
I once went through this at a different company, and after something like 6 stages, including the CTO and others with fancy titles, I was given an automated rejection. Apparently—after badgering someone for whom I had their email—someone in the chain didn't like that I gave kind of a vague answer to a question, and so that was it.
