I see a couple of mistakes right off the bat. Write the contract so that no ownership interest is achieved until a Series A funding event. For every hour that

I see a couple of mistakes right off the bat. Write the contract so that no ownership interest is achieved until a Series A funding event. For every hour that the technician works, they accrue the same hourly rate figure in an options account. This way when the startup is funded, the developer's percentage is determined by the value of their options account against the VC's valuation, not some arbitrary point like 6% It's much harder for someone to walk away from $100,000 in equity than it is a theoretical 6% Should have included a clause whereby the equity would disappear if the developer quits. 35% is rather outrageous for any founder in a company that has raised significant amounts of funding, let alone a well paid one. To echo other comments, 12 months to create a prototype in Django seems like a very long time. Either the developer sucked or was working on other projects on the side. It is also possible that the requirements kept changing mid-flight and this was a management problem. Outsourcing to India may work or it may not. Regardless, at this point you need to pay based on results instead of time. Good luck.