4 ms·

Ask YC: making contract for new co-founder??

• staunch 18y ago
  You can (and certainly should) do everything to protect yourself and you still might get screwed. Going into business with someone is giving them your trust. If you can't do that then you can't have a partner.
  • deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
• triplefox 18y ago
  One way to test your partner's trust is to deliberately instigate a money fight. It probably will happen later if not now, and now's when there's little at stake. Figure out a few "hard lines in the sand" that an unscrupulous person would really dislike, hold those positions as far as you think you can go without destroying your relationship, then come clean once you've determined the person you are truly dealing with. People will always reveal themselves when pushed to the edge.
  • gruseom 18y ago
    If anyone tried such a gimmick with me, it would damage my trust and respect for them permanently. I certainly wouldn't want to be partners with someone who would do that.
• gruseom 18y ago
  I can't bear to get screwed over again. I think your only true protection against getting burned again is to deeply face what it is in yourself that created those painful situations in the first place. No contract in the world will protect you from creating an equivalent situation again, if you haven't learned what you need to learn from the previous ones. Your use of phrases like "getting screwed over", "getting ideas and hard work stolen", and so on, suggest that you believe that it was because other people did bad stuff to you that things ended up the way they did. I'm willing to believe that other people did bad things. Nevertheless it was your own choices that put you there in the first place. As a wise person once explained, it was never really the other person you were trusting; first and foremost you were trusting your own bad judgment, and that's what really betrayed you. I'm not saying you shouldn't put things in writing or draw up a contract. By all means do. One way to protect against the risk of a relationship going bad is to have shares vest at a certain rate per month. I think our arrangement is 1/48 per month (so, over four years), with a 1-year minimum, and a portion of up-front vesting for work already done. But that pales in important to the deeper issue: if you don't want to get screwed again, then stop ascribing your painful experiences to other people. This doesn't mean you have to absolve or forgive them, it means you have to be truly honest with yourself about what you did and thought that was wrong. That's been my experience anyway... the only solution that works is fundamental growth.
  • lionhearted 18y ago
    Hey Gruesom, I'm upvoting you because you've got some good points in your comment and I've seen quite a few comments from you I really like. But... "I think your only true protection against getting burned again is to deeply face what it is in yourself that created those painful situations in the first place." That's... not really true. The rest of your advice is sound and good, but there are bad people in the world that do bad things. There's also normal people, and between normal people, there's friction. Almost everyone I know who is successful in business has been burned a couple times, and you just need to learn from it. Certainly the original poster did some things wrong via contracts, relationships, etc, but it's also quite possible that he was just dealing with some rat bastards. There's a lot of them in the world, and unfortunately, you usually start by working with them. Established people typically only work with people with a great track record, so when you don't have one, you're usually working with someone else who doesn't have one. So you've got a 1 in whatever chance that a random person is a donkey chance that you're working with a donkey.
• lionhearted 18y ago
  I'll highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280 http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou... It talks about setting up clear roles and expectations from the beginning. Contracts typically aren't worth the paper they're printed on - where you're at in life right now, you're not going to go to court if you fall out with someone. Contracts protect you a bit if you're further along, but a contract isn't worth a damn thing without a good relationship and clear expectations. The most important thing a contract can do is to lay out clearly, in writing, what you both expect to do and have roles set up. But so many of your assumptions will likely be wrong that you might have to redraw some elements of it over time. It happens - but getting down who does what, when, where, and how they're measured is huge. A basic operating agreement goes a long way. Check out E-Myth, it reads fast. Probably my favorite book on small business ever.
• anamax 18y ago
  > I'm going to call my normal lawyer tomorrow, but he mostly does criminal defense stuff Get another lawyer.