I personally went through the opposite problem last year : one of my two co-founders left when the business tanked due to economic crisis. He always felt like

I personally went through the opposite problem last year : one of my two co-founders left when the business tanked due to economic crisis. He always felt like he did more than his share of work and received less than his share of money (he had half the share of capital, 20%, but as a compensation he always had a higher salary). I stepped down from technical manager so that he could build the team at his will. Later, I sold him 10% of the shares for a tenth of the price (so we both had 30%) but he still felt like he was cheated. I think that the hard times during crisis broke him down finally. I'm pretty sure it was a bad move financially for him (he wouldn't work for anyone else, and by himself he can't earn that much), he even tried to "steal" our biggest customer... We had quite a hard time, particularly because the whole team left after him (unsurprising, it was his team after all) but we got through and everything's fine again now (though on product development we've lost 6 months at the very least). What else? If we hadn't full coffers at the time crisis hit, the company couldn't have survived such bad times.