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Ouch. I suppose the moral of this story is to make sure you draw a line between employee and partner right up front, and be very firm about the roles. Obviously

Ouch. I suppose the moral of this story is to make sure you draw a line between employee and partner right up front, and be very firm about the roles. Obviously, ee's get a paycheck and little else, and partners equity and a little paycheck. Sounds like you put yourself in the position where an ee could hold you for ransom. You were paying her a good salary, and she had no risk. Lesson learned huh? So what do you do now? You need to sever the relationship with this person, first and foremost. How much work is there left to do? If it's less than 25%, outsource this (doesn't have to be india... many dev's will be ok to pick it up, especially if there could be an upside - in the future). You should/could learn django regardless, since you should be aware of what your system does in the end. If you've got more than 25% to do, you should really learn to finish this yourself. I'm learning django and python at the same time, and honestly it isn't difficult if you have a programming background. Be aware that you may need to move this to the back burner and take a job to get by.. you won't be able to move as fast as she did. You may also be able to find some devs on YC here that might be interested in negotiating on more favorable terms. Not all programmers can look at things that way, but most here can. Good luck to you, and if you see me on IRC (django) I go by the same user name.

tptacek 19y ago
Not to be argumentative, but just to talk straight: you can "draw lines" between employer and employee all you want, but if both parties are rational, it's the market that enforces the line, not you. In other words, if you bring very little to the table, and your "employee" brings a lot to the table, you're setting yourself up to fail by being "clear" about an untenable arrangement.
- run4yourlives 19y ago
  I think this example shows that the market has nothing to do with anything - it's people's perception that matters. It this particular case the dev won. I'll give you that most of the time it works the other way around. Clearly, the poster underestimated her position and overestimated the dev's ability and that's what got her in trouble. With more knowledge, she could easily see that a django dev isn't worth 80K + 35%! In fact, I'm sure she'd get some bites (provided a solid idea) for the 35% alone from some very experienced people. If the market did enforce the line, we wouldn't be having this discussion. :-)
  - tptacek 19y ago
    I think we're agreed in principal and opposed semantically --- if drinko's position was better, a dev quitting wouldn't matter to her. Strong disagree that a Django dev isn't worth 80k+35%. Sure, I wouldn't pay anything close to that, but I have a mature thriving company. But on day 1, without the capital to contract the project out, that could be a totally fair deal. Am I totally wrong about how much Django devs make relative to PHP or Rails devs? Because my experience is they make more than 80k if they're good and have any business aptitude. They certainly get billed out higher than that.
    - run4yourlives 19y ago
      No, I think an 80K mark is good for a salary. What I disagree with is that a brand new startup should be hiring an 80K dev right out of the blocks like that. This startup needs a technical partner, not an employee, imo. So, you'd be looking at upwards of a 50% share with nowhere near that salary requirement. BTW - Billing rates rarely translate into salaries in any normal fashion. Two different markets, and the billing rate one tends to be much more inflationary.
  - astrec 19y ago
    Indeed - a good Python dev is worth multiples more than than 80k. But we're talking cofounders here, no?

tptacek 19y ago

Not to be argumentative, but just to talk straight: you can "draw lines" between employer and employee all you want, but if both parties are rational, it's the market that enforces the line, not you. In other words, if you bring very little to the table, and your "employee" brings a lot to the table, you're setting yourself up to fail by being "clear" about an untenable arrangement.

run4yourlives 19y ago
I think this example shows that the market has nothing to do with anything - it's people's perception that matters. It this particular case the dev won. I'll give you that most of the time it works the other way around. Clearly, the poster underestimated her position and overestimated the dev's ability and that's what got her in trouble. With more knowledge, she could easily see that a django dev isn't worth 80K + 35%! In fact, I'm sure she'd get some bites (provided a solid idea) for the 35% alone from some very experienced people. If the market did enforce the line, we wouldn't be having this discussion. :-)
- tptacek 19y ago
  I think we're agreed in principal and opposed semantically --- if drinko's position was better, a dev quitting wouldn't matter to her. Strong disagree that a Django dev isn't worth 80k+35%. Sure, I wouldn't pay anything close to that, but I have a mature thriving company. But on day 1, without the capital to contract the project out, that could be a totally fair deal. Am I totally wrong about how much Django devs make relative to PHP or Rails devs? Because my experience is they make more than 80k if they're good and have any business aptitude. They certainly get billed out higher than that.
  - run4yourlives 19y ago
    No, I think an 80K mark is good for a salary. What I disagree with is that a brand new startup should be hiring an 80K dev right out of the blocks like that. This startup needs a technical partner, not an employee, imo. So, you'd be looking at upwards of a 50% share with nowhere near that salary requirement. BTW - Billing rates rarely translate into salaries in any normal fashion. Two different markets, and the billing rate one tends to be much more inflationary.
- astrec 19y ago
  Indeed - a good Python dev is worth multiples more than than 80k. But we're talking cofounders here, no?