My co-founder and I had been working almost a full year before we got accepted to YCombinator, and we made some pretty substantial progress building out our bac

My co-founder and I had been working almost a full year before we got accepted to YCombinator, and we made some pretty substantial progress building out our back-office financial partnerships and getting savvy in the payment space. Bill had walked away from a very lucrative job in finance, and I left a pretty prestigious scholarship at NYU law. We were far from conception stage when we brought Karl on board. When he agreed to work for us, he knew he was going to learn a lot, get the YC experience, make some good connections, and see what it was like to work for an early-stage startup without having to make a life-changing commitment. If the company went belly-up, he could just go back to school in the fall. In fact, he did go back to school at the end of the summer. If we went belly up, Bill and I would have been shit out of luck. Karl only came back after we raised money and offered him a salary. There is no way we would have hired Karl had we not had the opportunity to work with him over the summer. But he did choose to work with us, and he was rewarded with a position that he would have had no chance of getting otherwise. He still has the option to go back to school, but if he does, he will have a head start on most of his peers. Karl has been an incredible part of our team, and I am thrilled we have him. That being said, we did not need Karl to get where we are, which I think is the one prerequisite for giving anybody founder status (and the commensurate equity). I worked for a startup (poverty level wages) right out of college. It was one of the best experiences I have had, and without it, there is no way I would have started this company. I wasn't doing it in the hopes that one day I would be anointed a founder.