I also worked in a similar situation. The "business guy" who was also handling customer emails, for a while became so slack he ignored people complaining that an important feature of the site was broken. I happened to be scanning through the emails when I found it. He also had a tendency to blame customers for bugs and not even pass their feedback on to me some of the time. He expressed the same attitude of "this is my company and you're lucky I let you work for me (without proper pay)". He wasn't really even doing the business part well, just riding on good Google rankings that he'd got from doing some SEO years before. Turns out though that by not being his employee, most of the code remained my IP. When we parted ways, I started up a new company in direct competition and am now doing much better by keeping 100% of the profits instead of the small share he'd been "generously" giving me before. He's kind of stranded without a developer and not enough revenue to hire one at market rates.
Good for you! Good luck with your own company! ;-)
I only license my software to all companies I have in order to avoid being stripped of my IP and I recommend it to anyone with a brain. Business guys aren't your friends, and their view of us that have both ideas and capabilities do execute is not very flattering. Usually they just want to ride someone and once we serve our purpose, we are disposed of.
What is perplexing to me is that I offered him a very generous 50% share (the intent was to motivate as well as to have the need to come with real solutions when we hit some problem so that we are forced to agree on something and view the issue from multiple angles to avoid tunnel vision) in exchange for him doing the business stuff and customer side for the company (meaning arranging suppliers, building supplier relationships, handling customer returns and communication etc.) and having the ability to be plugged into a company that requires very little work (the closest to the definition of "easy money" as I could get) in super competitive environment of Amazon utilizing bleeding edge tech I invented that gave us highest Amazon ratings, both internal as well as customer satisfaction. Yet there was always enormous frustration of not having that single dominating % more than me, worsening attitude to do the required work, secretiveness, and once it started to manifest itself in not working on customer issues in timely manner and alienating supplier relationships that took a lot of time and effort to build, I had enough and kicked him out. Funniest thing was him coming back and demanding my SW as well as credit for his "ideas".
Well, you learn as you go, next time I will prepare stronger rules for business guys.
Guys, to all of you, creating your own company costs you like $1000 in the US, it's a fixed amount of additional stress you need to handle, you'll get used to it quickly, and you don't have to waste your precious time with people that have no clue what they are doing just want to use you to get rich for nothing.
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. You're talking about a bad person, not a "business guy." If you partner with a person who doesn't care about how he interacts with the people around him and has a faulty moral compass, it doesn't make a difference if he's a developer or a business guy.
This is really a warning to make sure that you know who you're getting into bed with when creating a company. Don't just work with someone so that you can say you have a co-founder, find someone with whom you have a mutual respect.
It sounds like you managed things pretty well and stayed in control. So good for you too! Being in a position to split up without losing everything is something we don't all prepare for. In my case it was by pure luck. I had to go scrambling for the copyright laws and eventually worked out that my code would belong to me (according to definition of employee, work for hire, etc.). It could easily have gone the other way because I didn't consider things going sour when I started, and by the time I became concerned, I was already too heavily invested in it to want to risk starting a fight.
Having a written agreement about copyright ownership like you do is absolutely essential if the code is something of value. Without that you can never really be sure who it belongs to.
