31–40 of 253 posts
Then you want an employer/employee relationship, not a cofounder relationship. I would run, not walk, from a company with a founder arrangement where some subset got "the lion's share" for reasons like this.
I recently walked away from a potential startup because my non-technical partner (MBA ideas guy) wanted an 80/20 equity split in his favor. I was the first to broach the discussion and proposed 50/50. It was a severe misalignment in expectations, and this was after 3 months of meeting regularly to refine the idea and build out prototypes (read: I was building the prototypes). My advice is to have this conversation wi…
Hmm, if it were me, I would have asked how his 80% share would have made my 20% a good investment [than all the other options]. It's all about what each of you are bring to the table. It's possible he priced the tech side perfectly AND being the best option available to make you better off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, if it were me, I would have asked how his 80% share would have made my 20% a good investment [than all the other options]. It's all about what each of you are bring to the table. It's possible he priced the tech side perfectly AND being the best option available to make you better off.
There’s zero chance this would ever be a fair split. They know nothing about building technology so are never in the right. This happens often enough that most startup accelerators pre-flag it as criteria to not invest in founders (with an out of balance equity split).
I’ve easily seen more start-ups fail because the technical co-founder got pedantic about something with zero commercial relevance than I have where the non-technical founder rolled over their tech team. Mostly because the latter fail early while the former can sort of look like it’s not a trash fire for a little bit longer.
As you say, the unequal split is a red flag. Not the direction it leans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, if it were me, I would have asked how his 80% share would have made my 20% a good investment [than all the other options]. It's all about what each of you are bring to the table. It's possible he priced the tech side perfectly AND being the best option available to make you better off.
There’s zero chance this would ever be a fair split. They know nothing about building technology so are never in the right. This happens often enough that most startup accelerators pre-flag it as criteria to not invest in founders (with an out of balance equity split).
I recently walked away from a potential startup because my non-technical partner (MBA ideas guy) wanted an 80/20 equity split in his favor. I was the first to broach the discussion and proposed 50/50. It was a severe misalignment in expectations, and this was after 3 months of meeting regularly to refine the idea and build out prototypes (read: I was building the prototypes). My advice is to have this conversation wi…
It's worth anyone technical's time to build skills in strategy, marketing, finance, etc. The technical co-founder always gets screwed and suffers from a general lack of respect. In my opinion, it's usually unwise to take positions where you're strictly the technical co-founder, or where you're marketed as the same.
I realize this is all subjective, but the hardest problem in every startup is solving a real customer problem. I’ve never been part of a startup where the engineering was the hardest part, and I’ve been part of very high-tech companies. An accountant maybe doesn’t add much, but a business major who deeply understands a customers need can be more valuable than any engineer.
There’s lots of solutions in the market for problems I have, but most are above the cost I’m willing to pay for. As long as you have a large enough market willing to pay you can sustain it but often the solutions are just too costly in general to be sustainable.
And that critical part of bringing a useful solution at a cost the market will bear to sustain is the hard engineering part. I find problems people have daily that I can think of solutions to, but they’re often going to be too costly to be of any value to create a solution for and I often find them too unique for scaling to help any. I work in research environments, so YMMV.
In the past I worked with an ideas person, but their ideas were often quickly discounted by some basic engineering thoughts about how reasonable solutions could be built. If you have an engineering background and ideas, you can often iterate through viable ideas much faster, quickly discounting unviable ideas vs the other way around (having to do a lot of practical homework to explore practicality of an idea is more time costly).
There is absolutely domain value in understanding unique problems and seeing opportunity, no doubt, but viable solutions need to exist. If you think you’re the first person who saw and identified an opportunity, it’s a great time to look and ask around because chances are you’re often not the first to market. Often solutions or businesses don’t exist for the very point I raise: people couldn’t find cost effective solutions to make it worth pursuing.
Having started businesses with the explicit lack of biz-co-founders I beck to differ. That is of course unless your da Vinci-like super modal capabilities allows you to feel unlimited joy when doing business plans, taxes & marketing alongside your (hopefully) core competency of product development.
In my ideal world basically everyone is like this and the walls between "idea guy" and "tech guy" are knocked down. I've heard a lot of folks get cynical about sharp technical types who get hired by big 3 mgmt consultancies, but ime they're often great places to find those who are both technically sharp and can make a killer deck.
I don't man, I am fairly technical and have failed solo startups several times because I'm not good at the selling part (and I guess by extension build what people want ). So in my limited experience, a co-founder that can sell well is really valuable.
I realize this is all subjective, but the hardest problem in every startup is solving a real customer problem. I’ve never been part of a startup where the engineering was the hardest part, and I’ve been part of very high-tech companies. An accountant maybe doesn’t add much, but a business major who deeply understands a customers need can be more valuable than any engineer.
Or as Henry Ford said, "if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have told me unlimited clean energy, teleportation, immortality, and affordable housing."