Developers are creatures of odd schedules. If he's got the skills to pay the bills, and gets the work done...let the schedule slide. Programmers work with compu

Developers are creatures of odd schedules. If he's got the skills to pay the bills, and gets the work done...let the schedule slide. Programmers work with computers and data which know no schedule. A tremendous number of them are traditionally nocturnal, and do their best work in the wee hours of the night. If he's just lazy (as in, not getting things done) then there's a problem. But, your post doesn't seem to indicate that he is - just that he doesn't show up on your schedule. At a previous job of mine, developers particularly were given flexibility in their scheduling. At one point, the management were looking to lock this down for many of the same reasons that you were - they had the perception that business only happens between 9 AM and 5 PM, and expected that if developers weren't making things happen in that timeframe, there was a problem. One of my colleagues told the manager in charge of the change "I'll show up at 8 AM if you want, but I'm not going to be productive until 11 AM anyhow. I'll clock out at 5 PM after getting 5-6 hours of work in, rather than clocking out at 8 PM and getting 8-9 hours in". The management let her keep her schedule. If your partner needs to be working with external contacts during business hours, or if he is expected to perform customer service duties and be available when people are calling the phones, that's one thing. If he's the guy writing the code, maintaining the hardware, and making stuff happen, leave him be. Just because his schedule doesn't coincide with your schedule doesn't make his schedule wrong. How would you react if he asked you to conform your schedule to his? Something you probably don't realize is that he's likely working around the clock - not just during office hours. You get to clock out at the end of the day and go home and not worry about the job until 9 AM the next day. A technical co-founder never gets the luxury, really - we're always watching, working, monitoring, and fixing. If something breaks at 2 AM after we've been asleep for a half hour, we get up to fix it. If we're having scaling issues, we work 36 hours straight to get infrastructure optimized and stable. A technical founder's job conforms to no schedule, recognizes no business hours, and takes no holidays. If you want a happy tech partner, give him leeway in his schedule insofar as it doesn't actually negatively impact the business of the business. If he's not available for collaboration, is failing in his duties, etc, he needs to change something, because he's not doing his job. If it's just "morale", then honestly, get over it. If you make his job about showing up and having his butt in a chair from 9 AM-5 PM, then that's what you're going to get a - a butt in a chair. Established companies can afford that. A startup can't.