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I personally wouldn't do anything but 50/50. Even if it is 49.9/50.1 you are saying that the person with the higher % is inherently better, and this can leak in

I personally wouldn't do anything but 50/50. Even if it is 49.9/50.1 you are saying that the person with the higher % is inherently better, and this can leak into the dynamics of the startup in so many ways. Lawyers like to point out things like this, but they aren't the entrepreneurs. I can tell you from experience that if you have the right co-founder, 50/50 is no problem. If there is a disagreement, however minor, you talk it out until one person convinces the other. This pretty much never happened in my case, by the way.

donna 19y ago
Ditto here, and am in full agreement, excellent advice.
pg 19y ago
I agree. We encourage two founders to split stock evenly. If you have to depend on a shareholder vote to decide things, you're already dead.
SwellJoe 19y ago
Agreed. Listen to epi and pg on this one. Your lawyer is nuts. It just shouldn't be an issue. If you or your partner are afraid it might be, you've got the wrong co-founder. You will eventually bring in others and the potential tie will be broken--but for the next six months to two years (before the first VC round happens), your course should already be plotted. No important decisions should come up that require more than a "for the minutes" vote, because you already have discussed things and share the same goals. You've already discussed whether you'd be willing to sell early for some reasonable some, right? That's the big one. Sure, you might have the "do we go for the hundred million user consumer market and burn money like it's going out of style, or the half million user enterprise market and try to make a little money" conundrum that seems so inevitable in web apps...but, as others have noted, if you end up on different sides of this one, you simply can't work productively together...and you probably can't afford to do both. Everything else is execution...and it's stuff you should have already hashed out and agreed (roughly) on.

donna 19y ago

Ditto here, and am in full agreement, excellent advice.

pg 19y ago

I agree. We encourage two founders to split stock evenly. If you have to depend on a shareholder vote to decide things, you're already dead.

SwellJoe 19y ago

Agreed. Listen to epi and pg on this one. Your lawyer is nuts. It just shouldn't be an issue. If you or your partner are afraid it might be, you've got the wrong co-founder. You will eventually bring in others and the potential tie will be broken--but for the next six months to two years (before the first VC round happens), your course should already be plotted. No important decisions should come up that require more than a "for the minutes" vote, because you already have discussed things and share the same goals. You've already discussed whether you'd be willing to sell early for some reasonable some, right? That's the big one. Sure, you might have the "do we go for the hundred million user consumer market and burn money like it's going out of style, or the half million user enterprise market and try to make a little money" conundrum that seems so inevitable in web apps...but, as others have noted, if you end up on different sides of this one, you simply can't work productively together...and you probably can't afford to do both. Everything else is execution...and it's stuff you should have already hashed out and agreed (roughly) on.