

Ask YC: Technical Co-Founder and Non-Technical Co-Founder Equity Split - rockstar9

How would you guys split equity between two cofounders: one technical and one non-technical? I know this depends on the business, but what skills (besides coding) can the non-technical person contribute at the very early stages of an internet startup?
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smoody
One thing to take into consideration -- and I've seen this become an issue on
several occasions -- is that there is a lot more work required of the
technical co-founder. There's a point at which all of non-technical 'work-
long-hours-to-produce-a-deliverable-under-deadline' work is done and then the
effort switches over to making the occasional document/presentation revision
and taking meetings, etc. This tends to happen way before the product is
shipped. It's at that point that the techie catches the non-techie browsing
boing boing or watching youtube videos and s/he starts to feel resentment.

That's when the stock split can sometimes start to seem inequitable in the
eyes of the techie unless the split is heavily slanted in favor of the techie,
simply because it's natural to think of 'value add' in terms of 'time
invested' and not some other difficult-to-measure metric.

I know that doesn't answer your question, but no matter what you choose, it's
a good idea for both people to discuss and understand the value of their
contributions in terms other than the number of hours spent in front of the
computer.

~~~
smoody
to whomever demoted my response above...why?

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epi0Bauqu
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111>

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bigtoga
You leave so much out - how much work/output will each member do? Are both
part or full time or is one full and one part time? Are both taking full
salaries, partial salaries, or what?

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ideas101
Basically it also depends upon relationship - going forward non of you have to
feel like not compensated appropriately. Job description for non-hacker could
be anything and everything but coding (and/or web designing). So the list can
go on and on ... Sales, Marketing, Advertising, HR, Finance, etc. Most of the
time will go in to preparing business plan, research about your
product/service & competition, sales & marketing and contacting angels/VCs.

