> We've got excellent personal rapport
Then why are you posting here instead of having a serious sit-down talk with him about it?
Dispensing with a Co-founder
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#12Where can you get incorporated for 90$ ? I always thought it was several hundred at least
Indiana is about 90
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#13Where can you get incorporated for 90$ ? I always thought it was several hundred at least
I paid $55 for an LLC in Oregon, and did the paperwork myself. I also shelled out around $100 for various Nolo books. (My calculation was that I'd rather spend the money to get a basic understanding of the process than to just pay someone to do some simple paperwork).
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#1490 and even 125 bucks are not that much, eh?
125 bucks is a lot of money for a coffee. It is not a lot of money for incorporating a company and gaining all of the benefits of doing so. It is also not a lot of money if you compare it to spending 10,000 hours of time commitment. It also is not a lot of money to start a company, compared to your hardware costs, etc.
I was asking purely rhetorical question :) Surely 125 bucks is not a big investment into startup. We invest a lot more each month :)
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#15Dump and run.
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#16He hasn't understood what a startup means. If he did, $135 would seem very tiny compared to the huge amount of work he was planning to do. He's not planning to do that work. Yet. Don't dump him immediately. People are complicated, and sometimes they grow into things very quickly, or there was only one little thing missing. And it's possible you misunderstood his reasons for hesitation, or there was some other kind of…
Excellent answer. I deleted my response because this is a better one.
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#17> We've got excellent personal rapport Then why are you posting here instead of having a serious sit-down talk with him about it?
why not? The guy is young, and is asking about some advice in here (which is probably the right place). When you are friends with or get along with somebody, sometimes it is harder to tell them up front that what they are doing is not working out.
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#18Dispensing of a Co-founder? check out Murdr, Inc
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#19For what it's worth, most serial entrepreneurs I've talked with tend to advise waiting a while before incorporating. If you're still in the kitchen table phase, which you say you are, then your co-founder may be right. Until you graduate and begin working full-time on the project and have a demo that are you pitching to investors, incorporating is really just a distraction. At best it doesn't really help anything and at worst you screw it up and it takes thousands of dollars to fix.
Re: Dispensing with a Co-founder
#20He MIGHT just be expressing concern over the cart-before-the-horse issue. I'd echo the "build something first" sentiment.
That being said, one of the hardest challenges to overcome is a founder with substantively less commitment than you. It's like dating/marrying a girl (or guy, I suppose) who wants to spend EVERY evening together when you still want to spend a lot of time with friends or alone... Either person who compromises has a good chance of feeling resentful.
So gather an understanding. Set some initial expectations, like:
"we will each spend an average of 25 hours per work a week until we hit milestone X"
"we well get together 4 evenings per week to work together"
"if we hit milestone Y, we will dump everything and work full time on it, borrowing money if we have to."
"if we fail to hit milestone Z after 8 months, we'll close it down."