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Ask HN: How to structure a startup with five founders?
1 point by ivansavz on Aug 3, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
We recently won a StartupWeekend event with a promising new idea. We're a team of five (3 devs, a business woman, and the idea man who is fairly versatile). Everyone is into the idea and happy to continue with it, but we don't know how to structure the company. Can someone with experience help?

The idea man proposed to incorporate the company and then give us shares as we build the project which seems unfair. On the other hand 20%-for-all split is bad too because we haven't done anything---most of the work is yet to come.

Can we somehow structure the company so that every member's share is proportional to their participation in the coming months? Are there standard solutions for this? I'm looking at Assembly[1] in another tab and it is very interesting. Anyone know of similar projects (ideally a self-hosted one)?

The other alternative would be for the idea man and the lead dev to go with the more traditional 40% + 40% + 20% employee pool, and the rest of us pull out, but this would break the team chemistry completely.

[1] https://assembly.com/helpful/partners



Similar discussion: "Ask HN: How to split equity?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078356 (81 points, 10 days ago, 50 comments)

I think that the technical term you are looking for is "vesting". Read the linked discussion.

I don't understand the 40%+40%+20% split. It means 40%+40%+0%+0%+0%+(maybe 20% later)?




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