The harsh reality is that the technology is mostly a liability in business. Every line of code and vendor integration is downside waiting to happen. It is only

The harsh reality is that the technology is mostly a liability in business. Every line of code and vendor integration is downside waiting to happen. It is only obvious that the technology person might be worth 50%+ of a company when paying customers are lining up and reporting happy experiences. I've been in essentially the same position. Writing code is cheap. Finding people who are willing to pay for your software is hard. From a market dynamics perspective, I do think it's fair for a technical cofounder to receive a smaller slice of the pie, especially in domains that are inherently non-technical. For example, managing customer relationships in banking is a very expensive and time consuming process. You often have to physically fly people to customer sites to have meetings. The domain experts are generally busting their asses throughout the entire sales cycle. The technology people typically get to sit at home and respond to email and teams calls. Way more async. Way less time in the airport. Maybe not entitled to as much of the pie as a result. I'd also look at it like this - no one is going to pay you more equity for embellishing complexity. It might work for a while and to a small extent, but eventually you are just crippling your own personal margins. If you could have actually solved the problem entirely in the RDBMS in 40 hours for 4% equity, you could go do it again a bunch of times. When you're managing a Rube Goldberg machine, you've got no bandwidth to work on any other projects. If someone with a well populated sales funnel offered me 4% for my services, I would strongly consider in 100% of cases.