<blunt>: You have an over-inflated view of your own contributions, because, well, you're human, and we tend to view our own contributions as much more valuable

<blunt>: You have an over-inflated view of your own contributions, because, well, you're human, and we tend to view our own contributions as much more valuable (because we understand how complex and impactful they are, and we don't usually do so for other people's contributions). My perspective, as a technical person who started doing startups in 2007 (as CTO in my first 2 startups), is running a successful company now (as CEO), and has advised a bunch of companies over the last 10 years, is that a 50/50 deal is extremely generous and if anything I would advise the CEO that he was too generous with you and probably set up this problem of your overinflated ego by doing that. Possibly this problem has sunk the company unless you're able to pop your inflated head balloon and get back down to earth. Ideas aren't everything, but recruiting great people to work on your idea is part of execution. You got recruited 4 months in. You're an employee who somehow miraculously has as much equity as the founder. That is an insanely good deal and you are foolish and extremely greedy to be questioning it, especially at this point. Now, about who wears the pants, which you mention in another comment - you need to clarify who wears the pants in what context. You're not an expert on everything, and neither is he. Obviously you have expertise in technical matters, and so it is reasonable that you will want to own technical decisions and have a strong say in product/vision decisions. But based on your post you sound blissfully unaware of all it takes to build a larger company (I notice you didn't specify how "successful" your online business was) so you should defer to the CEO on most of what it will take to get this to actually become a company. That's his job. And if you think he can't do it, quit.